Special Talks

Special Talks

Invited Speakers:

Speaker 1.

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Name: Dr. Denis Bouyssou – Senior Researcher (Directeur de Recherche) at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris,
France. (http://www.lamsade.dauphine.fr/~bouyssou/).

Denis Bouyssou has an MBA from ESSEC (Paris, France). He obtained his Doctorat (PhD) in OR in 1984 and his Habilitation à diriger des Recherches in 1990 from the Université Paris Dauphine (Paris, France).

Denis Bouyssou is currently Senior Researcher (Directeur de Recherche) at the  Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris, France. From 1987 to 2001 he has been professor of Decision Science at the ESSEC Business School, Paris, France. He has held invited research positions at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium) and Université Laval (Québec, Canada). He has been a consultant for  various private and public firms in France.

Denis Bouyssou is a former president of ROADEF, the French OR Society, and  former secretary of EURO (the European association of OR societies).

Denis Bouyssou is the former co-editor-in-chief of 4OR. He is a member of the  editorial committee of Theory and Decision, advisory editor of the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and on the editorial board of Risk, Decision and Policy.

Denis Bouyssou is the co-author of four books on MCDM. He has published over 50 articles in various journals and contributed volumes. His main current research  interests are centered on Decision Theory (Preference modeling, Decision under  Risk and Uncertainty, Social Choice Theory and MCDM).

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Subject: Should you believe in the Shanghai ranking ?

Abstract:

This talk proposes a critical analysis of the ‘‘Academic Ranking of World  Universities’’, published every year and more commonly known as the Shanghai ranking. After having recalled how the ranking is built, we first discuss the relevance of the criteria and then analyze the proposed aggregation method. Our  analysis uses tools and concepts from Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). Our main conclusions are that the criteria that are used are not relevant, that the  aggregation methodology is plagued by a number of major problems and that the  whole exercise suffers from an insufficient attention paid to fundamental structuring issues. Hence, our view is that the Shanghai ranking, in spite of the  media coverage it receives, does not qualify as a useful and pertinent tool to discuss  the ‘‘quality’’ of academic institutions, let alone to guide the choice of students and  family or to promote reforms of higher education systems. We outline the type of  work that should be undertaken to offer sound alternatives to the Shanghai  ranking. This talk is based on a joint paper with Jean-Charles Billaut and Philippe Vincke.

Speaker 2.

Name: Dr. Sihem Amer-Yahia – Principal
Research Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Center (QCRI) where she leads the Social Computing group in Doha, Qatar (http://www.qcri.qa/sihemameryahia/).

Sihem Amer-Yahia is Principal Research Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Center (QCRI) where she leads the Social Computing group. She is also CNRS DR1 at Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble starting December 1, 2011. Here research is centered around the development of scalable models and algorithms for organizing, mining and managing large volumes of social breadcrumbs left by millions of users online. Her current projects include a collaboration with Al Jazeera and MIT to help journalists organize and understand user-generated input in the form of comments on news articles, tweets, Facebook likes and shares. Dr. Amer-Yahia has over 80 publications in major Web data management and social conferences. Prior to joining QCRI in May 2011, she was Senior Scientist at Yahoo! Research for 5 years and worked on revisiting relevance models and top-k processing algorithms on datasets from Delicious, Yahoo! Personals and Flickr. Before that, she spent 7 years at AT&T Labs in NJ, working on XML query optimization and XML full-text search. Dr. Amer-Yahia is editor of the W3C XML full-text standard. She is a member of the VLDB Endowment and the ACM SIGMOD executive committee. She is a senior ACM member and member of IEEE. Dr. Amer-Yahia regularly participates in research panels and chairs multiple conferences. She also serves on the editorial boards of prestigious journals: ACM TODS, the VLDB Journal and the Information Systems Journal. Dr. Amer-Yahia received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Univ. Paris-Orsay and INRIA in 1999, and her Diplome d’Ingenieur from INI, Algeria in 1994.

Subject: Social Analytics to Encourage Collaboration on the Social Web of News

           Abstract:

The proliferation of social media is undoubtedly changing the way people produce and consume news online. Editors and publishers in newsrooms heavily rely on citizen journalism to cover the latest events. Yet, the Social Web has yet to provide value to encourage collaboration. We conjecture that value lies in aggregating  millions of user actions along three dimensions: topic, geography, and time. I will  present SPAUE and MAQSA, two systems for social analytics on news. SPAUE  analyzes user traffic while MAQSA is content-centric. SPAUE uses graph traversal  primitives to aggregate the collective behavior of users represented as a set of  actions such as browsing, posting an opinion and sharing news stories. MAQSA provides an interactive topic-centric dashboard that summarizes social activity  around news articles. Both SPAUE and MAQSA rely on scalable algorithms that  enable an interactive specification of topics, actions, and dates and dynamically  process large collections of relevant articles.