Research visit to LMU-Munich and Salzburg Research

Fred Durao's picture
The KiWI guys

July-2010 was the time for collaboration.

I spent the first 2 weeks of July visiting LMU-Munich doing collaboration with Klara’s most recent work. We worked on the personalization of PEST approach with preliminary good results. Shortly....

....PESTP (the personalized PEST aproach) is a novel approach to personalized approximate querying of structured data that exploits the structure to propagate term weights between related data items. It focuses on structured data where meaningful answers are given through the application semantics, e.g., pages in wikis, persons in social networks, or papers in a research network such as Mendeley.  The PESTP matrix generalizes the Google Matrix used in PageRank with a term-weight dependent leap and allows different levels of (semantic) closeness for different relations in the data, e.g., friend vs. co-worker in a social network. Its eigenvectors represent the distribution of a term after propagation. The eigenvectors for all terms together form a (vector space) index that takes the structure of the data and searcher's preference into account and can be used with standard document retrieval techniques.

Besides the research, I enjoyed a typical Bavarian dinner at Englischer Garten. The week after I had “hard-working” (but still) fun week at KiWi cave in Salzburg! There I finalized and improved a number of features for personalization in KiWi. Salzburg is always a cozy site to be.

 

Fred Durao.