---- Announcement----- International School of Information Management University of Mysore Mysore ISIM Special Lecture - 2 'Web Content Mining for Automatic Integration of Web Search Sources’ by Dr. Vijay V. Raghavan Distinguished Professor of Computer Science The Center for Advanced Computer Studies University of Louisiana at Lafayette Lafayette, LA, USA Date & Time: January 17, 2007: 11:00 A.M. Venue: Bahadur Institute of Management Science Manasagangotri Mysore 570 006 You are cordially invited **************************************************************************** ************************************************* Abstract of the Talk: Web content mining is a broad and interesting research area that deals with extracting information/knowledge from Web pages. Metasearch engines operate by dispatching user queries to underlying Web search sources and subsequently extracting, merging, and displaying the returned results to the user. If there are only a few search sources, metasearch engines can have customized programs to interact with each of them. However, when there are hundreds of sources or more, especially when they are autonomous and heterogeneous and change their interfaces in an unpredictable way, highly automated techniques for Web content mining are needed. Moreover, information integration systems such as search engines, metasearch engines, and modern business intelligence solutions only access information available in a relatively small portion of the Web, referred to as the surface Web, that includes only static pages that are connected through hyperlinks. They do not access a significant portion of the Web known as the deep Web, which contains high quality content that is hidden behind search forms in structured databases. To leverage the immense value of the Web, information integration systems should have the ability to extract information contained in deep Web databases by utilizing suitable automatic Web content mining techniques. In this presentation, a few important Web content mining techniques applicable to automatic extraction of information from Web search sources, such as search engines and deep Web databases, are discussed. Biographical Sketch Prof. Raghavan joined the UL Lafayette- Center for Advanced Computer Studies in 1986 and, since 1993, he holds the title as Distinguished Professor in Computer Science. He specializes in designing effective information retrieval strategies aimed at improving the performance of a retrieval system through prior interactions with its users. The application domains include text, image and multimedia databases. In the realm of database systems research, he has developed approaches for database mining, managing semi-structured data, knowledge organization and reuse, and index selection. Prof. Raghavan has published over 170 peer-reviewed research papers many of which appeared in top-level conference proceedings, such as the ACM-SIGIR, ACM-SIGKDD, IEEE-ICDE, IEEE-ICDM, WWW, as well as many reputable journals such as ACM-TODS, ACM-TOIS, JASIST, IEEE-TSE, IEEE-TPAMI and IEEE-TKDE. Prof. Raghavan’s research contributions have had a significant impact as measured by the number of citations in scholar.google. Since 2001, Prof. Raghavan leads a research & development team, focused on technology transfer, at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The team's focus is on research issues pertaining to the management large datasets, including integration of distributed, heterogeneous information sources. In this context, he has interfaced with several technology entrepreneurs and business leaders. The company involved in commercializing the Metasearch Engine Builder technology, Webscalers L.L.C., has received Phase I and II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the NSF, for the amount of $600,000. **************************************************************************** ************************************************ For more details, please visit www.isim.ac.in/speciallecture