12 June 2006: JCDL

Bizarrely Gloria and I are in different countries. Not that that is bizarre in itself, it's happened a lot over the past few years, but this time there are two differences:
1. We're now married, and
2. I'm in the USA and she's in the UK, rather than the other way around.

The reason for this is the ACM and IEEE deciding to hold a Joint Conference on digital Libraries. This year's effort is the sixth and so I thought I'd better put the effort in and come on over to North Carolina to see what all the fuss is about.

The paper I just presented before "lunch" ("lunch" being a choice between a small box marked 'vegetarian' and a small box marked 'low carb') was quite an old one about how you tell if this John Smith is the same as that John Smith (answer: people cite their own work[1]). It was well-enough received I think, and I happily managed to avoid the temptation to head off into Pentecostal preacher mode ("everybody say CITATIONS, yes AAAA-men citations are of the Lord") so that kept the locals happy I think. Also the fact that I was the final presenter before lunch certainly seemed to keep the number of questions sufficiently down, although the gentleman from Google did seem quite interested in the areas where my little program didn't do so well - happily I knew the answer to that one too (some people don't have a coherent body of work, although there's probably a nicer way to put it than that).

The conference itself seems well-organised and while small in number (at a guess, five hundred delegates?) the overall quality is very high, some key folks are here (hello Tony) (no, not that Tony, I mean the other one, the one who went from ECS to Microsoft) and there's quite a level of expectation. One interesting note is the amount of cross-over between the topics being covered here and the kind of issues facing the document-management side of the business world (such as high-volume scanning, OCR, metadata and the rest) and yet Googling on the terms "JCDL" and "Document Management" shows that after about 2002/2003, the term 'document management' seemed to leave this conference. I wonder if there are some things the two worlds should be learning from each other and, for whatever reason, aren't.

But all in all, very good. Still to come this week are Andrew McCallum, Chaomei Chen, Isaac and the Citeseer folks and the 'conference banquet' which is apparently titled Pig Pickin'. Sounds like the south to me...

Oh, and one possible additional entrant into the program: Soon-To-Be-Hurricane Alberto, who's expected to make an appearance on Thursday.

[1] McRae-Spencer, D. M., Shadbolt, N. R., "Also By The Same Author: AKTive Author, A Citation-Graph Approach to Name Disambiguation", In Proceedings 6th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 12 June 2006, pp. 53-55.