Yahoo! Seminar Series

Beyond Tagging and Poking: Information Management and Exploration on Social Content Sites

Cong Yu

Research Scientist

Yahoo! Research

Friday, December 05, 2008
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
1690 CSE

Abstract

Content-oriented sites and social networking sites are moving toward each other. Yahoo! Travel, initially a pure content site, for example, revamped its site a while back to allow users to add travel buddies. For another example, Facebook, primarily a social networking site, strives to make content sharing and tagging on the site as convenient as possible. Recent initiatives like OpenSocial are making this integration ever easier, leading to virtually connected social content sites. The richness of data and the complexity of user behavior raise new challenges for information management and discovery over such sites. The Royal Jelly project at Yahoo! Research aims at exploring and addressing those challenges. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our initial logical architecture proposal, SocialScope. For a specific case study, I will describe in detail a novel diversification approach for social content recommendation. If time permits, I will briefly go through various other research activities going on at Yahoo! Research, including the Purple SOX information extraction management system.

Biography

Cong Yu is a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in New York City. His current research interests are scalable social data management, information discovery and exploration on social content sites, and information extraction management. He co-leads the Royal Jelly project (http://research.yahoo.com/node/2299) on social content exploration and recommendation, and is a core member of the Purple SOX project (http://research.yahoo.com/node/498) on information extraction management. He graduated from the Department of EECS at University of Michigan in 2007, with a Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science and Engineering. His doctoral dissertation, Managing Complex Databases in a Schema Management Framework, received ACM SIGMOD Distinguished Dissertation Honorable Mention Award in 2008. He has served on various conference Program Committees since graduation, and is currently co-chairing the Developers Track of the 2009 International World Wide Web Conference (http://www2009.org/calls/devtrack.html). He is an avid fan of Michigan football, the current season notwithstanding.

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