I’d like to keep some of the content from my WordPress page. Luckily, there is a Jekyll importer that can convert content. It does require a local installation of Jekyll, so let’s set that up first.

I recently realized that my WordPress website / blog had gone stale. The last entry dated more than two years ago. Adding content to that site had always had a high overhead. Looking for alternatives, it turns out the web has moved on to more light-weight solutions. Jekyll in particular looks like it could be fun.

In our CIKM paper An Eye-tracking Study of User Interactions with Query Auto Completion (QAC), we looked at how searchers examine and interact query completions, and what this tells us about measuring QAC ranking quality. Accurately interpreting user interactions would allow us to optimize search for each individual user. However, measuring performance is a real bottleneck, because searcher behaviour itself is affected by the searcher’s previous experience, expectations, and the search engine.

This summer, I was invited to teach at RuSSIR - the Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval in Nizhny Novgorod. I very much enjoyed the enthusiasm and insightful questions of the students. Thanks again to all who attended my lectures, and to the organizers!

My PhD thesis is out! Download a copy from this page, or get in touch if you would like a printed copy. The public defense will be on May 28. at the Agnietenkapel in Amsterdam.

Thank you to all those who attended the ECIR 2013 tutorial on Practical Online Retrieval Evaluation that Filip Radlinski and I gave today. We updated some of the slides from the version that was provided on the conference USB stick. Below are the updated slides and links to additional resources.

Our article “Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in Online Learning to Rank for IR” (to appear in Information Retrieval) addresses the question of whether online learning to rank systems need to balance exploration and exploitation.

At CIKM 2011, I presented our paper “A Probabilistic Method for Inferring Preferences from Clicks”. It proposes a new method, called Probabilistic Interleaving, for inferring feedback for comparing rankers using click data.