Date: Wednesday, 12 September 2007, 6:30 PM
Location: SAP LABS, Building D, 3410 Hillview Avenue,
Palo Alto, CA (Google
Maps | Yahoo!
Maps | Mapquest)
Cost: Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is
only $10/year.
Topic
This talk will focus on the nature and challenges of building a finding experience is a social commerce network. In this network the sellers and buyers have different capabilities, formats, motives, and incentives. Still, there is a social binding force surfaced through common interests, transactions, and trust. The nature of the content, which is typically non-catalogable items, adds to this spectrum. We discuss search relevance, classification, merchandizing, and reputation systems in this context.
About the Speaker
Neel Sundaresan is the director of eBay Research Labs and a Distinguished Research Scientist. His current areas of research interest include Social and Incentive Networks, Trust and Reputation Systems, Machine Learning as applied to Recommender systems, Classification, Ontology, and Search. He has been with eBay since 2005. Prior to joining eBay , he was a founder and CTO of a startup focused on multi-attribute fuzzy search and network CRM. Prior to this, he was the head of the eMerging Internet Technologies group at the IBM Research Center. There he built the first XML-based Search Engine. He was one of the early leaders in building XML technologies including schema-aware compression algorithms, application component generators and pattern-match systems and compilers. He built the first RDF reference implementation as a W3C standard recommendation. He led research work in other areas like domain specific search engines, multi-modal interfaces and assistive technologies, semantic transcoding, web mining, query systems, and classification for semi-structured data. Prior to this he worked on C++ compiler and runtime systems for massively parallel machines and for shared memory systems and also on retargetable compilers, program translators and generators. He has over 40 research publications and several patents to his credit. He has been a frequent speaker at several national and international technology conferences. He has advised 2 PhD and several masters dissertations. He has a degree in mathematics and a masters in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai India and a PhD in computer science from Indiana University, Bloomington. His dissertation was on Modeling Control and Dynamic Data Parallelism in Object-Oriented Languages.