I am attending a research workshop on knowledge and search engines at UCLA’s IPAM this week (and the next several). The image below is a panoramic shot of the UCLA property (May’s Landing in Malibu) where we had the kickoff retreat.

Mays Landing UCLA

Yesterday I gave two tutorial talks. The first was on the basics of Google’s PageRank algorithm, and the second was on the basics of knowledge discovery systems. Yesterday Petros Drineas from RPI also gave a talk, on a linear algebra perspective on information retrieval and data mining.

Today Yuval Rabani from the Israel Institute of Technology gave a talk on Metric Geometry. Other speakers today include Rafail Ostrovsky from UCLA (talking about nearest neighbor search and clustering methods) and Peter Jones from Yale University (talking about hierarchical structures in datasets and eigenfunctions).

Rafail is about to begin his talk, as I type.