dr. Marius PASCA
Senior research scientist
Google
S.U.A.
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Open Domain Question-Answering Systems
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ABSTRACT
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At Google, we are committed to organizing the world's information
and making it universally accessible and useful. 
Striving to achieve that goal involves addressing a number
of challenges across a wide range of computing disciplines.
Such challenges include systems issues involved in building
large, scalable distributed systems as well as work in areas
such as information retrieval, natural language processing,
intelligent data analysis, and user interface design to make
these systems effective at sifting, organizing, and presenting
relevant information to the user. 
In this talk we will describe some of the issues in these areas,
discuss a few of the interesting applications that Google has
developed over the past few years, and highlight some of the
behind-the-scenes pieces of infrastructure that we've built
in order to operate Google's services. Along the way, we will
share some interesting observations derived from Google's web
data.
          
SHORT CV
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Marius Pasca is a senior research scientist in the research
group at Google. 
He earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Southern
Methodist University, Dallas, Texas in December 2001, and an
M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Joseph Fourier University,
Grenoble, France in June 1998. 
He is the author of the book "Open-domain question answering
from large text collections", published in April 2003. 
Current research interests include factual information extraction
from unstructured text and advanced matching functions for information
retrieval.