Seminar Speaker
Date Monday, February 7, 2011, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm, SB 204
Title: From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment
Speaker: Larry Birnbaum
Abstract
Information systems that present people with information inescapably make editorial judgments in determining what information to show and how to show it. However the editorial values used to make these determinations are generally invisible to users and in many cases even to the engineers who design them. This talk describes some of the problems that this creates, based mainly on an assessment of intelligent information systems that we have developed at Northwestern. We then discuss some methods for providing explicit and visible editorial control in such systems, and present a variety of systems we have developed that utilize these approaches. These range from systems that provide news readers with additional detail and background, to systems that automatically generate stories from data.
Biography
Larry Birnbaum received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1986 and joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989. His research in artificial intelligence and computer science has encompassed natural language processing, case-based reasoning, machine learning, human-computer interaction, educational software, and computer vision. Birnbaum has authored or coauthored more than eighty articles. He was the program cochair of the 1991 International Machine Learning Workshop and has been a member of the program committee for numerous other conferences and workshops.