Haystack: Putting Users Back in Control of their Information Organization

When: 
Thursday, May 19, 2005 - 7:00pm
Venue: 
MIT Building 2
Room: 
2-105
Lecturer(s): 
David Karger, MIT CSAIL

Haystack is a system that aims to maximize every individual user's control over the way he or she records, views, organizes, and searches for information. In this talk I discuss the elements of the system: a flexible semantic-net data model that can stretch to accommodate whatever information, relationships, properties, and categories a user considers important, and a user interface framework that can effectively display the personalized information space in ways that make sense to and can be customized by the end user.

Lecturer Biography: 

David Karger is a Professor of Computer Science and a member of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1994 under the supervision of Rajeev Motwani. His research interests include algorithms and information retrieval. Some of his recent projects include Grid, a scalable adhoc mobile networking system; Chord, a scalable peer to peer system; and Haystack, a personalizable information retrieval system. His theoretical research currently targets problems in graph algorithms, optical networks, machine learning, and network coding. He serves on the board of Vanu Inc. He was awarded the 2002 National Academy of Sciences award for Initiatives in Research.