Speaker Short Bio Raghu joined Microsoft in 2012 as a Technical Fellow and CTO, Information Services and heads the Cloud and Information Services Lab (CISL) with members in Redmond, WA and Mountain View, CA. From 2006 to 2012, he was a Yahoo! Fellow. In 1999, he founded QUIQ, a company that developed innovative collaborative customer support and knowledge management solutions used by companies such as Business Objects, Compaq, National Instruments, Network Appliances, Sun Microsystems, and others, and served as the Chairman and CTO until 2003, when QUIQ was acquired by Kanisa.
The nature of information discovery has been transformed over the past few years. I will discuss some of the underlying trends that have re-shaped how users keep up with news (about the world, about their communities, about their friends and colleagues), discover and explore topics of interest, and search for specific information they require.
First, as people consume information increasingly from websites and digital devices, algorithmic techniques for selecting content have revolutionized the traditional notion of a static publication in which every user saw the same content and presentation: personalized, context-sensitive targeting is becoming the norm, and the role of an editor who shapes this user experience is changing so as to leverage the algorithmic tools to achieve a desired editorial voice.
Second, social networks are emerging as an ubiquitous, nearinstantaneous distribution channel that publishers must take into account in order to maximize their reach.
Third, search is becoming semantically richer, and the distinction between searching for information and discovering information serendipitously is blurring: increasingly, contextual information is triggering relevant searchable companion experiences. For example, while watching a TV program, users can see a stream of relevant entities and topics such as celebrities in a movie or teams and players in a game of soccer, and by clicking retrieve more detailed information on these entities and topics.
I will present an overview of these trends, highlighting the computational opportunities and challenges.