Talks

2024

  • Zoekmachines: samen en duurzaam vooruit. Inaugural lecture, Radboud University, 1 March 2024. [video] [download pdf]

2023

  • How NLP became a tool of villains, Farewell Symposium of Franciska de Jong: “Crossroads and Detours”, Enschede, The Netherlands, 24 November 2023 [presentation]
  • The environmental impact of deep learning on search, Data Science Seminar, 9 November 2023 [slides]
  • Challenges of index exchange for search engine interoperability, Open Search Symposium, CERN, Switzerland, 4 October 2023 (with Gijs Hendriksen)
  • An Open Web Index for Open Web Search, Data Science Seminar, 4 May 2023 (with Arjen de Vries)

2021

  • Keynote Tech Perspective: Crawling a Bit, Searching a Lot: Experience with Sheet Music and Dutch pages, Open Search Symposium (OSSYM) Spring Workshop, online, 10 May 2021
  • Discussion panel (moderator): Open Access and Information Retrieval, European Conference on Information Retrieval, online, 31 March 2021

2020

2019

  • Managing terabytes: A Google-sized search index, SIKS Advanced Course on Information Retrieval, Utrecht, 8 October 2019
  • Federated Web Search, CLST Meeting, Nijmegen, 11 September 2019
  • Federated Search, Bol.com Search Day, Utrecht, 5 September 2019

2018

  • Wat is er nou zo big aan Big Data? Universiteit van Nederland, Amsterdam, 12 September 2018
  • Federated Search and Federated Social Networks at U. Twente (and goodbye Tom De Schryver), UT Library LISA Lunch Meeting, Enschede, 30 May 2018
  • Advertising and Query recommendations without tracking users, Data Science Seminar, Enschede, 20 February 2018
  • Search advertising and query recommendations without tracking users, Dutch ISOC (Internet Society) New Year’s Reception, Amsterdam, 11 January 2018.

2017

  • Keynote: Ranking Learning-to-Rank Methods, 1st International Workshop on LEARning Next gEneration Rankers (LEARNER), Amsterdam, 1 October 2017
  • Federated Search with Searsia, HMI IPSO colloquium, Enschede, 9 October 2017
  • Bringing search to the fediverse, Inter-Actief Lunch Talk, Enschede, 30 May 2017
  • Search federated, Dutch ISOC (Internet Society) New Year’s Reception, Amsterdam, 12 January 2017

2016

  • Keynote: A case for search specialization and search delegation, CLEF: Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Évora, Portugal, 7 September 2016
  • Search Specialization and Delegation, University of Mannheim, 26 July 2016
  • Invited Talk: Federated Search: Together We Search, The 2nd Workshop on Heterogeneous Information Access at SIGIR 2016, Pisa, Italy, 21 July 2016
  • Information Retrieval: Effective and efficient search in billions of documents. VGZ Data Science Week, Enschede, 29 June 2016
  • Federated Search: From research to practice, SIKS-workshop Data Science from Different Angles, Eindhoven, 13 June 2016
  • Big Data at the University of Twente Ondernemend Roombeek, Enschede, 18 May 2016
  • Did you mean: Twente? Data-driven spelling correction. Student for a day, Enschede, 8 April 2016
  • Big Data in het onderwijs. Kivi Regio Oost Nederland, Enschede, 3 April 2016
  • Lessons learned from Federated Search in the Wild, Data Science Meetup Northeast Neterlands, Meppel, 17 March 2016
  • Federated Search Implementation, NASA Earth Science Data System’s Search Relevancy Working Group meeting, 9 February 2016
  • The impact of Twitter Health Campaigns, #SupportTheCause Symposium, Enschede, 22 January 2016

2015

  • Federated Search in the Wild: Lessons Learned. Textkernel, Amsterdam, 29 October 2015
  • #SupportTheCause: Analysing on-line campaigns on Twitter. iMinds, Ghent, Belgium, 23 October 2015
  • Building large-scale web search engines in an afternoon. SIKS Course: Advances in Information Retrieval Vught, 19 June 2015.
  • Did you mean: proefstuderen? Spellingcorrectie met big data. Proefstudeerdag Informatica, Universiteit Twente, 28 April 2015
  • Informatica is onze toekomst, De Maatschappij, departement Twente 18 February 2015

