Program Details
Takis Metaxas
Associate Professor, Chair of Computer Science, co-Director of the Media Arts and Sciences Program, Wellesley College
How Google Works (and Why You Should Care)
In today's interconnected world, with the help of powerful search engines such as Google and Yahoo, accessing information is not the challenge it used to be. The real challenge is in evaluating information critically. Failing to do so can have serious financial, medical, political or security implications. In this view, we think of the web as enabling a specific type of person-to-person communication, one which lacks most of the cues which we use to critically think about the reliability of information in a traditional print and broadcast context.
Recent studies have shown two manifestations of the information reliability problem: (a) The web audience is trusting without evaluation; and (b) There is serious effort (sometimes refered to as "web spam") to direct the search engines into biased or untrustworthy web search results. To understand the problem, we will examine how search engines work and why they produce the results they do. Moreover, we will examine the claim that "web spam is to cyberspace what propaganda is to society." We will see why this is the case and what (if anything) one should do about that.
About Takis Metaxas
Panagiotis Takis Metaxas is an Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science and co-Director of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. He studied Mathematics at the University of Athens and Computer Science at Brown. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth and has been a visiting scientist at MIT and at the Sydney Uni. He spent a couple of years working as the Chief Technology Officer of a biotech company specializing in computerized tests for measuring the symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD). He is a member of LACS, ACM, IEEE Computer Society, SIGCSE and SIGACT's electronic publication board.
His research interests are currently in Cybertrust, Web Spam and Cognitive Hacking. He has also published in the areas of Parallel Computing, Multimedia, Algorithm Visualization, and Computer Science Education. Specifically: Parallel Graph and Combinatorial Algorithms, Parallel Algorithmic Techniques and Paradigms, Realizable Models of Parallel and Distributed Computation, Human-Computer Interfaces for Cultural and Educational Multimedia, CS Curriculum Development, Teaching Methods and Tools.
Read more: http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/pmetaxas.html