WSDM, Day 3

Final day of the WSDM2009 conference: presentations the first day gave a lot of emphasis to translation and multi-lingual content, including the keynote from Google. Apparently Google would like to translate all of the Web, which sounds pretty ambitious. It makes me realize, though, that perhaps I’m on the right track being interested in working with audio files in “critical languages” (i.e. languages not commonly taught in schools in the US). However, there remains little interest in audio, from what I can tell.

A total of 225 participants attended both the conference and workshops, and a total of 12 student grants were awarded (out of 69 applications). I’m proud that I was given one of the student awards, and am even more grateful that I was one of 7 students to receive both free registration and some travel support. I will likely revisit some of the talks, which will be available at videolectures.net. And, wsdm2009 is the Flickr tag in case I want to browse photos of the event.

In some ways, this conference has been good because it let me participate in the workings of an epistemic community that is related, but not identical to the library and information science community. I thought I might get farther in understanding how to make A/V files retrievable on the web, but I really didn’t find out much. I met a lot of different folks interested in various aspects of indexing, so the event was in no way a wash! I leave tonight on the night bus for Madrid, and will fly back to Rabat on EasyJet on Friday afternoon.