Title: Web N.0: What sciences will it take?
Abstract:
The web has made a widely-hailed transition from its original incarnation to a putative state of "Web 2.0". This transition has stemmed from the clever use of AJAX and efficient grid computing to enhance a user's perception of responsiveness and interaction. In the process, the web experience has changed from a human interacting with a browser, to the emergence of a plethora of social media experiences. One consequence is that moving beyond the current notion of Web 2.0 demands research advances that straddle the boundaries between computational and social sciences, the latter including microeconomics, cognitive psychology and sociology. It also raises difficult questions on the use of data - ranging from the algorithmic to the societal.
This lecture will attempt to chart this interdisciplinary research agenda, arguing that the most influential research will require heavy interaction between these "hard" and "soft" sciences.
Biographical Information:
Prabhakar Raghavan has been Head of Yahoo! Research since 2005. His research interests include text and web mining, and algorithm design. He is a Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM. Raghavan received his PhD from Berkeley and is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE. Prior to joining Yahoo, he was Chief Technology Officer at Verity; before that he held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research.
