Steve Lawrence: now @ Google Lab
I had some email conversation with Steve Lawrence while he was at NEC, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to set up a CiteSeer site for myself. He is now at Google Lab, and is the creater of Google Desktop Search. Good move, Steve.
(Strange lighting on his forehead in this picture. Almost like there is some sort of secrete message to be mined.)
Steve Lawrence
Senior Staff Research ScientistSteve Lawrence is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google. Before joining Google, he was a Senior Research Scientist at NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Lawrence works in information retrieval and machine learning, and is the creator of Google Desktop Search.
A recent paper on Google Lab:
Extracting knowledge from the World Wide Web
Monika Henzinger and Steve LawrenceAbstract
The World Wide Web provides a unprecedented opportunity to automatically analyze a large sample of interests and activity in the world. We discuss methods for extracting knowledge from the web by randomly sampling and analyzing hosts and pages, and by analyzing the link structure of the web and how links accumulate over time. A variety of interesting and valuable information can be extracted, such as the distribution of web pages over domains, the distribution of interest in different areas, communities related to different topics, the nature of competition in different categories of sites, and the degree of communication between different communities or countries.
The World Wide Web has become an important knowledge and communication resource. As more people use the web for more tasks, it provides an increasingly representative and unprecedented in scale machine-readable sample of interests and activity in the world.
However, the distributed and heterogeneous nature of the web makes large-scale analysis difficult. We provide an overview of recent methods for analyzing and extracting knowledge from the web, along with samples of the knowledge that can be extracted.
Download: PDF Version