The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization.
News.contextWhat’s new:Continuing a long tradition of academic exploration in Net technology, U.C.
Berkeley will soon open an interdisciplinary center for developing new search technologies.
The school is talking to a number of search companies, including Google, about participating.
Wilensky is a professor of computer science and information management at Berkeley.
He also said he’s talking to Google and other search players about membership.
it’s possible for you to create a nuclear reaction," he said.
Google declined to comment.
The success of the $5 billion-a-year search-advertising business is fueling Internet research and development in many ways.
Looking for the next generation to be born?
Lycos, a one-time search leader, came out of Carnegie Mellon University.
Newer projects include Vivisimo, a clustering search tool from CMU professor Raul Valdes-Perez.
The search problems of today aredifferent from thoseof five years ago.
CMU developed an add-on tool that people download to a PC.
CMU is also working under a government grant on a longer-term project calledJavelin, focused on question-and-answer search technology.
But for complex queries like “What is the cheapest flight from San Francisco to London?”
or “Which university has the largest computer science department?”
finding answers is still like doing long division.
“This is dynamic information,” Carbonell said.
“You must parse the question, look for answers in multiple places and do a comparison.
The universities of Texas and Pennsylvania are also exploring different approaches to the same problem.
Stanford continues in its role as a breeding ground for search projects.
Other projects have turned into young businesses.
Sifting through and organizing billions of digital documents will require new search technology.
MIT hopes to deploy the technology and other advances from Simile for use by faculty and students.
At Berkeley’s center, Wilensky has ambitious plans to solve problems within a broader definition of search.
One major area of development will be in trust and privacy.
Others with black marks will disappear only to re-emerge later with a clean slate.
That development might be applied to Web sites as well.
It will include such faculty asJitendra Malik, professor and chair of U.C.
