Summize Blog

Twitter Acquires Summize. Confirmed.

2008-07-15T12:03:19-04:00

It's with great pride that I officially confirm Twitter’s acquisition of Summize. The rationale for this transaction from Twitter can be found here. I’ll outline my motivation to sell our beloved Summize, talk about our experience soup to nuts, and recognize the players who made this deal possible.

Summize - A Brief History

Our passion for designing search applications brought us three co-founders, Abdur, Greg, and myself, together back in 2000. After years of building and launching dozens of highly scalable systems serving millions of users, in 2007 we set out to create our own new vertical search engine to help people find opinions and attitudes on the Web.

At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says “nice” it isn’t necessarily in a positive sense). Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine.

In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics. We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem.

Summize – Nuts & Bolts

Excited by the potential of a realtime Twitter search, we unleashed Matt Sanford, a web crawling wizard, ops extraordinaire, measurement zealot, and foreign language nut, to shift his attention from blogs to microblogs, and to Twitter in particular.

Matt scurried the raw nuggets of data to Mike, an even bigger nut and a master juggler who to this day claims to have juggled SEVEN balls simultaneously. Mike, who responds well to donuts, just happens to be a C++ and Java guru so he churned out fancy beautified code to parse tweets, thread disparate conversations, and pluck out highly accurate and meaningful trending topics from the Twitter public timeline. The latter task is a really, really tough nut to crack, so it required a helping hand from our nutty professor ~~Adbur~~ ~~Abdir~~ Abdur aka “El Hefe.”

Mike pipes the data into our database for Eric, who spends two hours a day either making the perfect cappuccino or walking 28 blocks to find it. But Eric’s also a self-acclaimed IR wunderkid who can speak in SQL and can invert, convert, revert, subvert, and even evert relational databases and inverted indices to do exactly what he wants. (Ok, I don’t know what that means, but that’s exactly the point). He wrung every bit of performance possible to deliver an awesome realtime indexing and query engine. He also implemented hyper-geospatial proximity search during one of his coffee breaks.

Greg, our CTO, the “Pixelator”, who frequently confines himself in his basement to align a single pixel to achieve ultimate perfection that only the enlightened can discern, also maintains this riveting blog. He once wanted to rename Summize “tweird”, so that tells you a lot about him. I do admit he’s pretty good at UI design (no surprise here as I taught him everything he knows, including how to manage geeks), assembled all the pieces and served up an elegant user experience for the Twitterati to marvel at.

The bottom line? In a nutshell, Summize nailed realtime conversational search right out the gate.

Summize – Twitter’s Missing Manual

Summize revealed the true power of Twitter and its thriving community. Right from our home page you can “see” what people are talking about at this moment via our trending topics. We tamed the Twitter public timeline by bringing some order to the chaos.

Type any query into Summize to “listen in” on conversations on practically any topic. What do people think about Hancock? What’s the buzz on Dark Knight or the new iPhone? What site is down?

It’s now effortless to find your taste neighbors and to connect with like-minded people worldwide. Simply search on keywords that interest you and start following. Experience conferences vicariously and monitor breaking news events as they unfold.

The “Aha! moment” for us was tracking what people are saying about Summize itself. We have been glued to summize.com nearly 24x7 since launch. For the first time we could listen, respond, and engage with our customers in realtime. This revelation was game changing for all of us. There is great potential for companies to get involved with their user base the way we and others like Zappos, JetBlue, Comcast, Southwest have.

Twitter and their investors understood the potential of Summize, hence the marriage between the two startups. There is a perfect technology fit, vision fit, and cultural fit as mentioned in the Twitter blog.

The acquisition enables Twitter to fully harness the core search, filtering, and discovery technology built by the extraordinarily talented Summize team. All five Summize engineers will be joining Twitter. I will continue as a consultant for a short period of time and then move on to spend more time with the family, of course, and eventually sprout another killer startup here in lovely Northern Virginia, a thriving hotbed for Web 2.0 companies (and, as Abdur would say, I am a cereal entrepreneur now).

Close - Personal Note and Acknowledgment

I have a long working relationship with my fellow co-founders, Greg and Abdur, so it is with mixed emotions for me to see them move to California. They have taught me far more than just information retrieval.

