Misc – Krisztian Balog

Highlights from 2021

January 10, 2022March 28, 2023 by krisztianbalog

A selection of highlights from 2021:

Served as PC co-chair of the short paper track of CIKM’21.
Organized workshops on Simulation for IR Evaluation (@SIGIR’21) and Personal Knowledge Graphs (@AKBC’21).
Received a Best Paper Award at DESIRES’21.
Ivica Kostric joined IAI as a PhD student.
Joined Google as a Staff Research Scientist in a 50% role. In the remaining 70% I continue to work as a Professor at the University of Stavanger. (Yes, that adds up to 120%.)

Highlights from 2020

January 18, 2021April 2, 2022 by krisztianbalog

A compilation of highlights from 2020:

Organized ICTIR’20 together with Vinay Setty and Trond Linjordet — due to COVID, as a virtual conference.
The Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI) started its operations, where I lead the work package on Language Technology for AI. There will be 3 PhD positions at UiS.
Published papers that attracted attention, on user simulation (KDD’20), novel entity discovery (WWW’20), entity linking (SIGIR’20), and explanations (SIGIR’20).
Our submission, led by Vinay Setty, achieved top performance at the SMART Challenge.

Joining Google (for a year)

August 20, 2018January 9, 2019 by krisztianbalog

Today, I’ve started by sabbatical at Google, London, UK, where I’ll be working as a Staff Visiting Faculty Researcher on conversational recommendations. I still maintain a 20% position at the University of Stavanger to continue supervising my PhD students.

Prof. Balog

October 4, 2016February 7, 2017 by krisztianbalog

I have been promoted to Full Professor of Computer Science celebrate champagne

First picks from 2013

February 10, 2013 by krisztianbalog

It’s almost mid Feb, so I won’t even attempt to make it a Happy New Year entry. And I’ll keep it short.

As of Jan 1 this year, I’m working as an Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger. Don’t look for the IR group’s homepage, there is no such thing. Yet ;)

Briefly about (some of) my recent work. Not surprisingly, it’s all related to entities. In a SPIRE’12 paper we study ad-hoc entity retrieval in Linked Data in a distributed setting, with focus on the problems of collection ranking and collection selection. In a short position paper, written for the ESAIR’12 workshop, we discuss how to make entity retrieval temporally-aware, using semantic knowledge bases that are enriched with temporal information (like YAGO2). In a CIKM’12 poster we introduce the task of target type identification for entity-oriented queries, where types are organized hierarchically. We also made all related resources publicly available.
Most recently, just earlier this week, I gave a lecture on Semistructured Data Search at the PROMISE Winter School. At some point in the not-too-distant future there might be a written version of this material. So if you have any feedback, comments, suggestions, etc. please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Finally, I decided to set up and maintain a separate page with a list of entity-oriented benchmarking campaigns, workshops, and journal special issues. I hope people will find it useful. If you have a relevant piece to be added here, let me know.