Omar Alonso @ Davis

My interests are information retrieval, temporal retrieval, text mining, exploratory search, open source, databases, domain engineering, sensemaking, information visualization, crowdsourcing/human-based computation. I have more than 10 years of industrial experience in product design and development, so I tend to see some problems from a different perspective. Here is an example. I'm not longer at Davis so this page contains random bits of what I did here and stuff that I'm currently working on. Contact: oralonso at gmail dot com About the picture.

Research

• Semantic annotations in information retrieval
  Hugo Zaragoza (Yahoo! Research) and I have organized the workshop "Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval" for ECIR 2008. The workshop went very well and we got lots of good feedback. The proceedings are available from the website.

  We also organized a second ESAIR workshop at WSDM 2009 in Barcelona. The call for papers for InformationProcessing and Management is here.

• Temporal information retrieval. This is the PhD thesis topic that combines exploratory search, TimeML, text mining, and NLP techniques. Advisors: Michael Gertz and Ricardo Baeza-Yates.

  Talk on Time in Web Search at the Yahoo event in Andorra. Last year I was at SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam, where I did demo the project. I also presented in the Industry day on sensemaking. I did participate on the ESI CHI 2007 workshop, showing my demo on exploratory search using timelines.

• Crowdsourcing for relevance evaluation Mostly working with Mechanical Turk and trying all sorts of things for relevance, document summarization, and related stuff.
  Publications:
  • Crowdsourcing for relevance evaluation, SIGIR Forum, December 2008.
  • Relevance Criteria for E-Commerce: A Crowdsourcing-based Experimental Analysis (poster), SIGIR 2009.
• Mining software repositories (MSR). This is a past project (Minero) about using information retrieval and text mining techniques to software engineering assets for discovery of patterns and other things. Mainly open source projects like HTTPD Apache.
  Publications:
  • Expertise Identification and Visualization from CVS, MSR 2008. Demo here.
  • Database Techniques for the Analysis and Exploration of Software Repositories, First Mining Software Repositories Workshop, 2004. (pdf)
  • Extracting Contributor Information from Software Repositories. Unpublished. (pdf).

  As part of the research on MSR, I did a couple of prototypes (including visualization): expertise identification on open source and contributor analysis on the Apache CVS logfile. A big thanks to the Apache folks for providing me original data.

• Database-driven information visualization. Visualization metaphors have been around for years but their adoption has been low. The common myth is that you need sophisticated users to take advantage of them. That might be in part true, but the real issue is that without good content organization and structure there is no room for visualization. More info on database and visualization.

Publications

Corporate life

Did a short stint at SAP Research. Some relevant content:

• Sensemaking in the Enterprise: A Framework for Retrieving, Presenting, and Providing Feedback on Information Sources. Unpublished paper of a cool project. Here is the pdf version.
• Information Sensemaking in a Business Scenario (SIGIR 2007 Industry Day)
• Enterprise People and Skill Discovery using Tolerant Retrieval and Visualization (pdf). ECIR 2007, Italy.

Before that, I used to work for Oracle in the database group as part of the team responsible for the underlying information retrieval API called Oracle Text and the Secure Enterprise Search product. Other relevant work that I did:

• Oracle's Approach to Semantic Web: Information Grid Framework (extended version). Also presented in both poster and developers track sessions at WWW 2006.
• Information visualization with Oracle 10g Text (pdf)
• Wrote chapter "Information Retrieval using Oracle Text, Powered by Java in the Database" for Kuassi Mensah's book "Programming the Oracle Database using Java & Web Services", Digital Press (2006).
• Yapa
• Contributed material for VLDB tutorial The Continued Saga of DB-IR Integration by R. Baeza-Yates and M. Consens.

Misc research stuff that you can skip

• Reviewer: SIGIR 2007, Information Systems, IP&M, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
• PC member: CIKM 2009, SIGIR 2009, SIGIR 2009 Future of IR Evaluation workshop, WSDM Late breaking, CIKM 2008,WWW 2008, ICSR 8, ICSR 6, ICSE 2001 (reuse workshop), and a few others.
• Workshop Chair, SIGIR 2010, Switzerland
• Best Paper of Conference Award, ICSR 7, Austin TX (2002).
• Member ACM, SIGIR, IEEE

Survival skills

And a little bit of travel ...

• Luzern and Zürich. Great weather, great food, and unbelievable chocolate.
• Taught an information retrieval summer course at Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in México (2004). The perfect excuse to try a road trip to the Pacific ocean (La Manzanilla).
• Welcome back event in Tandil, Argentina (2003). Another opportunity to catch up with salamines y quesos as well as old friends.
• Gave a talk at CWR in Chile (2002). They are doing very good work and now even part of Yahoo! Research. It was very nice to get a real pisco sour too.
• I did Hamburg-Erfurt on Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter. Ever felt like a small fish? Try waiting on a tarmac between a 747 and an A340.