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  • How long would it take to read Wikipedia?

    Almer S. Tigelaar 21 / 02 / 2012

    Wikipedia has become the de facto encyclopedia on the Internet. A traditional encyclopedia spans many textbook volumes which would take any normal person ages to read. Few people would likely engage in such an endeavor. However, since Wikipedia is readily accessible: should you take up the challenge?

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  • Life in a Day

    Almer S. Tigelaar 09 / 02 / 2012

    The premise behind the YouTube documentary “Life in a Day” is interesting: invite everyone around the world to shoot video on one specific day: July 24th 2010. Have people upload their raw footage and edit it so it becomes a short, ninety minute, documentary that chronicles a single day on our planet. Does this extreme form of crowdsourcing actually work?

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  • Top 8 Prejudices about Americans

    Almer S. Tigelaar 07 / 02 / 2012

    When travelling abroad it is difficult to go with an open mind. Despite our best efforts we bring with us an excess of prejudice shaped by our own culture and view of the destination country. So to it was for me when I visited the United States. When coming back, people at home are very insistent that you play into their prejudice regarding where you’ve been as well, perhaps as a means of reinforcing their own identity.

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Monthly Archives: September 2009

Query-Based Sampling using Only Snippets (Poster)

Almer S. Tigelaar 29 / 09 / 2009, 15:00

Query-Based Sampling using Only Snippets
Tigelaar, A. S. & Hiemstra, D.
Poster NWO SIREN 2009, Enschede, The Netherlands.

Depicts the Query-Based Sampling Process

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More Efficient Query-Based Sampling

Almer S. Tigelaar 09 / 09 / 2009, 11:00

Talk AbstractUSI Lugano Logo
Imagine that we have just a free-form text search field as interface to a search engine, and that we can only parse the results it returns. What can we do to get an idea of what this search engine has to offer content-wise? This is the well known problem of acquiring a resource description when faced with uncooperative servers. We present a new approach to solving this problem, which is less bandwidth intensive compared to previous approaches, such as query-based document sampling.

Presented at University of Lugano (USI), September 7th 2009, Lugano, Switzerland.

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