Speaker: Dr. Yaacov Yesha Dr. Yelena Yesha When: Friday, Nov 16th, 2007 Time: 2:00pm Where: ECS 243

Abstract: Weblogs, or blogs are radically changing the face of communications on the Internet. Beyond publishing content, blogs enable users to engage in conversation and form tight knit communities, constituting a highly influential subset on the Web. Over the past year the Ebiquity group at UMBC has been studying computational aspects of blogs, including the identification of spam blogs, tracking their influence and studying their use within corporations. In this talk, we discuss the global rise of blogs as a communication platform, and introduce our work on studying the structure, quality, influence and utility of blogs.

Biography:
Yaacov Yesha is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He received the Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1979 from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. His interests include mobile computing, software testing, scheduling on parallel architectures, electronic commerce, digital libraries, and image and speech processing. Yaacov Yesha was a program vice chair for the Seventh International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems, 1994. He was a member of the program committees of the First International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, 1992, and the 6th ISCA International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems, 1993, and a session chair in the Advances in Digital Libraries forum, 1994.

Yelena Yesha received the B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from York University, Toronto, Canada in 1984, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University in 1986 and 1989, respectively. She is presently a Professor and Deputy Director for the Multicore Computational Center. In addition, since December, 1994 till august 1999 Dr. Yesha served as the Director of the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences at NASA. Her research interests are in the areas of distributed databases, distributed systems, digital libraries, electronic commerce, and trusted information systems. She coauthored 14 books and authored over 160 refereed articles in these areas. Dr. Yesha was a program chair and general co-chair of the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, General Chair of ACM Sigmod 2005 and member of the program committees of many prestigious conferences.