Keynote: Computing with News

by Krishna Bharat (Google Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA)

The Internet has transformed the world by bring information into our lives ubiquitously. Information when delivered in a timely, relevant, and personalized fashion can be powerful. In the past it has been the prerogative of the news industry to educate minds, entertain readers, and empower citizens with information. However, the net has taken on this role more broadly. The union of computing and journalism was both logical and natural and has yielded a plethora of online news channels. Also, it has brought us value added citizen reporting in the form of blogs and recommendation networks. While connecting people to news and to social networks is very important, this is not the only way in which computing can help journalism. Computers can analyze vast news collections in an efficient and scalable way. They can extract information, induce structure, and transform and categorize text in ways that makes news easy to browse and search for both readers and journalists. This is a ripe area of research with tangible social benefits. If we can apply computers to make news more efficient to produce, distribute and absorb and fundamentally more truthful, it can better inform the actions taken by both individuals and nations.

About the Speaker

Krishna Bharat is a Principal Scientist at Google Inc, Mountain View, California working on web and news search. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 1996. Before joining Google in 1999, he was a member of the research staff at DEC Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. Krishna has served on the program committees of UIST and the World Wide Web Conference and has been a reviewer for the WWW Conference, UIST, SIGCHI, SIGIR and TOCHI. He has taught tutorials on Web-IR at SIGCHI and SIGIR.

Krishna is the creator of Google News which won the 2003 Webby Award in the news category. Also, he received the 2003 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. In 2004 he founded Google’s R&D operations in India and served as the center’s first director until 2006.