Conferences and Courses

The Web Economy: Technical Challenges and Research Opportunities

Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Google Brazil

Jueves 31 de Agosto, 12PM, Auditorio DCC

The success of the Web as an effective low cost communication media
yielded a large audience of hundreds of millions of users worldwide. This large audience uses the Web to send emails, to communicate through chats, voice over IP connections, and video conferences, and to search for information, products, and services – all of which are interactive actions in nature.

The inherent interactivity in the Web led to new forms of advertising that gave birth to a new economy – the Web economy. In this new mass market, it is possible to present the users with products and services directly related to his/her short-term interests, i.e., targeted advertising is much more effective in the Web than in the other medias.

Targeted advertising can be used in conjunction with a series of products and services, each of which present specific technical challenges and, consequently, new research opportunities.

In this talk I will discuss some of these technical challenges.

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Berthier Ribeiro-Neto: Ph.D. in Computer Science by the University of California at Los Angeles, 1995. In 1996, he joined the CS Dept of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, from which he is currently in non-paid leave.

Ribeiro-Neto is the director of the Google Engineering Office in Brazil, located in Belo Horizonte.

He is also co-author of the book entitled Modern Information Retrieval, Addison Wesley, 1999, a bestseller in the area of information retrieval (IR) adopted in hundreds of universities around the world.

He has authored dozens of papers in major conferences and journals in the areas of information retrieval, Web information systems, and digital libraries.

He is a member of the American Society for Information Sciences, ACM, and IEEE.