Columbia University Women in Computer ScienceThe goal of this group is to bring together women involved in computer science in the Columbia University community. We seek to expand the opportunities and successes of women in CS. We hope to encourage prospective computer science majors and provide direction and assistance to current computer science students. As a network for women undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff, the group promotes interaction on social, academic and professional issues.
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is an annual conference held by the Anita Borg Institute. With support from our department, Yahoo! and faculty advisers WICS is able to send a total of 9 members. In addition, Jana Johnson and Melinda Agyekum were awarded full conference scholarships. Thanks to our sponsors and congratulations to the attendees for being a part of Columbia's largest GHC cohort!
Location: Interschool Lab, 7th Floor CEPSR
Title: Socially-Aware Recommendations in Collaborative Tagging Sites
Abstract: Collaborative tagging sites constitute a unique opportunity for leveraging implicit and explicit social ties in search and recommendations. This talk describes our work in the context of Royal Jelly, a platform for socially-aware recommendations in collaborative tagging sites. The key aspects of RJ are search over recommendations, topic derivation from tags, efficient recommendation algorithms and diversity in recommendations. We describe some of our solutions in that space and an overview of the challenges ahead.
Bio: Sihem Amer-Yahia is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in NYC. Her interests are at the intersection of databases, search and recommendations in social content sites. Before that, she spent 7 years at AT&T Labs in NJ, working on XML query optimization and XML full-text search. Sihem is an editor of the XML full-text language documents recommended by the W3C. This year, she is on the editorial board of the Springer Encyclopedia of Database Systems as an editor of the XML entry, she also edited the Data Engineering Bulletin special issue on databases, search and recommendations and she is chairing the database track of CIKM 2008.