I have been promoted to Full Professor of Computer Science 
Misc
First picks from 2013
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.
New year’s resolution
Post more often.
Happy 2012!
Switching colours
As of this month, I am a postdoc at the Database Systems research group, headed by Prof. Kjetil Nørvåg at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. I would like to say a big thank you to all my former colleagues in Amsterdam for providing an extremely friendly and inspiring research environment throughout the past several years. I wish you best of luck, and hope to see you at the next conference!
My research interests remain essentially unchanged: capturing, representing, and organizing information related to entities, in semantically meaningful ways. And, big data, of course.
Hadoop Hackathon @SARA
SARA organizes a kick-off meeting for its Proof-of-Concept Hadoop service on Dec 7, 2010 at the Science Park, Amsterdam. A major part of the event will be a “hackathon”, a hands-on introduction to Hadoop, with the support of two Hadoop-experts: Edgar Meij and Djoerd Hiemstra. It’s a good opportunity to learn about Hadoop and play with it on existing datasets (for example the Wikipedia, ENRON, or White House access records), or on a case of choice.