Informatics Seminar on Tuesday, 27 May at 16.00 - Prof. Mounia Lalmas

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Prof. Mounia Lalmas

TITLE: Information Retrieval: from focused to aggregated answers
SPEAKER: Prof. Mounia Lalmas, Queen Mary, University of London
DATE: Tuesday, 27 May, 2008
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI 008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 16.00-17.00

ABSTRACT:

Digitised information is everywhere. We rely on it to answer many of our information needs. Sometimes we need focused answers, e.g. the
information about a meeting that was communicated by e-mail; other times we need aggregated answers, e.g. travel, weather and
accommodation information for Glasgow. Huge progress has been made in providing focused answers, whereas work has only started for providing aggregated answers. The two types of answers are however not unrelated: focused retrieval has already made steps towards providing aggregated answers. I will illustrate this relationship with a number of outcomes from INEX, the evaluation initiative for XML retrieval.

BIOGRAPHY:

Mounia Lalmas is a Professor of Information Retrieval at Queen Mary, University of London, which she joined in 1999 as a lecturer. Prior to
this, she was a Research Scientist at the University of Dortmund in 1998, a Lecturer from 1995 to 1997 and a Research Fellow from
1997 to 1998 at the University of Glasgow, where she received her PhD in 1996. Her research focuses on the development and evaluation of
intelligent access to interactive heterogeneous and complex information repositories, and covering a wide range of domains such as
HTML, XML, and MPEG-7. She co-led from 2002 to 2007 the international evaluation initiative for content-oriented XML retrieval (INEX), a large-scale project with over 80 participating organizations worldwide. She is currently the ACM SIGIR vice chair.
She will take up a Research Chair in Information Retrieval at the University of Glasgow in September 2008.