Eric Jensen also deserves recognition as a quasi-founder for joining Summize before we secured any funding. Eric is an exemplary technologist and a keen strategist who’s not afraid to take risk. He’ll definitely be someone to watch in the years ahead.

I’m thrilled for the Summize guys and for Jack, Ev, Biz and the Twitter team as they will benefit tremendously having Greg and Abdur in senior technology leadership roles.

I would like to acknowledge our angel investors who saw the potential in the Summize founding team from day one. A big thanks goes to Roger Richter and Tim Webb who are always on my side even when things look bleak. Another big thanks goes to John Burbank, Andrew Seligson, Seth Spalding of Passport Capital for leading our angel round and for listening to my wacky ideas. I’m also grateful to Jim Davidson, our former boss at AOL, for believing in us despite the obstacles we face out here in the East Coast.

During our travails as a coastally challenged startup we met with many VCs, but one VC firm stood out far above the rest—Union Square Ventures. There is a good reason why USV is admired by entrepreneurs and the Web 2.0 community—they are simply the best. In fact, the most important advice I received was from Brad Burnham and it’s still ingrained in my head, “Create something simple. Let the market pull you in.” Thank you, Brad, and thank you for introducing us to John Borthwick.

John and Andrew Weissman of Betaworks Studio saw the potential in Summize even before we launched our Twitter search. They worked tirelessly to open doors to help us get funding and/or partnering deals. They introduced us to Josh Auerbach, the most amazing deal maker ever and a really nice and funny guy overall, and they re-introduced us to Gerry Campbell, our former colleague at AOL Search (read Gerry's thoughts on the deal). Thank you, John, Andy, Josh, and Gerry. With Summize you have proven your “Outcubator” model.

This post cannot be complete without thanking Fred Wilson. Thank you, Fred for helping to make this deal happen. There’s a reason why we use “from:fredwilson” as our test query at Summize. If we don’t see any search results, then clearly “Something is Technically Wrong” in the social media world which requires immediate attention.

And last, but not least, I want to thank our loyal Summize fan base. There were so many Summize evangelists who supported us that it’s impossible to call out individuals. On behalf of the Summize team, I offer each and every one of you our sincerest gratitude.

Respectfully,

Jay Virdy
http://twitter.com/jayvirdy

InfoScale 2008 Recap

2008-06-23T20:26:41-04:00

Sorry for the delay but I have not had much time for a post. InfoScale keeps getting better and this year we had lots of good participants and papers. I thought I would layout a few belated highlights of the conference from my point of view. It was a great honor to continue the success of INFOSCALE in its 3rd year as one of its organizing committee members. It is always difficult to continue the momentum of a conference in its early years, but judging from the responses for this year in terms of renowned PC members and high-quality submissions, we are confident that INFOSCALE will soon be on par with other more established conferences.

This year we received 74 submissions from authors in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, each of which was reviewed by at least 3 experts in the field. Only 18 of the submitted papers were accepted as regular papers, and 6 were accepted as short papers. Already, INFOSCALE has become a highly selective conference with only a 24% acceptance rate.

Here were a few high lights from the conference. First was Nivio Ziviani's talk on perfect hashing algorithms ( Download perfect-hash.pdf ). Hashing algorithms are wonderful tools and Nivio laid out the reasoning behind the ones he has worked on over the years, namely his work on large key set hashing. Nivio is not only a great academic but has also founded two companies, one sold to UOL and the other to Google in Brazil, showing that his work is not only worthy of publication but also of commercial importance.

Below is a picture of Nivio Ziviani at the banquet, he is the second from the left next to his wonderful wife. Also in the picture from left to right (Mrs Ziviani, Dr. Ziviani, Dr. Silvestri, Francesca and Dr. Baeza-Yates on the far right).

