[ChimeText] 25 Jul: William Chang (CTO of Baidu) / The WWW in China and Three Generations of Intelligent Search

[Min-Yen Kan]

Dear all:

Baidu's CTO, William Chang, will also be coming on next Friday in the
afternoon, after the Yahoo! Research Labs talks.
He will be talking about how Baidu has thrived in China and how the
culture in China impacts how Baidu performs search that betters its
rivals.
Please come!

Date: 25 July 2008 (Friday)
Time: 1430-1530
Venue: TBA
Speaker: Dr William Chang, Chief Scientist, Baidu

Title: The WWW in China and Three Generations of Intelligent Search

Abstract:

China has become the world's biggest online market in terms of users. What
continues to drive this growth?  What are its challenges and
opportunities?  In this survey we will outline the social and economic
background, the key business models and competitive advantages, how media
and multimedia interact, and how people use the Internet in their daily
lives. The second part of this talk will present an overview and forward-looking
synopsis of the principles and applications of search, from the
perspective of a long-time search engineer.

Bio: Dr. William Chang has been the Chief Scientist at Baidu since January
2007. Prior to joining Baidu, Dr. Chang served as the CTO of Infoseek and
the VP of Strategy of Go Network. He is also the creator of the highly
successful Infoseek natural language search engine and Ultraseek
enterprise search engine. Dr. Chang has extensive expertise in search
technology, online community building and advertising business models.
Dr. Chang earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard and a
PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley for
his breakthrough work in text search. At the renowned Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory, Dr. Chang mapped a genome and invented a protein sequence
search methodology. More recently, he created a contextual advertising
product at Sentius Corporation, and founded Affini, Inc., a social network
technology company.

Upcoming Talks:
24 Jul:  MSRA NLP Research Labs talks: 2 talks on
1) Ming Zhou / Generating Chinese Couplets using a Statistical MT Approach
2) Chin Yew-Lin / Web Scale Question Answering  -- SQuAD

25 Jul: Yahoo! Research Labs talks: 5 talks on
1) Ricardo Baeza-Yates / Distributed Information Retrieval
2) Evgeniy Gabrilovich / Overview of Computationa lAdvertising
3) Rosie Jones / Geography in Web Search
4) Donald Metzler / Predicting when (not) to Advertise
5) Vanessa Murdock / Diversifying Image Search with User Generated Content

25 Jul: William Chang (Baidu) / The WWW in China and Three Generations
of Intelligent Search

28 Jul: Qiu Long / Context for Semantic Similarity