NoGA: No Google Analytics

We will start a project to investigate alternatives for web analytics of Big Tech companies (Google) as part of the SIDN fonds program Je data de baas (“Mastering your data”). There are 10 projects in the program.

In this project, the Data Science group works together with the Marketing and ICT of the University to find out whether it is a serious option for Radboud University (and other medium to large-scale organizations such as municipalities and hospitals) to take Web analytics in their own hands, instead of outsourcing it to Google.

More information at: https://nogadata.nl

Welcome to Foundations of Information Retrieval

Welcome to the course Foundations of Information Retrieval, a new 5 credit course that is based on the first part of last year’s 10 credit course Information Retrieval. We will introduce some exciting new things in the course: This year’s practical assignments are motivated by use cases of the Text Retrieval Conference’ Genomics track. We will use Elasticsearch, one of today’s most used, and most popular open source scalable search systems. The practical assignments use Jupyter notebooks. We hope to see you at the first lecture on Wednesday 5 September at 10:45h.

Check out the Canvas syllabus

Greetings from CuriousU Search Engine Technology

CuriousU Search Engine Technology will explore the world of search engines. You will learn how search engines work, what challenges they deal with, and how their performance can be measured. And even beter: you will be guided in building, evaluating, and improving your own search engine on a real-world dataset.

To be presented at CuriousU Summer School 2017 13 – 22 August, 2017 at the University of Twente.

Eight questions about Big Data

Iedereen heeft het de laatste tijd over Big Data. Maar wat is het eigenlijk? Waarom is het zo’n big deal? En hoe kun je verantwoord met Big Data omgaan? Acht vragen over Big Data, samen met Peter-Paul Verbeek, Elmer Lastdrager, Oscar Olthoff en Floris Kreiken.

18 March: Norvig Award Ceremony

Peter NorvigOn 18 March, starting at 15.45 h. until 17.30 h. the Norvig Web Data Science Award Ceremony takes place in the SmartXP lab in building Zilverling of the University of Twente. During the ceremony, Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, will award the prize (funds to attend the 2013 edition of SIGIR in Dublin Ireland, a tablet, and a lightening talk at Hadoop Summit in Amsterdam) to the winners via a live video connection from California, USA. Participation in the event is free of charge. Please register by sending your name and affiliation to: challenges@inter-actief.net. Students and researchers will get the opportunity to ask questions to Peter Norvig during the event. If you have a good question, please send it to the email address above too: Maybe your question will be selected to be asked at the event.

More information at U. Twente Activities

DIY online lecture

Education is changing rapidly. Many universities start to provide their courses on-line, free for everyone to take. To keep up with these developments, I made a short do-it-yourself (DIY) video lecture — appropriately discussing online education — which combines 4 techniques: 1) an ordinary lecture with slides, as always; 2) my talking head from the webcam; 3) written notes on the slides, “Khan Academy-style”; 4) a screencast, capturing live actions on the screen.

In case you like to do this too: The video was made using recordMyDesktop, CamDesk, Xournal, and edited with OpenShot, all running on Ubuntu. I used a webcam to record myself, and a pen tablet (Wacom Bamboo) to annotate the slides. As can be seen, the result is not great: The number of frames per second is low (default is 15 frames per second in recordMyDesktop), the audio quality is low (I need a better microphone), and audio and video are slightly off (not sure why this happened). On Windows a combination of CamStudio, Powerpoint, and Movie Maker might do better.

Many thanks to the following people that advised me or otherwise supported me in making the test online lecture: Wanno Drijfhout & Marije de Heus (Course Managing Big Data), Theo Huibers & Eelco Eerenberg (Thaesis), Tonnie Tibben (Twente iTunes U), Alfred de Vries (SmartXP lab), Peter de Boer & Roy Juninck (FB lecture halls and digital whiteboards). Additional advise and comments are very much appreciated.