Google Tech Talk - London Woman in Engineering September 20, 2007

London Women in Engineering 
- Technical Talk Night

This is an opportunity for women with an interest in technology and computer science to come together to enjoy an evening of technical conversation and network with like-minded individuals.
During this event, Elin Pedersen, a Research Scientist for Google in Mountain View, will give a technical talk on “Finding Related Documents by Tracking User Activity”.

Thursday, 20th September 2007

The event will start at 18:00 and will include drinks and nibbles followed by a Technical Talk and networking session. Google London is located at 76 Buckingham Palace Road, Victoria, London, SW1W 9TQ (closest tube – Victoria)
18:00 – 19:00 Registration, drinks & nibbles
19:00 – 20:00 Technical Talk by Elin Pedersen, Q&A Session
20:00 – 21:00 Networking

RSVP
If you are interested in joining us for this event, please reply to eng-events-uk@google.com with your name, email and phone number. We will follow up with a reminder email and directions to our office a few days before the event.

If you would like to invite anyone else who has interest in attending please add their name, email address and phone number to your RSVP email and an invite will be sent.
We look forward to meeting you!

Abstract:
Usage tracking for relevance is presented as a method to automatically determine relevance of digital objects to a given object. A user's ongoing interaction with digital objects spawns relations among them and determines the strength of each relation. The user's work on digital objects is captured and made into weighted edges in a network of digital objects.
Being media agnostic usage tracking has an important advantage over existing term and content based methods: text, images and sounds are all just objects and treated alike; it is the user's handling of the objects that matter.
To prove the concept of usage tracking for relevance ranking we built a service that tracks the user's interaction and provide peripheral awareness of digital objects that are likely related to what the user is focusing on. A brief user assessment of the service suggests that usage-relevance is indeed useful, but our implemented mechanism for building and maintaining relations was not robust enough. A technical analysis concludes the problem is deeply embedded in the way the operating system works.

Elin Rønby Pedersen is a research scientist at Google, specialising in Human Computer Interaction. Before joining Google, Elin had done HCI research in leading technology companies like Microsoft, FXPAL, Interval Research Corp, and Xerox PARC. Elin also founded Kraka, a consulting firm in Redwood City that helped R&D organisations transform research into user informed business prospects. She has published and patented pioneering work on pen & gesture input, paper interfaces, peripheral awareness and social interaction. A hallmark of her work is the tight interaction between technology creation and insights in users and usage. Earlier in her career Elin held an associate professorship at Roskilde University in Denmark. She is passionate about creating pleasant and beautiful spaces – both virtual and physical.

Official Website: http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk