Thomas Hofmann received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 1997 and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as the University of California at Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute. In 1999 he joined the Computer Science Department at Brown University as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004. Between 2004 and 2006, he held a position as a Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, while also serving as the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems. He is also co-founder and former Chief Scientist of Recommind Inc, a privately owned company focusing on enterprise search. Since July 2006, Thomas is a Director of Engineering at Google and of one the site leads of Google's engineering center in Zurich , Switzerland.

AG 3, AG 5, RG2, AG 2, AG 4, RG1, SWS   Info

Public Audience

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60 Minutes

Saarbrücken

For an ever growing population of internet users, search engines are the dominant technology for finding the information they need. Most of these users have high expectations to retrieve relevant results, while demanding an interface that is intuitive and efficient to use with minimal or no training. At the same time, user attention has become a highly contested asset in e-commerce and changes in result rankings of major search engines can significantly affect revenue streams on a global scale.

This talk will focus on challenges that a commercial search engine faces to deliver relevant results on a global scale, leading to questions like: How can we make better sense of user queries? How can we help users to better express their information needs? How can we evaluate relevancy ranking in Web search engines? What techniques are used by people to try defeating IR algorithms and how can we counter them?

Matthias Bender

+49 681 9325508

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Machine Learning, Google, Web Search

This talk is held on the eve of the yearly job fair FIT, in which Google will participate.