Speaker: Sihem Amer-Yahia
        Senior Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research - NYC
        http://research.yahoo.com/~sihem

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.