CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Tutorial on City Search - in conjunction with the Search Solutions 2013

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CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Tutorial on "City Search: An evolution of search to incorporate city data"
Held in conjunction with the Search Solutions 2013
Tuesday 26th November 2013
URL: http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2013/ss2013tutorials.php
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AIM AND SCOPE
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Majority of people reside in cities (estimated over 70% of the world
population by 2050) - a situation posing several challenges for
municipalities, governments, citizens and businesses. In an urbanizing
world, cities comprise of different systems ranging from transport, water,
and electricity data management infrastructures to social, communication
and service networks. The data emerging from these systems is a precious
resource to make cities more intelligent, innovative and integrated beyond
the boundaries of isolated applications.

Today, beyond the classical Web resources (e.g. documents) large amounts of
data are retrieved from sensors, mobile devices, social network messages,
governmental applications, or service networks. In such a diversity of
information, answering the specific information needs of the city
inhabitants requires a more holistic IR and data management techniques,
capable of harnessing different types of city data and turned it into
actionable insights to answer the different queries of the people. In fact,
existing local search engines such asGoogle+ Local, Yahoo! Local, ask.com's
AskCity or CitySearch already take an initial step to answer some vital
information needs such as "What are the good places to eat in Dublin city
center?" or "Are there any kid-friendly cafes in South Dublin?". However,
when it comes to answering more complex user information needs such as
"What are the traffic conditions on M50 motorway now?" or "Is there a park
with a skate ramp close to a shopping center in South Dublin?", the
existing local search engines have certain limitations in terms of
understanding these complex needs and also capturing the required
information from different city data sources in response to them.

This tutorial will present the deep insights, novel challenges,
opportunities and techniques to make city data queryable in three parts: In
the first part, we will present what "searching the city data" actually
means beyond the current approaches (e.g. local search engines) to answer
the possible (even complex) information needs of the city inhabitants and
how they differ from searching the Web or enterprise data. In addition, we
will give examples of public (and private) sources of information available
in different cities of the World today that are consumable by the
information seekers. In the second part of the tutorial, we will present
the requirements and techniques to manage and uplift the raw city data into
a discoverable, connected and meaningful structure to be harnessed by the
search engines. In the final part, we will present and give details about
how common IR techniques and existing models can be employed and adapted to
retrieve the relevant information for the users, and how the relevancy can
be improved by considering different city-specific aspects in different
stages of search process - e.g. indexing, annotating, linking, query,
retrieval, recommending and ranking.

Our tutorial will take place on Tuesday 26th November 2013, in conjunction
with Search Solutions 2013 in London, UK.

PRESENTERS
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	* Veli Bicer, IBM Research - Smarter Cities Technology Centre,
Dublin, Ireland
	* Vanessa Lopez, IBM Research - Smarter Cities Technology Centre,
Dublin, Ireland

CONTACT
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Any questions, comments or suggestions should be directed to
velibice@ie.ibm.com or vanlopez@ie.ibm.com



Vanessa Lopez Ph.D.
Research Engineer
IBM Research - Ireland
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IBM Product Distribution Limited ( PDL)  Registered in Ireland with number
92815
Registered Office : Oldbrook House, 24 -32 Pembroke Road, Ballsbridge
Dublin 4

Received on Tuesday, 29 October 2013 14:07:20 UTC