2014

  • Empirical Evaluation for Information Retrieval, SIKS Course on Research methods and methodology for Information and Knowledge Systems, Vught, 27 November 2014
  • Overview of the TREC Federated Web Search track, Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), Gaithersburg, USA, 21 November 2014
  • Inleiding in Big Data, Masterclass Risico en Veiligheid in ICT & Cyberspace, Enschede, 12 September 2014
  • Managing Big Data, Summer School on Big Data in Clinical Medicine, Enschede, 30 June 2014
  • Handling Massive Data, SIKS Tutorial on Data Science, Vught, 13 May 2014
  • Big Data: A Big Issue, Studium Generale, University of Twente, 6 May 2014 (with Johnny Søraker)
  • Federated search for real: combining 150 search engines, and counting, University of Nijmegen, 28 March 2014
  • Federated Search for Real: combining 150 search engines, and counting, Keystone Cost Action Spring 2014 WG Meeting, Leiden, 25 March 2014
  • Big Data in Science and Education, SURFsara Data and Computing Infrastructure Event, Bimhuis Amsterdam, 12 March 2014

2013

  • Wat is informatie? Museum Jeugd Universiteit, TwentseWelle, Enschede, 8 December 2013
  • MapReduce. SIKS Advanced Tutorial on Big Data, Enschede, 26 November 2013
  • How to build Google in an afternoon. SIKS Tutorial on Information Retrieval, Vught, 5 June 2013
  • What is Big Data?. The CTIT Symposium 2013, University of Twente, Enschede, 4 June 2013
  • Big data at the University of Twente. Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), Den Haag, 28 May 2013
  • Science Challenges. Innovatie Centra Academisch Bètaonderwijs (ICAB Conferentie), Nijkerk, 22 May 2013 (with Marcel Boersma)
  • Big data and education. Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, 7 March 2013
  • The future of education Studium Generale, University of Twente, Enschede, 7 February 2013

2012

  • Empirical Research for IKS, SIKS Course: Research Methods and Methodology for IKS, Vught, 15 November 2012
  • Empirical Evaluation of Search. Case study: federated search, ICT Open 2012, Rotterdam, 22 October 2012
  • Federated Search in the Wild, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, 16 October 2012
  • Agile Education, University of Twente Ambassadors Day, Enschede, 1 October 2012
  • Big Data in Research and Education, Saas-Cloud Meeting, ICT Office, Woerden, 5 September 2012
  • Het diepe web doorzoeken. NWO Bessensap, Den Haag, 4 June 2012
  • Peer-to-peer information retrieval. Spotify, Stockholm, Sweden, 16 March 2012
  • Peer-to-peer search revisited. USI Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano, Switzerland, 23 January 2012

2011

  • The SIKS/BiGGrid advanced Big Data tutorial Dutch-Belgian Database Day, Enschede, 2 December 2011
  • Google BigTable and HBase, SIKS/BiGGrid advanced course on Big Data, Enschede, 30 November and 1 December 2011
  • Peer-to-peer search, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 26 September 2011
  • Peer-to-peer search for the masses, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, 9 September 2011
  • Building Google in an afternoon SIKS Course on Information Retrieval, Vught, 7 June 2011
  • Peer-to-peer search that works, Yandex, Moscow, 27 April 2011

2010

  • Hadoop @ University of Twente, SARA Hadoop Hackathon , Amsterdam, 7 December 2010.
  • MapReduce for Information Retrieval Evaluation, ISLA colloquium, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 9 November 2010
  • SIKS and Big Data, SIREN 2010, Veldhoven, 2 November 2010.
  • “Let’s quickly test this on 12TB of data”, CLEF 2010 Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, Padua, Italy, 21 September 2010.
  • “Distributed Data Processing using MapReduce”, Interactief Lunch Talk, Enschede, 4 May 2010.
  • “MIREX: MapReduce Information Retrieval Experiments”, Indenty, Enschede, 28 April 2010.
  • “MIREX: MapReduce Information Retrieval Experiments”, Teezir Search Solutions, Utrecht, 15 April 2010.
  • “MIREX: MapReduce Information Retrieval Experiments”, WCC Smart Search and Match, Utrecht, 15 April 2010.
  • “MapReduce Information Retrieval Experiments”, Database Group Colloquium, Enschede, 13 April 2010.

2009

  • “Empirical Research in Information Retrieval”, SIKS Course: Research Methods and Methodology Information and Knowledge Systems, Doorn, 25 November 2009.
  • “Information Retrieval Modeling”, 3rd Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR), Petrozavodsk, 11-16 September, 2009.
  • “How to build Google in 120 minutes”, SIKS Basic Course on Information Retrieval, Vught, 27 May 2009.
  • “Basic Retrieval models for entity ranking”, SIKS Advanced Course on Probabilistic Methods for Entity Resolution and Entity Ranking, Zeist, 21 April 2009.
  • “Information Extraction and Linking in a Retrieval Context”, Tutorial at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Toulouse, 6 April 2009 (with Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven).
  • “Highly Discriminative Keys for Collection Selection in Distributed Retrieval”, Max Planck Institut für Informatik, Saarbruecken, 18 March 2009.