Ricardo Baeza-Yates gave a great talk on distributed web search based on his research at Yahoo (Download keynote_ricardo.pdf ). Ricardo examined how they have been examining when and why distributed search should take place e.g. power, location or data to give a few examples of why to distribute. He also went into great detail on how they have been examining the pros and cons of various architectures. One of the most interesting points he made during the talk was how various algorithms or data structures may not be optimal when studied alone, but in the context of a whole system they do quite well. This is a great example of why research needs to keep in step with commercial systems so these types of situations can be examined in detail. Also, Ricardo will be coming out with a second version of his book soon, "Modern Information Retrieval" so wait if you are about to buy the old one.

Below Ricardo giving out the best paper award to Wai Gen Yee:

Which is a perfect lead into the last paper I would like to talk about. Wai Gen Yee who got the best paper award at InfoScale.

Dr. Yee presented a paper on peer-to-peer query routing based on some cleaver peer description work.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing systems commonly use the set-of-terms model to describe succinctly a peer’s shared file set: the union of the terms in the share files. This information is used to guide query routing decisions. The problem with this model, however, is that it falsely suggests term co-occurrences that do not exist in any single file. Consequently, queries get routed erroneously to peers that have no matching files, wasting network and computation resources in the process. We reduce the amount of co-occurrence errors by partitioning each peer’s file set and representing the peer as several file partitions instead of one. Experimental evidence demonstrates that it is possible to reduce the network traffic between neighbors by up to 60% at virtually no cost.

Download routing.pdf

Lastly, a few thanks must be given out. A very sincere thank you to Dorothy Bany our InfoScale organizer. She pulled it all together and made the conference flow without a hitch, thanks Dorothy and your helpers were awesome. Below, Dorothy Bany is on the right, my wife and daughter on the left.

Thank you to the man that made it all happen Fabrizio Silvestri, thank you very much for making it such a great time. Below Dr. Silvestri and Gabrial.

Hope you all make it to InfoScale 2009 in China.

WWDC - Live Coverage

2008-06-09T09:59:07-04:00

Today Apple will be hosting their Worldwide Developers Conference WWDC08 and we have the pleasure of providing live tracking of the event via Twitter updates. We believe this is a great opportunity to showcase the power of tracking global conversations and give new users exposure to our trending topics and sentiment technologies. We love the Twitter micro-blogging platform and the opportunity to provide this service to the community. Lastly, a big thanks Twitter for the link.

DemoGirl on Summize

2008-05-22T18:47:10-04:00

For those of you that have not found the DemoGirl site, I recommend checking it out. Molly does 2-3 minute screencasts on new sites so others can quickly check out the site and its functionality without having to sign-up or go there. While Summize has no sign-up barrior for people to use it, we do love seeing her talk about some of the great features and uses of our product.

Here is a link to her post on Summize and the embedded screencast.

Enjoy...

CIKM 2008 Call for Papers

2008-05-21T22:48:22-04:00

The CIKM 2008 deadline is almost up. This year is going to be great with the venue being in Napa Valley. I thought our call for papers on our web site would be interesting to check out. Also, I am running this years Industry track so if you have something interesting for the conference please submit it.

Final Call for Papers and Information about CIKM 2008
ACM Seventeenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
CIKM 2008

October 26-30, 2008, Napa Valley Marriott Hotel & Spa, California, U.S.A.
WEBSITE: http://www.cikm2008.org/

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Corporate supporters
Keynote speakers
Conference themes and Topics
Paper submissions Information and Important dates (Abstracts due: May 27, 2008)

Industry day
List of accepted workshops
Student travel support
Information about hotel, travel, and Napa Valley
Organizing and Program Committee

CORPORATE SUPPORTERS

Gold: Information Retrieval Facility, Microsoft, SearchMe.com

Silver: Advertising.com, Ask.com, eBay Research Labs, Yahoo! Research

Bronze: Justsystems Evans Research

Supported by ACM SIGIR and ACM SIGWEB

If you are interested in being a sponsor see the following for details:
http://cikm2008.org/sponsorship.php

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Databases: Rakesh Agrawal (Microsoft Search Labs, USA)

Information Retrieval: Bruce Croft (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
Knowledge Management: Pedro Domingos (University of Washington, USA)

CONFERENCE THEMES
Since 1992, the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
(CIKM) has successfully brought together leading researchers and
developers from the database, information retrieval, and knowledge
management communities. The purpose of the conference is to identify
challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and
information systems, and to shape future research directions through the
publication of high quality, applied and theoretical research findings.
In CIKM 2008, we will continue the tradition of promoting collaboration
among multiple areas. We encourage submissions of high quality papers on
all topics in the general areas of databases, information retrieval, and
knowledge management. Papers that bridge across these areas are of
special interest and will be considered for a "Best Interdisciplinary
Paper" award.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
CIKM 2008 topics are in the broad areas of Databases, Information Retrieval,

and Knowledge Management. CIKM 2008 also includes an Industry track.

