Wednesday, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

Plenary Panel: Open Government and the World Wide Web

The opening ceremony of WWW2010 will include a plenary panel offering perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic on the move to make data more open and accessible on the Web (data.gov and data.gov.uk). The panel features inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee; Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero; Professor James Hendler of RPI, who will moderate the discussion; UNC professor and Director of iBiblio.org, Paul Jones; Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Executive Office of the President; and University of Southampton Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Director of the Web Science Trust and of the Web Foundation. [video clips from panel discussion]

Wednesday, 2:00 – 3:30 PM

Search is Dead! Long Live Search

Back in the heady days of 1999 and WWW8 (Toronto) we held a panel titled “Finding Anything in the Billion Page Web: Are Algorithms the Key?” In retrospect the answer to this question seems laughably obvious—the search industry has burgeoned on a foundation of algorithms, cloud computing and machine learning. This panel pulls together senior experts from academia and the major search principals to debate whether search will continue to look anything like the 2-keywords-give-10-blue-links paradigm that Google has popularized. What do emerging approaches and paradigms—natural language search, social search, location-based search—mean for the future of search in general?

Andrei Broder – Fellow and VP, Search & Computational Advertising, Yahoo! Research.

Marti Hearst – Professor, School of Information, University of California-Berkeley.

Barney Pell - Partner, Search Strategist for Bing, Microsoft.

Andrew Tomkins - Director of Engineering at Google Research.

Prabhakar Raghavan - (Co-organizer and Moderator) Head, Yahoo! Labs .

Elizabeth Churchill - (Co-organizer) Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research.

Thursday, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

What the Web Can’t Do

The continuing growth and development of the web brings new interactions with every iteration.  Advents in HTML5 and Javascript increase what is possible to render in a browser—adding more than simple page markup—yet by convention, these interactions are ultimately limited to seven verbs described in the now 10 year old RFC 2616 Section 9 specification.  Video streams, real-time web, chat channels, and rich interactions supported through a variety of protocols need to be proxied through the verbs of GET, POST, and PUT. Is this really enough for the web to continue to grow or do we need grow and introduce newer verbs?

David Ayman Shamma (Moderator) – Research scientist, Yahoo! Research.

Joe Gregorio – Google Developer Relations.

Adam Hupp – Engineering Lead, Facebook News Feed team.

Kevin Marks – Vice President of Web Services, BT.

Seth Fitzsimmons – Senior Engineer, Flickr.

Ramesh Jain – Donald Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine.

Friday, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Video Search: Are Algorithms All We Need?

During the 1990s, search technology improved sufficiently to handle large volumes of textual material without the need for manual abstracting, indexing, and cataloging. Taking professional cataloguers out of the process of text indexing created enormous value; an analogous set of advances is underway with video in the 2010s. But how and when will it be possible to take professionals out of the process of cataloging video manually? How can we expect different approaches to video search and seaerch UI to evolve, and which ones will prove most useful? What kind of societal value can we reap by making making all of our broadcast history as readily accessible as books, journal articles, and newspapers are now? How can the W3C help with the development of appropriate standards for video description and search? Answers to and debate about these questions will be the focus of this panel, which has representatives from some of the largest, most viewed, and carefully indexed collections of digital video available online.

Jeff Ubois (Moderator) – Video Archiving Consultant

Jamie Davidson – Product Manager on Search and Algorithmic Discovery at YouTube..

Marko Grobelnik – Technical Associate, Department of Knowledge Technologies, Jožef Stefan Institute, and Program Manager, VideoLectures.net.

Paul Over – TRECVID Project Leader, National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Hans Westerhof – Director, Images for the Future.