Attention IR and People Search

The SIGIR 2007 conference also had a couple of gems in the Doctoral Consortium workshop.

Krisztian Balog (University of Amsterdam) homepage
People Search in the Enterprise

The abstract of Balog looked a two areas concerning people search, profiling people and enabling search of those people based upon both the topical and social profile. Who is an expert on X? Who do I know (or get introduced to) someone who is an expert on X? His research seems to be just beginning.. I'll be checking his page for new papers.

Georg Buscher (German Research Center for AI) homepage
Attention-Based Information Retrieval

Buscher won the best presentation award at the workshop. His slides outline how attention data can be used to bias/rerank IR results to enable re-finding old information/documents as well as doing query expansion (profile based???) given the current user's attention data. His research is also fairly new.

Both of these topics are obviously of interest to Others Online and the idea of connecting people together through a common topic or set of topics that are learned as implicitly related to the users.