Each area is organized into tracks:

Databases:

Access methods and indexing
Authorization, data privacy and security
Concurrency control and recovery
Data adaptability, reusability and quality
Database languages and models
Information integration, data provenance, probabilistic databases
Mobile databases and distributed data management
Peer-to-peer, parallel and distributed databases
Query processing, optimization and performance
Real-time and active databases
Scientific and biological databases
Semantic Web
Semi-structured data processing, XML filtering and routing
Stream-based processing and network databases
String Databases, Blogs and Social Search
Systems, middleware, applications and experiences
Temporal, spatial and multimedia databases
User experience (Languages, Models, Interfaces)

Information Retrieval:

Citation Analysis, Social Networks for IR
Domain-specific IR (e.g., Legal IR, Genome, Mobile IR, IR for chemical structures)
Filtering (e.g., Routing, Collaborative filtering, Topic tracking, Recommender systems)
Foundation of Information Retrieval (e.g., Theory, Ranking)
IR Architectures, Scalability and Efficiency
IR Evaluation
Language Specific IR (Multi-lingual, Cross-lingual, NLP)
Machine Learning for IR
Multimedia IR (Audio, Speech, Video, Image)
Semi-Structured Information Retrieval
User Modeling for IR, Search Personalization
Web Search, Advertising, Adversarial

Knowledge Management:

Advertising and Optimization
Classification and Clustering
Data pre- and post-Processing
Information Extraction
Information Filtering and Recommender Systems
Knowledge Synthesis and Visualization
Large-scale statistical techniques
Link and Graph Mining
Semantic Techniques
Temporal and Spatial data Mining
Text Mining

Industry track:

Industrial Practice and Experience
Technology for Developing Regions

SUBMISSION FORMAT
Submission details can be found on the conference web site at:
http://www.cikm2008.org/how_to_submit.php.

IMPORTANT DATES
Research and Industry Track
Abstracts due: May 27, 2008
Papers due: June 3, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: July 15, 2008
Camera ready: August 15, 2008

INDUSTRY DAY
Co-organized by Marius Pasca (Google, USA) and James G. Shanahan (Independent Consultant, USA)

As CIKM 2008 will be held in Napa Valley, just one hour to the north of San Francisco, one of the goals of the conference is to embrace the innovative spirit of the Bay Area/Silicon Valley in bridging further the academic-commercial gap in the database, information retrieval, and knowledge management communities. To help achieve this goal, we will having an industry day (separate from the industry research track) where luminaries, primarily from industry and from the VC (Venture Capital) community, will provide insights on how DB/IR/KM technologies are/can be leveraged to make a billion-dollar success.

Confirmed speakers and panelists include:

Andrei Z. Broder (Yahoo! Research, USA)
Steven Gary Blank (Stanford University, USA)
Christopher J. C. Burges (Microsoft Research, USA)
Doug Cutting (Yahoo!, USA)

Omar Hamoui (AdMob, USA)
Ronny Kohavi (Microsoft, USA)
Peter Norvig (Google, USA)
Peter Rip (Crosslink Capital, USA)

LIST OF ACCEPTED WORKSHOPS

BooksOnline'08 - Setting the Roadmap for Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories
DOLAP 2008 - ACM Eleventh International Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP
DTMBIO 2008 - ACM Second International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Bioinformatics
iNEWS08 - Improving Non English Web Searching
GIR'08 - Fifth Workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval
LSDS-IR 2008 - Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval
ONISW 2008 - 2nd International Workshop on Ontologies and Information Systems for the Semantic Web
PaIR - Patent Information Retrieval
PIKM 2008 - PhD Workshop
SSM 2008 - Search in Social Media
WICOW-2 - Second Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web
WIDM 2008 - Tenth International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management

STUDENT TRAVEL SUPPORT
CIKM invites applications for awards to help cover the cost of travel, subsistence, and
registration to CIKM 2008 for students. For details see
http://www.cikm2008.org/student_travel_support.php.

