Stefano Ceri – författare

This book focuses on the process of creating and educating innovation leaders through specialized programs, which are offered by leading academic schools. Accordingly, the book is divided into two parts. While the first part provides the theoretical foundations of why and how innovation leaders should be created, the second part presents evidence that these foundations can already be found in the programs of ten top-level universities.

Part one consists of six chapters following a rigorous plan of content development, addressing topics ranging from (1) innovation, to (2) the settings where innovation occurs, (3) innovation leadership, (4) the need to change education, (5) a taxonomy of advanced educational experiences, and (6) cases of positive vs negative innovation leadership in the context of complex problems. Here the authors show that a new kind of innovation leadership is urgently needed, how it can be created, and how it is put into action. The second part is a collection of invited chapters that describe in detail ten leading academic programs: their objectives, curricular organization, enrollment procedures, and impact on students. Selected programs include four North American institutions (Stanford’s d.school, Harvard’s Multidisciplinary Engineering Faculty, Philadelphia University, OCAD’s Master of Design on Strategic Foresight & Innovation), five European institutions (Alta Scuola Politecnica of Milano and Torino, the EIT Master Program, Paris’ d.school, Brighton’s Interdisciplinary Design Program, Aalto University) and the Mission D program at Tongji University in China.

The book is dedicated to all those who recognize the need to provide stimuli regarding innovation and innovation leadership, primarily but not exclusively in academia. These include, but are not limited to, professors, deans and provosts of academic institutions, managers at private organizations and government policy-makers – in short, anyone who

Search computing, which has evolved from service computing, focuses on building the answers to complex search queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using the ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The field is multi-disciplinary in nature and takes advantage of contributions from other research areas such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economics, and legal sciences. This book, the second in the Search Computing series, describes the evolution of theories, technologies, and methods related to search computing. The book has been divided into eight parts, reflecting the main research directions within the Search Computing project. The parts focus on: search as an information exploration task; interaction design issues when dealing with multi-domain search results; modeling and semantic description of search services; the rank-join problem; query processing techniques and architectures; tools and mashups for application development; the application of search computing to bio-informatics; and the exploitation potentials of project results.

With the proliferation of huge amounts of (heterogeneous) data on the Web, the importance of information retrieval (IR) has grown considerably over the last few years. Big players in the computer industry, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, are the primary contributors of technology for fast access to Web-based information; and searching capabilities are now integrated into most information systems, ranging from business management software and customer relationship systems to social networks and mobile phone applications.

Ceri and his co-authors aim at taking their readers from the foundations of modern information retrieval to the most advanced challenges of Web IR. To this end, their book is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the principles of IR and provides a systematic and compact description of basic information retrieval techniques (including binary, vector space and probabilistic models as well as natural language search processing) before focusing on its application to the Web. Part two addresses the foundational aspects of Web IR by discussing the general architecture of search engines (with a focus on the crawling and indexing processes), describing link analysis methods (specifically Page Rank and HITS), addressing recommendation and diversification, and finally presenting advertising in search (the main source of revenues for search engines). The third and final part describes advanced aspects of Web search, each chapter providing a self-contained, up-to-date survey on current Web research directions. Topics in this part include meta-search and multi-domain search, semantic search, search in the context of multimedia data, and crowd search.

The book is ideally suited to courses on information retrieval, as it covers all Web-independent foundational aspects. Its presentation is self-contained and does not require prior background knowledge. It can also be used in the context of classic courses on data management, allowing the instructor to cover both structured and unstructured data in various formats. Its classroom use is facilitated by a set of slides, which can be downloaded from www.search-computing.org.