Dr. John M. Lervik is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Fast
Search & Transfer ASA (FAST), a company that unlocks the ever-expanding
volume of information on the Internet and within enterprise environments
through a powerful platform of scalable search and real-time alert
solutions. FAST search technology powers search solutions at some of the
world's best-known companies, including Dell, Freeserve, IBM, Reed Elsevier,
Reuters, T-Online (Deutsche Telekom), Thomas Publishing, and Virgilio
(Telecom Italia).
Prior to becoming the CEO, Dr. Lervik served as the Chief
Technology Officer of FAST from inception of the Company in 1997.
Dr. Lervik holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where he was awarded the best
overall PhD in 1996/97. Dr. Lervik holds several patents.
Abstract: "Digital Libraries: What Should We Expect from Search Engines"
Search engines have changed the way librarians and information professionals
do their jobs. Search engines, rather than traditional online services, are
often the starting point of choice for librarians. In this presentation, we
will offer an overview of some of the new search technology developments
that will contribute to improving information access and navigation in
digital libraries.
The Web and digital libraries are becoming more and more similar both as far
as content and access are concerned. Perhaps the best examples for this
trend are various developments in the search engine area, where the same
basic technologies are used to index, search and present information.
Furthermore, end-users are increasingly expecting the same general type of
interfaces and ease of use of information systems in digital libraries as on
the Web. A typical examples of an online search service combining journal
and Web content in the same setup is Scirus (http://www.scirus.com).
We will discuss how search systems for digital libraries can be developed
further, for instance, by adding more and more structured and
semi-structured data, and by exploiting the meta-information data available
in libraries. Particular emphasis will be placed on new ground-breaking
features recently available in FAST's search products, such as automatic
concept extraction and live analytics. We will illustrate some of these
innovations with examples from prototype implementations.
Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information
(CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research
Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with
the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship
and intellectual productivity.
Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office
of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who
holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley,
is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information Management and Systems.
He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a
fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National
Information Standards Organization.
Lynch currently serves on the Internet 2 Applications Council and the National
Digital Preservation Strategy Advisory Board of the Library of Congress; he
was a member of the National Research Council committees that published The
Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Infrastructure and
Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits, and now serves on the NRC’s committee on
digital archiving and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Abstract: "Stewardship in the digital age"
Karen Sparck Jones is Professor of Computers and Information at the
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. She has worked in automatic
language and information processing research since the late fifties,
and has many publications including several books. She is a Fellow
of the British Academy, a Fellow of the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence, and a European Artificial Intelligence
(ECCAI) Fellow.
She was President of the Association for
Computational Linguistics in 1994, and has received three awards
for information retrieval research, most recently the American Society for
Information Science and Technology's 2002 Award of Merit. She is a member of
the NIST/DARPA Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) Programme Committee ad is
also involved with the DARPA TIDES Programme. Her most recent research has
been on spoken document retrieval and on summarising.
Her publications in information retrieval include an edited collection,
'Information retrieval experiment', 1981, and, jointly edited with Peter
Willett, `Readings in information retrieval', 1997.
Abstract: "Information retrieval research and digital libraries"
Automatic document indexing and searching were early areas of research in computing applications. However it was long before techniques developed in research were applied to operational services, and even this was in the novel context of the Web rather than in conventional bibliographic services. What are the lessons of, and opportunities for, the information retrieval methods now well established by large scale research experiments, in the new world of digital libraries?"