HOTEL INFORMATION
CIKM 2008 will take place at the Napa Valley Marriott Hotel & Spa, 3425 Solano Avenue, Napa, CA 94558.
Information about the hotel and booking can be found at:
http://www.cikm2008.org/local_information.php.

TRAVEL INFORMATION
http://www.cikm2008.org/travel.php

NAPA VALLEY
Napa Valley recreational opportunities abound. Whether you are interested in the most
athletic of activities or your pursuits are more leisurely, there is plenty
to be found in Napa County. Details are available at:
http://www.cikm2008.org/napa_valley.php.

ORGANIZERS
Conference Chair: James G. Shanahan (Independent Consultant, USA)
Proceedings Chair: Diane Kelly (University of North Carolina, USA)
Tutorials Chair: Neel Sundaresan (eBay Research Labs, USA)
Workshops Chair: Gregory Grefenstette (CEA LIST, France)
Treasurer: Ryen W. White (Microsoft Research)
Local Area Chair: Goutham Kurra (Turn Inc, USA)
Sponsorship Chair: Yan Qu (Advertising.com, USA)
PR Chair: Mounia Lalmas (Queen Mary, University of London, UK)
Web Master: Disco Gerdes (34s58w Web Development)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

CIKM 2008 Program Committee by Area

Database (Sihem Amer-Yahia, Yahoo! Research, USA)
Information Retrieval (Yi Zhang, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
Knowledge Management (Alek Kolcz, Microsoft Live Labs, USA)
Industry (Abdur Chowdury, Summize.com, USA)

CIKM 2008 Database:

Area Chair: Sihem Amer-Yahia (Yahoo! Research, USA)
Assistant Area Chair: Ioana Manolescu (INRIA, France)

Meta-reviewers (Track chairs)

Peter Boncz (CWI, The Netherlands)
Graham Cormode (AT&T Labs, USA)
Juliana Freire (University of Utah, USA)
Irini Fundulaki (ICS-FORTH, Greece)
Carl-Christian Kanne (University of Mannheim, Germany)
Nick Koudas (University of Toronto, Canada)
Maristella Matera (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Atsuyuki Morishima (University of Tsukuba, Japan)
Fatma Ozcan (IBM Almaden, USA)
Wang Chiew Tan (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)
Rebecca Wright (Rutgers University, USA)

CIKM 2008 Information Retrieval:
Area Chair: Yi Zhang (University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
Assistant Area Chair: David A. Evans (JustSystems Evans Research, USA)

Meta-reviewers (Track chairs)

Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis (University of Washington, USA)
Lee Giles (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
David Hawking (CSIRO, Australia)
Jimmy Huang (York University, Canada)
Joemon Jose (University of Glasgow, UK)
Jaap Kamps (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Noriko Kando (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
Paul Kantor (Rutgers University, USA)
KL Kwok (City University of New York, USA)
Hang Li (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
Jian-Yun Nie (University of Montreal, Canada)
Jan Pedersen (Yahoo!, USA)
Tetsuya Sakai (NewsWatch, Japan)
Mark Sanderson (University of Sheffield, UK)
Luo Si (Purdue University, USA)
Andrew Trotman (University of Otago, New Zealand)

CIKM 2008 Knowledge Management:
Area Chair Alek Kolcz (Microsoft Live Labs, USA)
Assistant Area Chair: Key-Sun Choi (KAIST, Korea)

Meta-reviewers (Track chairs)

Naoki Abe (IBM Research, USA)
Paul Buitelaar (DFKI, Germany)
Nitesh Chawla (University of Indiana, USA)
Hsin-His Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
Dennis Decoste (Microsoft Live Labs, USA)
Ryaid Ghani (Accenture Technology Labs, USA)
Marko Grobelnik (Josef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
Joost Kok (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Henry Lieberman (MIT, USA)
Wei-Ying Ma (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
Alexander Tuzhilin (Stern School of Business New York University, USA)

CIKM 2008 Industry:

Area Chair: Abdur Chowdhury (Summize.com, USA)

http://www.cikm2008.org/program_committee.php contains the complete
list of program committee members for all areas.

