Beyond Tagging and Poking: Information Management and Exploration on Social Content Sites

Content-oriented sites and social networking
sites are moving toward each other. Yahoo! Travel,
initially a pure content site, for example, revamped its
site a while back to allow users to add travel buddies. For
another example, Facebook, primarily a social networking
site, strives to make content sharing and tagging on the
site as convenient as possible. Recent initiatives like
OpenSocial are making this integration ever easier, leading
to virtually connected social content sites. The richness
of data and the complexity of user behavior raise new
challenges for information management and discovery over
such sites. The Royal Jelly project at Yahoo! Research aims
at exploring and addressing those challenges. In this talk,
I will provide an overview of our initial logical
architecture proposal, SocialScope. For a specific case
study, I will describe in detail a novel diversification
approach for social content recommendation. If time
permits, I will briefly go through various other research
activities going on at Yahoo! Research, including the
Purple SOX information extraction management system.
Cong Yu is a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in
New York City. His current research interests are scalable
social data management, information discovery and
exploration on social content sites, and information
extraction management. He co-leads the Royal Jelly project
(http://research.yahoo.com/node/2299) on social content
exploration and recommendation, and is a core member of the
Purple SOX project (http://research.yahoo.com/node/498) on
information extraction management. He graduated from the
Department of EECS at University of Michigan in 2007, with
a Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science and Engineering. His
doctoral dissertation, Managing Complex Databases in a
Schema Management Framework, received ACM SIGMOD
Distinguished Dissertation Honorable Mention Award in 2008.
He has served on various conference Program Committees
since graduation, and is currently co-chairing the
Developers Track of the 2009 International World Wide Web
Conference (http://www2009.org/calls/devtrack.html). He is
an avid fan of Michigan football, the current season
notwithstanding.