Archive for the ‘Fil’ Category.
October 28, 2009, 12:41 pm
The November 2009 issue of CACM published my letter to the editor entitled Abolish Conference Proceedings (Digital Edition). Here is the published text (which was edited for brevity from my longer letter).
As program chair of an ACM conference (Hypertext 2009), I agree with both Lance Fortnow’s Viewpoint “Time for Computer Science to Grow Up” (Aug. 2009) and Moshe Vardi’s Editor’s Letter “Conferences vs. Journals in Computing Research” (May 2009). Moreover, as an interdisciplinary researcher, I experience firsthand how conference-driven publication practices hurt CS in terms of potential interdisciplinary collaboration, reach, and visibility.
That’s why I propose the abolition of conference proceedings altogether. Submissions should instead go to journals, which would receive more and better ones, with refereeing resources shifting naturally from conferences to journals. As a result, journals would improve their quality and speed up their processes. With the CS community’s full attention, the review process would be more rigorous and timely. Deadlines would no longer be so concentrated, and scientists would submit better work, revise as needed, and profit immediately from reviewer feedback; the same referee would judge improvements to a particular submission.
In many cases where conferences and journals are aligned, presentations could be invited from among the best papers published in the previous year. For newer areas and groundbreaking work, a conference or workshop could still accept submissions but would not publish proceedings. Publishing would be the job of journals.
ACM should shepherd such a transition as publisher of both the proceedings of most top computing conferences and of many top computing journals.
After writing my letter to the editor, it was brought to my attention that there already exists a model for the approach I proposed, envisioned by the VLDB Endowment as a transition from the VLDB conference proceedings to the PVLDB journal and ultimately to a Journal of Data Management Research.
October 17, 2009, 11:49 am
Channel 13 video
A report on the popularity of Twitter at IU (which ranks among the top 10 universities on a number of metrics) has sparked some interest in the local media about work CNetS researchers are going on Twitter usage. An interview with Filippo Menczer, associate director of CNetS, appeared on the front page of the Herald-Times on Oct 16, 2009. Indianapolis NBC affiliate Channel 13 interviewed Menczer and CNetS postdoc Bruno Gonçalves for their news program that night. The story was also picked up by the Chicago Tribune, US News & World Report, The Republic, Indianapolis Star, NewsDay, Courier-Journal, Indianapolis Business Journal, News-Sentinel, WIBC, The Indy Channel, WHAS, Journal & Courier, Palladium-Item, Star Press, and IDS.
July 28, 2009, 11:26 am
Dr. Ben
Dr. Le-Shin
Congratulations to Ben and Le-Shin — er, Dr. Markines and Dr. Wu! They both successfully defended their dissertations this summer, earning their PhD!
July 1, 2009, 7:29 pm
NaN had a strong presence at Hypertext 2009 in Torino:
July 1, 2009, 5:30 pm
SoIC logo
Important changes in the school go into effect July 1, 2009: The IUB part of the school is now named School of Informatics & Computing and we won’t have internal departments (CS and Informatics) anymore. Faculty will be organized in three internal, transparent (invisible), anonymous divisions. I chair one of these, internally referred to as divA (we are divA faculty)… Seriously, I hope this will help us market our brand better for its breadth, attract more students, improve our ranking, and get rid of some arbitrary/historical internal barriers to innovative curriculum and interdisciplinary research.
June 28, 2009, 7:42 pm
I gave four invited talks in Spain, Italy, and Switzerland this summer:
Thanks to my wonderful hosts and their groups for engaging discussions and delightful hospitality!
May 19, 2009, 6:12 pm
Fil Menczer is one of the organizers of Hypertext 2009, the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext an Hypermedia. The conference will be held June 29-July 1 at the Villa Gualino Convention Centre, on the hills overlooking Torino, Italy. Hypertext is the main venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on “linking.” The Web, the Semantic Web, the Web 2.0, and Social Networks are all manifestations of the success of the link. With a 70% increase in submissions, Hypertext 2009 will have a strong and diverse technical program covering all research concerning links: their semantics, their presentation, the applications, as well as the knowledge that can be derived from their analysis and their effects on society. The conference will also feature demos, posters, a student research competition, four workshops, and keynotes by Lada Adamic and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.
May 15, 2009, 5:04 pm
Similarity Cloud for 'mac' vs 'pc'
Alessandro Flammini and Filippo Menczer, along with M. Ángeles Serrano from the University of Barcelona, have authored a paper entitled “Modeling Statistical Properties of Written Text” that has been published in the PLoS One. The paper introduces and validates a generative model that explains from simple rules the simultaneous emergence of patterns of written text observed in many languages. The paper focuses on the well-known Zipf’s law of word frequencies, as well as additional patterns such as Heaps’ law of word diversity, the bursty nature of rare words, and similarity among documents. Through their model, the researchers found a connection between word burstiness and the topicality of text. In addition, they identify dynamic word ranking and memory across documents as key mechanisms to explain the organization of written text. The semantic similarity between topics, which is one of the features that the model aims to explain, is visualized by the Similarity Cloud, an online tool developed by computer science graduate student Mark Meiss. The model developed by the researchers and the findings of this paper could lead to improved techniques for identifying key terms that capture the topics of a Web page, which is crucial for matching search queries to relevant results and ads. More…
The paper 
Research and Creativity Activity profiles 