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  • The Avengers

    Almer S. Tigelaar 11 / 05 / 2012

    Marvel teased us with the release of this film near the end of various previously released super hero flicks like Captain America and Iron Man 2. This would be the movie that unites all the super heroes from the Marvel universe. Well actually, only those that had not been previously licensed to other studios. Hence, you will not find characters from X-Men, Spiderman, or the Fantastic Four in this movie. Director Joss Whedon brings back fond memories of creative television series like Firefly and Dollhouse, but what does he make of a 220 million blockbuster production?

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  • Hugo

    Almer S. Tigelaar 06 / 03 / 2012

    Hugo is based on a relatively recently released (2007) award winning book by Brian Selznick. It is not surprising that the film rights to the books were quickly sold, and certainly not by the least of directors either: Martin Scorsese. He has a career spanning decades and has directed a string of movies in recent years which I liked, among which are Shutter Island, The Departed and Gangs of New York. However, those were admittedly all in different, less family friendly, genres. So, I went to Hugo hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

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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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Almer S. Tigelaar » Research

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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