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Summize Blog


Twitter Acquires Summize. Confirmed.July 15

It's with great pride that I officially confirm Twitter’s acquisition of Summize.  The rationale for this transaction from Twitter can be found here.  I’ll outline my motivation to sell our beloved Summize, talk about our experience soup to nuts, and recognize the players who made this deal possible.

Summize - A Brief History

Our passion for designing search applications brought us three co-founders, Abdur, Greg, and myself, together back in 2000. After years of building and launching dozens of highly scalable systems serving millions of users, in 2007 we set out to create our own new vertical search engine to help people find opinions and attitudes on the Web.

At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites.  Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says “nice” it isn’t necessarily in a positive sense).  Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine.

In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on tr

InfoScale 2008 RecapJune 23

Sorry for the delay but I have not had much time for a post.  InfoScale keeps getting better and this year we had lots of good participants and papers. I thought I would layout a few belated highlights of the conference from my point of view.  It was a great honor to continue the success of INFOSCALE in its 3rd year as one of its organizing committee members. It is always difficult to continue the momentum of a conference in its early years, but judging from the responses for this year in terms of renowned PC members and high-quality submissions, we are confident that INFOSCALE will soon be on par with other more established conferences.

This year we received 74 submissions from authors in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, each of which was reviewed by at least 3 experts in the field. Only 18 of the submitted papers were accepted as regular papers, and 6 were accepted as short papers. Already, INFOSCALE has become a highly selective conference with only a 24% acceptance rate.

Here were a few high lights from the conference.  First was Nivio Ziviani's talk on perfect hashing algorithms ( Download perfect-hash.pdf ).  Hashing algorithms are wonderful tools and Nivio laid out the reasoning behind the ones he has worked on over the years, namely his work on large key set hashing.  Nivio is not only a great academic but has also founded two companies, one sold to UOL and the other to Google i

WWDC - Live CoverageJune 9

Today Apple will be hosting their Worldwide Developers Conference WWDC08 and we have the pleasure of providing live tracking of the event via Twitter updates. We believe this is a great opportunity to showcase the power of tracking global conversations and give new users exposure to our trending topics and sentiment technologies. We love the Twitter micro-blogging platform and the opportunity to provide this service to the community.  Lastly, a big thanks Twitter for the link.

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DemoGirl on SummizeMay 22

For those of you that have not found the DemoGirl site, I recommend checking it out. Molly does 2-3 minute screencasts on new sites so others can quickly check out the site and its functionality without having to sign-up or go there. While Summize has no sign-up barrior for people to use it, we do love seeing her talk about some of the great features and uses of our product.

Here is a link to her post on Summize and the embedded screencast.

Enjoy...

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CIKM 2008 Call for PapersMay 21

The CIKM 2008 deadline is almost up. This year is going to be great with the venue being in Napa Valley. I thought our call for papers on our web site would be interesting to check out.  Also, I am running this years Industry track so if you have something interesting for the conference please submit it.

Final Call for Papers and Information about CIKM 2008
ACM Seventeenth Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
                                       CIKM 2008

October 26-30, 2008, Napa Valley Marriott Hotel & Spa, California, U.S.A.
WEBSITE:  http://www.cikm2008.org/

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • Corporate supporters
  • Keynote speakers
  • Conference themes and Topics
  • Paper submissions Information and  Important dates (Abstracts due: May 27, 2008)
  • Industry day
  • List of accepted workshops
  • Student travel support
  • Information about hotel, travel, and Napa Valley
  • Organizing and Program Committee

  CORPORATE SUPPORTERS

Gold: Information Retrieval   Facility, Microsoft, SearchMe.com

Silver:   Advertising.com, Ask.com, eBay Research Labs, Yahoo! Research

Bronze: Justsystems Evans Research

Supported by ACM SIGI