2008

  • “Distributed Data Processing using Google’s MapReduce’’, Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 25 November 2008.
  • “Distributed Search: Who bids?”, Yahoo Research, Barcelona, 20 October 2008.
  • “Distributed Information Retrieval by means of Keyword Auctions’’, Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 26 August 2008.
  • “Sound ranking algorithms for XML search’’, Workshop on Focused Retrieval, Singapore, 24 July 2008.
  • “Panel discussion: Beyond document retrieval: zooming in, zooming out’’, Workshop on Focused Retrieval, Singapore, 24 July 2008.
  • “Sound ranking algorithms for XML search’’, Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 22 April 2008.
  • “Advanced Language Modelling Tutorial: an Application to Expert Search’’, Tutorial at the 30th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), Glasgow, UK, 30 March 2008.
  • “Sound ranking algorithms for XML search in PF/Tijah’’, Workshop on Ranked XML Querying, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, 11 March 2008
  • “Information Retrieval for Database Dummies’’, Workshop on Ranked XML Querying, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, 10 March 2008

2007

  • “Empirical Research in Information Retrieval’’, in SIKS Basic Course on Research methods and methodology, Vught, 16 November 2007.
  • “The Guess Who game: or how to minimize search time in interactive retrieval’’, Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 5 June 2007.
  • “SIGIR’s centre of the universe’’, Speech during the SIGIR banquet (joint presentation with Franciska de Jong), 25 July 2007.
  • “A tutorial to formal models of information retrieval’’, in SIKS Basic Course on Information Retrieval, Vught, 23 May 2007.
  • “Probabilistic Models for Information Retrieval’’, in SIKS Advanced Course: Computational Intelligence: AI and Probability, Zeist, 17 April 2007.
  • Invited talk: “PF/Tijah: text search in an XML database system’’, Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop, Leuven, Belgium, 28 March 2007.

2006

  • “Empirical research in Information Retrieval’’, in SIKS Course: Research methods and methodology for Information and Knowledge Systems. 22 November 2006.
  • Invited talk: “Expressing language modeling approaches as region algebra queries’’, Document Space 2006, Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, United States of America, 27 January 2006

2005

  • “How to build Google in just 45 minutes (or any other large-scale web search engine)’’, The ‘45-minute’ Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 18 October 2005
  • “Expressing language model variants as region model queries’’, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom, 28 September 2005
  • Invited lecture: “Formal models of information retrieval’’, Fifth European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR’05), Dublin, Ireland, 6 September 2005
  • “The simplest evaluation measures for XML information retrieval that could possibly work’’, Workshop on Element Retrieval Methodology, Glasgow, Scotland, 30 July 2005
  • “The remarkable relationship between region models and language models’’, Information Retrieval and Theory Workshop, Glasgow, Scotland, 25 July 2005
  • Invited lecture: “XML Information Retrieval and the Evaluation of XML Databases’’, in SIKS Advanced Course: XML, where databases and information retrieval meet, Leusden, 19 April 2005
  • Invited talk: “Database technology for applications of information extraction’’, at Workshop on Machine Learning for Information Extraction, Antwerp, Belgium, 10 March 2005

2004

  • Invited lecture: “Formal Models of Information Retrieval & The Quiz…’’, in SIKS basic course on Information Retrieval, Vught, 10 December 2004
  • “Parsimonious Language Models for Information Retrieval’’, Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 30 November 2004
  • “Parsimonious Language Models for Information Retrieval’’, 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, 27 July 2004
  • “Parsimonious Language Model Estimation’’, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, 6 May 2004

2003

  • Invited lecture: “Information retrieval modelling’’, University of Osnabrück, Germany, 17 October 2003
  • Invited lecture: “A tutorial to formal models of information retrieval’’, Fourth European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR’03), Aussois, France, 1 September 2003
  • “A formal approach to information retrieval query languages’’, Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 22 May 2003
  • Invited lecture “The evaluation of intelligent XML retrieval systems’’, in SIKS advanced course on implementing intelligent search in XML data, Zeist, 16 May 2003

