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
Every Data Scientist should read Weapons of Distruction by Cathy O’Neil. She warns for the fact that mathematics is misused to turn subjectivity in Big Data into objective facts. She has many examples that will frighten you.
The Decentralized Web: Interesting write-up by Neha Narula and Chelsea Barabas from MIT.
PixelFed Federation Status:
✅ - Mastodon
✅ - Pleroma
❌ - Funkwhale (WIP)
❌ - GNU/Social
❌ - Hubzilla
❌ - NextCloud
❌ - MissKey (WIP)
❌ - PeerTube (WIP)
❌ - Plume
❌ - Pump.io
❌ - Socialhome
I will finish the WIP ones and then push support in the next few days!
Safe the date: Meeting on Ethics, Privacy, Transparency and Bias in Information Retrieval to take place on 5 September 2018 in Sheffield. More details in the next few weeks.
New blog post: How to become a successful artist on Mastodon https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-become-a-successful-artist-on-mastodon/
Registration is closed on pixelfed.social, however there are a few other instances open!
https://pix.hostux.social
https://pxlfd.me
https://pix.tedomum.net
https://admires.art
(We do not endorse any instances, including pixelfed.social or any instances @dansup runs)
New blog post: How to implement a basic ActivityPub server https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/
Gave a presentation yesterday on research data management and bibliometrics for a Masterclass on Marie Curie Individual Fellowships. Nice group of people, hope some of them get their proposal granted. Also talked about enhancing your visibility.
Congrats #WizeNoze for making it in the #Disrupt100!
There are 2 main rivaling programs to handle your scientific references. One is free/libre software (#Zotero), the other is not (#Mendeley). Guess which one you should use?
Hint: if you use the closed source one, it will encrypt your article-database and not give you the possibility to decrypt and export it.
So folks, the #article13 and #linktax proposals will be going soon to the EU parlaiment, and if they pass they will become a serious problem for the #Fediverse:
* To automatically filter copyrighted materials, even badly, you need a way to reference those materials. Even our largest instances probably can't afford access!
* Our instances will not be able to afford licenses to link to news sites under the new #LinkTax rules.
Go make some noise at: https://saveyourinternet.eu/
(@gargron)
Show your support against monopolist YouTube misbehavior.
Follow @blender from Mastodon.
Background story:
https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/youtube-blocks-blender-videos-worldwide/
Excellent #ActivityPub usecase: decentralize but connect.
Gabriella Pasi and Ludo Waltman are keynote speakers at the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop in Leiden.
http://dir2018.nl/programme
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.