[Year 12 IT Apps] Fun talk on the future of web search tonight

[Steven Bird]

http://www.vala.org.au/index.php

Imagining the Futures of Search
An evening with Douglas W. Oard from the University of Maryland (USA)

For decades before Web search engines emerged on the scene, research
labs around the world were developing the core technology of “ranked
retrieval” that now forms the pervasive basis for many end-user search
applications. For decades before Google Book Search threatened to
reshape the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, research
labs around the world were creating the imaging, OCR, and search
technologies that came together in that system. This evening, we will
peek into those same research labs to see what’s going on there today
that may again shake up our world.

We have but one past and but one present, but there are many possible
futures. Tonight, we’ll briefly glimpse three: ubiquitous search of
foreign-language content, support for search and sense-making in
conversational media such as speech and email, and what could happen
when and if our machines start “reading” our documents and our
documents start “reading” each other. How might our profession, and
our society at large, adapt to best balance the costs and the
potential benefits that these innovations would bring? And how might
we, as a profession, and as a society, help to shape the ways in which
these new technologies actually develop? It will be an evening with
more questions than answers, as is appropriate for an organisation
whose very name is Libraries, Technology and the Future.

Speaker:

Doug Oard is an American library educator and technologist who is in
Melbourne this summer and autumn for a sabbatical visit at the
University of Melbourne and RMIT University. At the University of
Maryland, College Park, he holds joint appointments in the College of
Information Studies (Maryland’s iSchool) and in the University of
Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Doug is in many ways
an unrepentant engineer, with three degrees (Bachelors, Masters and
Ph.D.) in Electrical Engineering, but in other ways he is one of us
(having, for example, recently served as Associate Dean for Research
at Maryland’s iSchool). You can read a bit about his work at
http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~oard/.

FREE ENTRY
Not a VALA member? Visitors are welcome at VALA meetings - just come!

VENUE: Tutorial Room, Ground Floor, Baillieu Library, University of
Melbourne, Melways Map X871 I6. (On-site parking available after 5.00
p.m. – have gold coins available for the parking fee. Public transport
via tram.)

DATE & TIME: Wednesday 26 May 2010
Drinks and refreshments from 5:30 pm with presentation commencing at 6:00 pm.