20th International WWW Conference, India
Posted by Łukasz Anwajler
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Events
If there is a place where you can feel in which direction Web heads to, it must be at International World Wide Web Conference. This year's event took place in hot Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India and was as inspiring as expected.
Conference hosted more than 80 research papers presentations. First two out of five days were dedicated to workshops, including "4th Semantic Search Workshop", "2nd International Workshop on RESTful Design", "Linked Data on the Web" and more.
Decent conference can be distinguished from excellent one by attending people and guests - and I cannot say a bad word about them. Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, sir Tim Berners-Lee and Christos H. Papadimitriou are people who do not need to be introduced.
WWW Conference raised many interesting issues related to Web applications and if you asked me I would say the hottest topics were: search, internationalization and social networks studies.
Presented solutions beyond search consisted of many mechanisms: collaborative filtering (adapted from recommendation systems), context-aware features with well known geolocation at the head and query templates (ever heard of 'word-net'?). It looks like simple gathering history of queries is not enough and key market players look for new data which will help them make search results better. And in my opinion it is really nice unless user privacy is violated.
Considering location of the Conference it was expected that internationalization would be vital part of discussion about future Web. In India there are dozens of languages (122) and dialects (2371) used every day so disappointment of domestic community resulting from poor handling of i18n features was fully understandable. There are many problems which Web needs to face and most of them are related to mobile devices which are widely used in India. Translation between Indian languages/dialects, fonts support, CSS styling and reasonable, localized text input are just few of open challenges.
Twitter, Wikipedia and Facebook are very popular among researchers. There were many interesting studies like predicting Wikipedia votings or displaying TV shows with related tweets real-time. Winning Best Poster Award by "Predicting Popular Messages in Twitter" was just confirmation that social networks have still much to offer to problem solvers.
I was more than happy to attend W3C's "Mobile Web Applications Camp" which was the most interesting part of the Conference for me due to my Web development background and recent commitment to mobile applications development. After few presentations, there was lively discussion about new APIs security, web vs native applications development, HTML5 features and more. It was such a hot debate that participants were given four microphones with one of them so often held by me that I was given a HTML5 T-shirt just to give it back!
All in all, 20th International WWW Conference was an highly inspiring event with lots of talks, well prepared presentations and bright people willing to share knowledge. I really liked it and I want to repeat this experience in next year in France.
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