For two months this year (September and October) I have relocated to the Silicon Valley, where Pingar has a new office. During this time I will be attending the SharePoint conference in Anaheim and the HCIR workshop at Google, Mountain View. Earlier this year I have collaborated with Anna Divoli from the University of Chicago. Our joint research paper on "Search interface feature evaluation in biosciences" got accepted for presentation and poster at HCIR. The great news are that Anna will be now joining the Pingar team and relocating to New Zealand.

I'm stoked that Pingar is now not only re-branded but also released a set of extremely useful tools out to developers via an API. We provide research-based solutions for query analysis, text summarization, taxonomy mapping, entity and address extraction, text sanitization and profanity checks. The tools are constantly improving and their number is growing. And we even have API for Chinese NLP tools, which is truly unique.

This month I was lucky to be invited to the Kiwifoo, a gathering of tech and not so tech people, a wonderful place to get expired and make useful connection. However, what expired me even more, are the discussions in the Kiwifoo forum after the earthquakes in Christchurch. Immediately, participants came up with ideas for organizing accommodation, tech support, hot desk support and social media volunteering, but most importantly they made things happen! Forum members influenced Trademe to create a support forum, Google to link a resources page from their landing page, a Christchurch recovery map was put together by a team of volunteers. It's great to be a part of such an active community. New Zealand (& overseas) people strive to help so much that donation sites like Red Cross break from too much traffic (now made working!).

A linguist/philosopher/IT enthusiast from Hungary Zoltan Varju asked me to answer a few questions for his series of blog posts "The life of a computational linguist". Zoli previously interviewed Oliver Mason, Jason Adams and Hugo Liu. Here are my answers, which include thoughts on favorite theories & technologies and an honest description of what I do in real life. :-)

Over the last few months I have been porting Pingar's semantic algorithms from English to Chinese language. It was a challenging and interesting experience.
Chinese differs from English significantly, but in terms of extracting query refinement suggestions, extracting keywords and generating summaries, the same general techniques can be applied. A demo of the resulting product is shown in this video from 1:30. The National Business Review reports about its launch at the Shanghai Expo.

I have just updated my publications list with two new entries. The first one is a demonstration paper which I will present at JCDL in Australia in June. It describes how Maui can be integrated into a Google App web application to support human indexers in their work. The second one is the result of a one year collaboration with Su Nam Kim, Min-Yen Kan & Tim Baldwin. We have been helping Su Nam Kim in setting up an international competition in automatic keyphrase extraction from scientific publications. 19 teams have submitted their results and I look forward reading the descriptions of their algorithms, which will be unvailed at the SemEval workshop in Sweden this July.

I will be speaking at the upcoming Girl Geek Dinner in Tauranga, on February 24th. It will be a relaxed evening with a dinner, attended by women (and some men I believe) who are interested in technology.
Tickets are available for $25 or $15 for students. Girl Geek Dinners are world wide and a great place to network with like-minded people. I feel honored to be invited as a speaker for the Tauranga's edition of this event.

I am co-organizing Track-5 at the SemEval-2010 called Automatic Keyphrase Extraction from Scientific Articles, together with Su Nam Kim and Timothy Baldwin from the University of Melborne, and Min-Yen Kan from the National University of Singapore.

In April I will attend the NZ Computer Science Research Student Conference (NZCSRSC) in Wellington. I will be one of the panelists discussing the question "Post PhD/Masters, what are your options?".
This conference has been running in New Zealand since 1991 and its goal is to bring students from different universities together. Three years ago I was the Chair of the NZ CSRSC 2007 in Hamilton, at the Waikato University.
Since then I attended the Christchurch and the Auckland conferences. If you are a graduate student in Computer Science or related field studying in New Zealand, definitely attend!

For the last few months I've been living in New Zealand's largest city Auckland. My work place is the AUT Tower in the city center. My employer is the company Pingar, which develops novel search technologies. When user enters a search query, Pingar dynamically generates PDF documents, which contain those parts of the resulting hits that are relevant to the query. I add the Natural Language Processing technologies to their solution. The work is interesting, living in a metropolitan area is exciting, overall it's been a great year for me! :-)