The Women's Postgraduate College for Internet Technologies (WIT) at the Faculty of Informatics of the Vienna University of Technology and the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) invited to:

The Past, Present, and Future of Web Information Retrieval

Dr. Monika Henzinger
Research Director at Google

When: Where:

Friday, May 6th 2005 15:00 - 16:00 + Vienna University of Technology Neues Elektrotechnisches Institutsgebäude Room EI 7, Ground floor 1040 Vienna, Gußhausstraße 27-29

After the event

Monika Henzinger's talk created the largest response so far to a WIT-Kolloquium. A record audience of about 450 filled the auditorium in Gusshausstrasse to the last seat, eventhough it was a Friday after a public holiday. The audience appreciated Monika Henzinger's lively talk, and the comments regarding the content were consistently positive. A great event, showing above all: Women are successful in IT.

Photos

Video (needs Quick Time Player; 67 MB)

Abstract

Web search engines have emerged as one of the central applications on the Internet. In fact, search has become one of the most important activities that people engage in on the the Internet. Even beyond becoming the number one source of information, a growing number of businesses are depending on web search engines for customer acquisition.

The first generation of web search engines used text-only retrieval techniques.  Google revolutionized the field by deploying the PageRank technology - an eigenvector-based analysis of the hyperlink structure - to analyze the web in order to produce relevant results. Moving forward, our goal is to achieve a better understanding of a page with a view towards producing even more relevant results.

Bio

Monika Henzinger is the research director at Google and soon will be a professor of Computer Science at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne. Before coming to Google, she was on the research staff of the Digital Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California and on the faculty of the Computer Dcience departments at Cornell University and the University of Saarbruecken in Germany. Monika Henzinger holds a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Saarbruecken and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University.

Funding

WIT is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science, and Culture (bmbwk) and the European Social Fund (ESF). This event is sponsored by Google and Erste Bank.

Note

Attendance free!
After the talk there was the opportunity for an informal exchange of opinions at the buffet.

Another event at the same place, 17:00

Tom Henzinger*
EPFL and UC Berkeley

Games, Time, and Probabilities: Models and Algorithms for System Design and Analysis

more info: http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at

*Monika and Thomas Henzinger are a married couple.