Google boasts 2012 WWW conference contributions

Google just announced, well, boasted, about its involvement with the 2012 World Wide Web conference that occurred last month.

Vice President of Engineering Prabhakar Raghavan took to the Official Google Research Blog this afternoon to detail the search engine’s role in the widely popular and annual series. Google was a major supporter of the conference and even sponsored it, coupled with many Googlers having taken an active role through keynotes and papers.

“More than forty members of Google’s technical staff gathered in Lyon, France in April to participate in the global dialogue around the state of the web at the World Wide Web conference (WWW) 2012,” explained Raghavan. “A decade ago, Larry Page and Sergey Brin applied their research to an information retrieval problem and their work—presented at WWW in 1998—led to the invention of today’s most popular search engine.

The new VP further said Mobile Web in the technical program is becoming more apparent as the conference has “evolve[d] over the years,” and then he noted the WWW community is transitioning from a “classic ‘bag of words’ of web pages” to an “entity-centric view.”

Raghavan is Yahoo’s former chief scientist, but 9to5Google reported that he left the position in March to take an executive job at Google amid massive cuts at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based search engine.

A list of Googlers and their conference contributions is below:

Googlers were also co-authors of the following papers:

• Risk-Aware Revenue Maximization in Display Advertising by Ana Radovanovic and William Heavlin (Googlers)
• SessionJuggler: Secure Web Login From an Untrusted Terminal Using Session Hijacking by Elie Bursztein (Googler), Chinmay Soman, Dan Boneh and John Mitchell
• Spotting Fake Reviewer Groups in Consumer Reviews by Arjun Murkherjee, Bing Liu, and Natalie Glance (Googler)
• Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother’s by James Cook, Atish Das Sarma (Googler), Alexander Fabrikant and Andrew Tomkins (Googlers)
• YouTube Around the World: Geographic Popularity of Videos by Mirjam Wattenhofer (Googler), Anders Brodersen (Googler), and Salvatore Scellato
• Who Killed My Battery: Analyzing Mobile Browser Energy Consumption by Narendran Thiagarajan, Gaurav Aggarwal (Googler), Angela Nicoara, Dan Boneh and Jatinder Singh

Googlers co-organized three workshops:

• Appification of the Web by Ed Chi (Googler), Brian Davison, and Evgeniy Gabrilovich (Googler)
• Extracting Unambiguous Keywords from Microposts Using Web and Query Logs Data, as part of the Making Sense of Microsposts workshop by Davi Reis, Felipe Portavales Goldstein, and Fred Quintao (Googlers)
• Human Computation Must Be Reproducible, as part of the CrowdSearch: Crowdsourcing Web search workshop by Praveen Paritosh (Googler)
• WebQuality 2012: The Anti-Social Web by Zoltan Gyongyi (Googler), Carlos Castillo, Adam Jatowt, and Katsumi Tanaka

Additionally, a Googler led a tutorial:

• The Role of Human-Generated and Automatically-Extracted Lexico-Semantic Resources in Web Search by Marius Pasca (Googler)

Googlers presented a poster:

• Google Image Swirl by Yushi Jing, Henry Rowley, Jingbin Wang, David Tsai, Chuck Rosenberg, Michele Covell (Googlers)