IWeb Program Development Workshop

How to get there

Enter via the main entrance function gate on Elliott Ave (Melway 29 11-12 E-F). An Artistic (caterer) staff member will be at this function gate in the morning, to greet and direct people to the function centre. I'll give this person a list of names, so you should be able to get in even if you arrive [much] later than 9.30.

• The Elliott Ave entrance is about the same distance from the #19 tram stop 16 (Royal Parade) as it is from the Royal Park train station (Upfield line). There are also #55 tram stops near the Zoo's back entrance and next to the train station. Car parking all around.
• Zoo's instructions on getting there & map of the area
• Map of the zoo: we'll be in the Lakeside Function Centre (RHS of map)
• Zoo brochure, with map, so you can plan your lunchtime wander to visit the cousins

Schedule

• 9.00 - 9.30 Arrival & informal discussions over coffee, tea, oj, water
• 9.30 - 10.30 David Hawking presentation and discussion
• 10.30 - 11.00 Morning tea
• 11.00 - 12.30 Whole group & small group work to compile lists of capabilities & courses for different cohorts
• 12.30 - 1.30 Lunch
• 1.30 - 3.00 Refine mapping of capabilities to courses & cohorts
• 3.00 - 3.30 Afternoon tea
• 3.30 - 5.00 Whole group & small group work to design [a few] new courses

Last update: by A. Tam, CS&IT, RMIT University

Keynote by David Hawking

Promoting evolutionary fitness for dynamic web habitats

"It's a jungle out there."

More than any previous technology, the Web permits IT intercommunication, interoperability and resource discovery. Key factors in its success include openness, simplicity, freedom, tolerance, efficiency and low cost of entry. (Contrast it with Lotus Notes.) While these factors remain in place the web paradigm will not only remain dominant but will extend into new areas and new applications. However, there are many risks. Familiarity with underlying Web principles and an understanding of how key Web technologies such as search engines operate seems critical to maximising benefit; unfortunately many current Web practitioners lack both.

Within the next few years, I expect that the uptake of web technologies within enterprises will increase (despite commercial initiatives to side track this); that the use of LOTE on the Web will dramatically increase; that images and continuous media will become more important; that web models for conducting business will improve and be used more; that user-context will have much greater influence; that devices for accessing the web will proliferate; that security models on the web will become more sophisticated and important; that giant corporations, spammers and governments will attempt to control or to pervert the current operation of the Web; that librarians and archivists will attempt to organise and classify it (but will fail because of lack of resources and maybe lack of understanding about what's useful); and, finally, I expect to be surprised.

Taking every licence inherent or imputed in the invitation to speak, the speaker will indulge himself by outlining the knowledge and skills he would like to see in web professionals graduating from RMIT.

David Hawking is a Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO, an Australian Government research organization and leader of the Enterprise Search Group (es.cmis.csiro.au), based in Canberra, Australia. This group has created a commercial enterprise search engine (Panoptic: www.panopticsearch.com).

Dr Hawking is a program chair of ACM SIGIR'2003 and is actively researching in the areas of enterprise search, distributed IR and Web search. For the last two years he has presented Web search tutorials at SIGIR in conjunction with colleagues at Google, Verity and IBM (formerly Alta Vista).

David initiated the VLC/Web tracks at TREC (trec.nist.gov) in 1996 and has coordinated them since then. With colleagues, he has been responsible for the creation and distribution of several widely used Web test collections. He has co-authored a number of publications in the Web search area, including: "Scaling up the TREC collection" (IR journal), "Results and challenges in Web search evaluation" (WWW8), "Engineering a multi-purpose collection for Web retrieval experiments" (IP&M), "Measuring Search Engine Quality" (IR journal) and "Effective site finding using link anchor information" (SIGIR'2001), and "Result merging strategies for a current news metasearcher" (IP&M).