CONTACT
info {at} cikm2008 {dot} org

InfoScale 2008 Papers

2008-05-15T12:38:17-04:00

InfoScale 2008 is almost here (June 4th - 6th 2008). We are now putting together our program and thought a quick preview of the keynotes and papers would be interesting. First, the little blurb on the focus of InfoScale:

"The Third International Conference on Scalable Information Systems will focus on a wide array of scalability issues and investigate new approaches to tackle problems arising from the ever-growing size and complexity of information of all kinds. "

This is the third year of InfoScale and it continues to grow in terms of quality and people focusing on scaling issues. We are excited to have two great key notes focusing on distributed systems: Anthony Rowstron from Microsoft Research and Ricardo Baeza-Yates from Yahoo Research. Below is a quick summary of their talks.

Antony Rowstron - Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

Peer-to-peer meets wireless: Opportunities and challenges
In general, peer-to-peer technologies for the Internet have been shown to be scalable and efficient for content distribution, and are increasingly been used for more than just simple file distribution. In this talk I will talk about how the field of wireless networking is being impacted by P2P. First, I will discuss the convergence of structured overlays and network routing protocols. Protocols, like Virtual Ring Routing, exploit some of the techniques used in structured overlays to create a new generation of scalable routing protocols, aimed at wireless mesh networks. These routing protocols are designed to enable the next generation of mesh-based infrastructure for use in the enterprise. Secondly, I will discuss how P2P ideas and concepts for scalability are impacting wireless vehicular networking.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates - Yahoo! Research

Towards a Distributed Web Search Engine
In the ocean of Web data, Web search engines are the primary way to access content. As the data is on the order of petabytes, current search engines are very large centralized systems based on replicated clusters. Web data, however, is always evolving. The number of Web sites continues to grow rapidly (170 millions in March 2008) and there are currently more than 20 billion indexed pages. On the other hand, Internet users are above one billion and hundreds of million of queries are issued each day. In the near future, centralized systems are likely to become less effective against such a data-query load, thus suggesting the need of fully distributed search engines. Such engines need to maintain high quality answers, fast response time, high query throughput, high availability and scalability; in spite of network latency and scattered data. In this talk we present the main challenges behind the design of a distributed Web retrieval system and our past and on-going work in solving them, including crawling, indexing and query processing.

After the keynote presentations we have a great set of papers for the main program, below is a list of accepted papers. The interesting part of this conference is the merging of two different types of research groups, those working on networking scale and those working on information retrieval scale. Lets see what type of discussions and ideas are sparked from these two communities.

