Arjen P. de Vries @arjen@idf.social
Computer scientist and entrepeneur specialised in Information Retrieval and Databases. Indie music 🎸
Admin idf.social instance
Dear all,
For now, I will keep the site closed for registrations; but everyone can independently invite people to join using the following link to generate an invite:
If you know someone who wants to join this instance, then please do give them an invite!
Consider the instance open for those who know anyone on IDF.social.
"Sense of community" and an initial seed of some 40 IR researchers should be enough to keep those spammers out of here and still grow the club!
Computer scientist 👨🏫 with main focus on Information Retrieval 📄
Also interested in Data Science / Big Data 💾
In the previous millennium 
a PhD on Multimedia Databases 🎥 (Yes that was a respectable research topic once upon a time pre-birdsite!)
#sigir is my academic home.
Entrepreneur: co-founder of #spinque (spinque.com)
IDF.social admin.
Loves indie music: follow me at @arjenpdevries if you are interested in gigs, #nowplaying events, etc.
Inaugural toots on idf.social using a photo of lunch with Nick Belkin after attending the now Dr. Hugo Huurdeman defense.
See also:
http://timelessfuture.com/phd
Our paper on personalized context-aware point of interest recommendation has been accepted at ACM TOIS; pre-print available here: http://bit.ly/2LS7P7n
New Yorker cartoon cannot be missed
Had niet door dat jouw T-shirt een ode aan NAACL best paper was @djoerd :
The choice of the best paper of the conference, Deep contextualized word representations, also demonstrates an increasing interest in generalization. Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo) showed significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on a wide range of tasks as can be seen below.
ACM CHIIR 2019 in Glasgow!
"... user-centered approaches to design and evaluation of systems for information access, retrieval, and use. This includes studies of interactive retrieval systems, novel interfaces and interaction paradigms, new evaluation methods, and related areas."
Focused studies on specific information retrieval systems and situations & longitudinal, real-life, and ethnographic research of contextually embedded search tasks
How did the search engines get so good?
Prof. Mark Sanderson speaking at RMIT Computer Science seminar.
CfP: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR'19) | http://sigir.org/chiir2019/
About to announce the best In-Use paper at #ESWC2018 with @Annatordai (drum roll...)
The Mastodon bridge tool has got a facelift! https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/
You can sign in with Twitter and Mastodon to find Twitter friends in the fediverse. You can also send it to your Twitter friends, as it will show them their friends on Mastodon and point them to where they could make an account!
And on that topic: FT is creating publication quality graphics using GGplot - https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1006783615022391297 - without additional work by a designer.
Just learned about OpenSCHUFA:
https://www.startnext.com/en/openschufa
Crowd-sourced reverse engineering of SCHUFA, a credit score common in Germany.
They try to find out if these scores are inaccurate or biased.
Great project!
In case you want to help spread the word:
http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~hiemstra/download/joinmastodon.pdf
Dong Nguyen, former PhD student of Franciska de Jong, wins Dutch Data Science Prize: Best PhD thesis!
She now works at the Alan Turing Institute in London.
Instance/domain blocking will be supported, but you might not even need it!
There is no federated timeline, and a user will only see posts from people they follow or local users on the public timeline. They can mute (ignore, prevent mention notifications) remote users/domains and admins can mute remote users/domains too.
I'm not against a federated timeline, I'm just not sure it makes sense for this project. Feedback wanted!
Are you looking for a privacy friendly search engine? I would recommend Startpage.com. Here is an extensive comparison with DuckDuckGo (long read): http://securityspread.com/2016/10/24/duckduckgo-startpage-2016-update/
Today, we're opening up the great library of source code https://www.softwareheritage.org/2018/06/07/opening-the-door/
Live from @unesco headquarters in Paris.
@swheritage @rdicosmo @webmink
Today at the #REDI meeting, we discussed the Mastodon #Forkoff rebellion. Interestingly, no one in the class room thought about possible harmful effects of the trending topics feature before... (or search for that matter ) However, after the discussion, most students realized that the features we are developing can have a severe negative impact on vulnerable people on-line.
Web archiving conference coming to Amsterdam.
Cute webpage (you need a certain age to appreciate the cultural ref perhaps)
Finally some common sense wrt DL:
"... the impressive accuracy numbers of the best performing models are questionable because the same test sets ... the danger of overfitting, we measure the accuracy of CIFAR-10 classifiers by creating a new test set of truly unseen images. Although we ensure that the new test set is as close to the original data distribution as possible, we find a large drop in accuracy (4% to 10%) for a broad range of deep learning models."