2002

  • Invited lecture “Probabilistic Models for Information Retrieval’’, in SIKS basic course on Information Retrieval, Vught, 12 December 2002
  • “A Database Approach to INEX’’, Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX), Schloss Dagstuhl Wadern, Germany, 9 December 2002
  • “Language Models and XML’’, Workshop on Intelligent XML Search, Schloss Dagstuhl Wadern, Germany, 3 December 2002
  • “On content-based retrieval of semi-structured data’’, Database Group Colloquium, University of Twente, 18 November 2002
  • “Content-based Image Retrieval for Millions of Images’’, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, 23 August 2002
  • Panel discussion: “XML and Information Retrieval’’, SIGIR workshop on XML and Information Retrieval, Tampere, Finland, 15 August 2002
  • “Term-Specific Smoothing for the Language Modeling Approach to Information Retrieval: The Importance of a Query Term’’, 25th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Tampere, Finland, 12 August 2002
  • Invited lecture “Integration of Information Retrieval and Databases’’, in SIKS basic course on Databases & Interactive Systems, 17 May 2002, Driebergen
  • “An Introduction to Cross-Language Information Retrieval’’, Invited lecture, ILLC Information Retrieval Course, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 7 May 2002

2001

  • “Developing a Dutch information retrieval test corpus’’, Twelfth Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands (CLIN-12), University of Twente, 30 November 2001
  • “The CLEF Relevance Assessments in Practice’’, Workshop of the Cross-language Evaluation Forum (CLEF-2), Darmstadt, Germany, 4 September 2001
  • “Relevance feedback for best match term weighting algorithms in information retrieval”, Joint DELOS-NSF Workshop on Personalisation and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries, Dublin City University, Ireland, 19 June 2001
  • “Fascinating relations between media and text’’, (with Arjen de Vries, CWI), Academia Europaea 2001 Scientific Meeting, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 16 June 2001
  • “An information retrieval test collection for Dutch’’, Parlevink colloquium talk, Department of Computer Science, University of Twente, 23 April 2001
  • “Using Language Models for Information Retrieval’’, ILLC Computational Logic Seminar, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 9 March 2001
  • Invited lecture: “Probabilistic Retrieval’’, in SIKS advanced course on Full-text Information Retrieval Methods, 5 March 2001, Nijmegen

2000

  • “On translation resources, merging strategies and relevance feedback’’, Workshop on Cross-Language Information Retrieval and Evaluation (CLEF-1), Lisbon, 22 September 2000
  • “Closing the gap between natural language processing and information Retrieval’’, First Dutch Information Retrieval Workshop, Department of Computer Science, Maastricht, 13 September 2000
  • “An information retrieval test collection for Dutch’’, Computing Science Department, University of Nijmegen, 20 June 2000
  • “Information Retrieval and Language Models’’ Parlevink colloquium talk, Department of Computer Science, University of Twente, 29 May 2000
  • “Disambiguation strategies for cross-language information retrieval’’, Conference of the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, 6 April 2000
  • “Using language models for information retrieval’’, Computer Laboratory Colloquium, University of Cambridge, 25 February 2000
  • “Closing the gap between natural language processing and information retrieval’’, Information Retrieval Group Seminar, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, 31 January 2000
  • “A language model-based retrieval system’’, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, 14 January 2000

1999

  • “Adaptive filtering with the Twenty-One system’’, Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-8), US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, US, 17 November 1999
  • “Disambiguation strategies for cross-language information retrieval’’, European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Paris, 23 September 1999 (Awarded by the British Computer Society’s Informer-Springer competition for the best student paper in Information Retrieval in 1999)
  • “Relevance feedback in adaptive filtering’’, Castle Meeting, Spa, Belgium, 20 September 1999
  • “A linguistically motivated probabilistic model of information retrieval’’, Computing Science Institute Extern Colloquium, University of Nijmegen, 8 March 1999

1998

  • “Merging the search results of distributed video archives in Pop-Eye’’, Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands, Leuven, 11 December 1998
  • “Participating in the Text Retrieval Conference: TREC-7′’, Parlevink colloquium talk, Department of Computer Science, University of Twente, 23 November 1998
  • “The Twenty-One system’’, Text Retrieval Conference (TREC-7), US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg 10 November 1998 (TREC system talk)
  • “A linguistically motivated probabilistic model of information retrieval’’, European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Crete, Greece, 21 September 1998

1997

  • “Multilingual domain modeling in Twenty-One’’, Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands,, Linguistics Faculty, University of Nijmegen, 12 December 1997
  • “A domain specific lexicon acquisition tool for cross-language information retrieval’’, Eurolan Summer School on Corpus Linguistics, Student Session, Tusnad, Romania, 18 July 1997
  • “The Twenty-One demonstrator’’, RIAO Conference on Computer-Assisted Information Searching on Internet, Montreal, Canada, 26 June 1997
  • “Bi-directional translation models for statistical translation’’, Xerox Research Center Europe, Grenoble, France, 20 May 1997
  • “Deriving a bilingual lexicon for cross-language information retrieval’’, fourth International Information Technology Conference for Students, Groningen, 21 February 1997