Long Papers List

Foto Afrati, Chen Li and Vassia Pavlaki "Data Exchange: Query Answering for Incomplete Data Sources"
Giuseppe Amato and Pasquale Savino "Approximate Similarity Search in Metric Spaces using Inverted Files"
Michail Argyriou, Vasilis Samoladas and Spyros Blanas "GRaSP: Generalized Range Search in Peer-to-peer Networks"
Murat Cakiroglu and Ahmet Turan Ozcerit "Jamming Detection Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Networks"
Alvaro Florez-Lara, Eduardo Casilari and José M. Cano-Garcìa "Analysis of the scalability of hierarchical IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee networks"
Wai Gen Yee, Linh Nguyen, Dongmei Jia and Ophir Frieder "Efficient Query Routing by Improved Peer Description in P2P Networks"
Filippo Geraci and Marco Pellegrini "Dynamic User-Defined Similarity Searching in Semi-Structured Text Retrieval"
Jianjin Jiang, Guangwen Yang and Dingxing Wang "Modeling Replication Strategies in Data Grid Systems with Arbitrary Clustered Demands"
Mustafa Hasan, Ali Hammad Akbar Dr. and Ki-Hyung Kim Prod "LowMIPv6: A Scheme for network based mobility for the Low Capable Ubiquitous Device"
ji li, Huaxin Zeng and Hao Luo "PPFAS - A Port-Pair based Fair Aggregation and Scheduling in SUPANET"
Carlo Mastroianni, Giuseppe Pirrò and Domenico Talia A Hybrid "Architecture for Content Consistency and Peer Synchronization in Cooperative P2P Environments"
Gianluca Moro and Gabriele Monti "Scalable Multi-Dimensional Range Queries and Routing in Data-Centric Sensor Networks"
Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Sachindra Joshi, Sanjeet Khaitan and Sreeram Balakrishnan "Optimization Issues in Inverted Index-based Entity Annotation"
José L. Risco-Martín, Saurabh Mittal, David Atienza, J. Ignacio Higalgo and Juan Lanchares "Optimization of Dynamic Data Types in Embedded Systems using DEVS/SOA-based Modeling and Simulation"
Soror Sahri and Witold Litwin "Scalable Web Services Interface for SD-SQL Server"
Brahmananda Sapkota and Sanaullah Nazir "Scalable Architecture for Web Service Discovery"
Sebastiano Vigna "Distributed, Large-Scale Latent Semantic Analysis by Index Interpolation"
Chonsheng Zhang, Zhongbo Wu, Bo Qu, Hong Chen, Xing Hao "On efficient processing of multiple KNN queries in constrained spatial networks"
Liang Zhao, Luo Chen, Ning Jing and Huaiyu Zuo "GRIMS: A Scalable Management and Storage System for Massive Remote Sensing Images"
Tan Apaydin "Dynamic Data Organization for Bitmap Indices"

Short Paper List

Steve Beitzel, Eric Jensen, Abdur Chowdhury and Ophir Frieder "Analysis of Varying Approaches to Topical Web Query Classification"
Claudio Gennaro "A Content-Addressable Network for Similarity Join in Metric Spaces"
Abdallah Makhoul, Jacques Bahi and Arnaud Giersch A Scalable Fault Tolerant Diffusion "Scheme for Data Fusion in Sensor Networks."
Muhammad Marwan Muhammad Fuad and Pierre-François Marteau "The Multi-Resolution Extended Edit Distance"
Diego Puppin "Collection Selection... now with more documents!"
Tallat M. Shafaat, Monika Moser, Ali Ghodsi, Seif Haridi, Thorsten Schütt and Alexander Reinefeld "Key-Based Consistency and Availability in Structured Overlay Networks"

Local Twitter Search

2008-05-14T11:58:59-04:00

Last night we launched a local operator for our twitter search, enabling you to search within tweets near a location. For example, you can find what people are saying about Obama near:oregon while he campaigns there. The easiest way to find this operator is to use our advanced search page, there you will see an input box with "near this place." Just fill it in with your city, state, zip, etc. along with what you are looking for. Adam Ostrow and Danny Sullivan have already done a great job of reviewing this feature, but we wanted to provide some clarification here about exactly how it works.

For this initial version, we've focused on the "location" field of your twitter profile to determine where you are. Twitter recently released an API allowing this field to be dynamically updated. We rely on the Google Maps API to interpret (or "geocode") this free-text location as an actual place that can be put on a map. We also rely on the level of accuracy they report to determine whether the locations of tweets are accurate enough to be displayed at the zoom level you're viewing. So if you don't see what you expect, especially in China, zoom out!

Brightkite recently provided users an option to update their twitter location. As more Twitter clients integrate accurate location updating into their interfaces, these results will get better and better. For those that already have more precise location data, we accept exact decimal latitude, longitude values in the location field, i.e. "44.145447,-120.583402" You can also put these exact locations in individual tweets, overriding whatever is in your profile by using the picoformat "L:44.145447,-120.583402" Dan Catt wrote a great blog post about how one might automatically update their Twitter profile with exact locations by mashing up existing location API's.

Finally, our local search is available in our API to mash up with your favorite Twitter apps. However, you must provide the exact lattitude, longitude that you are searching from using the "geocode" query parameter, instead of specifying a place name with "near".