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Ricardo Baeza-Yates at the University of Oviedo
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Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 07:54 AM
Ricardo Baeza-Yates was last week visiting EUITIO at the University of Oviedo. On wednesday he gave an open lecture about web mining and wisdom of the crowds, later he spoke to the students enrolled in the Master on Web Engineering. The following day he gave a second lecture in the Gijón campus, describing recent research on building distributed search engines. Both lectures were extremely interesting, with the second one covering insightful technical details. They were recorded and I'll put the links once they are available.

There was considerable media coverage --in Spanish-- (1, 2, 3) with a couple of newspaper interviews (4, and 5) and even local radio and TV.

One of the most interesting questions asked by the audience was about the background students should get in case they'd like to work in Yahoo. Ricardo gave the following recommendations: they must be creative (apart of intelligent) with knowledge in algorithms, information retrieval, data mining, machine learning, and multimedia processing (image, video and audio).

Lastly, and in a more personal level, Ricardo is a really nice person and I enjoyed a lot being his host, specially the conversations during the meals.

Update: Some pictures from the conference at Oviedo, courtesy of María E. Fernández (http://www.mariaefm.net/). Full size pictures at Flickr.

Ricardo before and during the conference:

The head of the Department of CS, Juan Manuel Cueva-Lovelle:

Me introducing Ricardo:

Some public attending the conference:

Press coverage (regional TV station, RTPA):


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