Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
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When Machine Learning Hits A Wall
Machine learning (or AI if you prefer) is amazing. I cannot think of another area of computer science — or of technology in general — that has been more influential...
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Critical Thinking and Generative AI
Critical Reasoning and Generative AIOne of the formative experiences in my mathematics education was a time I struggled to compute an integral in a calculus class...
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Semantic Equivalence of e-Commerce Queries
I am proud to share the slides for “Semantic Equivalence of e-Commerce Queries”, which my eBay colleague Aritra Mandal presented this morning at the KDD 2023 Workshop...
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Upcoming Search Classes this Fall
I hope that everyone has been enjoying the summer. I took a sabbatical from teaching, but I’m looking forward to new students this fall.Are you excited to learn...
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What is Searcher Happiness?
As a search specialist, my main goal is to improve searcher happiness. Sure, companies pay me to improve business metrics like conversion rate and revenue, butprobability...
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Surprise! Surprise?
We have reached the stage of generative AI where artists, authors, and performers are convinced that AI is stealing their lives — and, perhaps more importantly,...
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Search Result Snippets, Revisited
Search result snippets, also known as query-biased summaries, are the additional context included with each result on the search results page. They are an essential...
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Implicit Query Reformulation
Let me start with the disclaimer that this post describes an embryonic idea, not an approach that I have validated through analysis or experimentation. With that...
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Facets: Constraints or Preferences?
When my colleagues and I at Endeca started working on faceted search in 1999, our model of the search journey was that most searchers start with broadly expressed...
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How I Became a Micro-Celebrity
In the 1979 movie “The Jerk”, there is a hilarious scene where Navin (played by Steve Martin) becomes excited at the discovery that his name is in print — in the...
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Affordances for Conversational Search
In application design, affordances are cues that help users discover and explore how to interact with the application. Typical affordances for search applications...
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From Today, Creating Is Dead!
From Today, Creativity Is Dead!A common theme in the concerns about generative AI is that it will replace human-generated art and end creativity as we know it.daguerreotype...
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Trust Through Provenance
The recent advances in generative AI have led many people to fear all manner of deepfakes — particularly text, images, audio, and video. People like Yuval NoahAI...
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The Compressibility of Thought
In a recent Tom Fishburne cartoon, one employee says “AI turns this single bullet point into a long email I can pretend I wrote,” while another says, “AI makesgenerative...
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Welcoming Our New Robot Overserfs
These are early days for generative AI, but it already feels like we are at the dawn of a revolution in human-computer communication. Practically overnight, wefacets...
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Is AI-Generated OK?
For as long as we have had needs, long before servers started asking us “Sorry, we don’t have Coke, is Pepsi ok?”, we have accepted substitutes for the products...
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Maximal Marginal Creativity
In 1998, Jaime Carbonell and Jade Goldstein proposed maximal marginal relevance (MMR) as way to balance the concerns of relevance and diversity. This measure is...
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Minimalist Models for Search Ranking
Search application developers put a lot of effort into optimizing the ranking of search results, especially in areas like ecommerce, where incremental ranking improvements...
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The Ultimate Question
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years of calculation to determine that the answer to the “ultimate question...
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