Blog

I read papers. A lot of them. Most of them conference papers. SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, CIKM, WWW, WSDM, CHI, … I try to at least browse through the published abstracts every year. Some of those papers stick with me for a long time, because the idea is quirky, the approach... [Read More]

Deep learning has been the dominant theme in a number of research communities (e.g. computer vision, natural language processing) for the past few years. In information retrieval (IR), things are moving more slowly, we are still experimenting with word embeddings and are only beginning to adapt the (by now) classic... [Read More]

I have just finished this academic year’s edition of Big Data Processing, a Bachelor course I have been teaching for a few years now. As I am not a big fan of teaching the same course for 5+ years, I am happy to move on to a different course next... [Read More]

Top Grant The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has recently announced the list of proposals awarded funding through the Top Grant Scheme. The TOP2 is a personal grant worth about 220K € which funds a 4-year PhD position and some extras. This year my proposal on Large-Scale... [Read More]

MOOCs aim to “educate the world.” More often than not, however, MOOCs fall short of this goal — a majority of learners are already highly educated and come from specific parts of the (developed) world. Learners from developing countries without a higher degree are underrepresented, though desired, in MOOCs. One... [Read More]