In November 2006, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) launched an Internet Services Theme Research Program, with the goal of accelerating Asia-Pacific academia’s research in the area of Internet Services.   >> Learn more

Innovative Research & Projects

From late 2006, MSRA has run invitation for proposal (IFP) in Internet Services area, mainly focused on search, as specified by MSRA senior researchers. Based on invitation, representative projects such as those described below have been among the most competitive submissions to receive funding awards.

Recommender Systems in Blog Space
Professor Jiajun Bu, Zhejiang University
This research, based on the analysis of published blog posts -- focuses on the issues of recommending blog groups and advertisements aimed at bloggers as well as visitors.

A Model for Evaluating the Quality of User-Created Documents
Professor Rim Hae-Chang, Korea University
The group built a Maximum Entropy-based quality evaluation model that is trained with textual and non-textual features of the document samples annotated with a ground-truth quality label (good, fair, or poor).

Research on Community Identification and Community Evolution on the Web 2.0
Professor Xueqi Cheng, Chinese Academy of Science
By introducing two metrics called linkage probability and triangularization probability, the group finds these are proportional to polynomial function of content. Based on previous studies, the group proposes a model combining vertex connectivity and content similarity in a proportional manner.

>> Learn More Projects

Related Resources

Learn about resources to further encourage and facilitate academic research and innovation in internet services area. Get details on relevant research groups, publications and demos, as well as additional resources.

Groups

Groups in Microsoft Research Asia that work closely with the Internet Services program and function as partners in the funded projects:

• Web Search and Mining Group 
• Search Technology Center

Publications and Demos

Awarded projects funded in 2007 and 2008 have already generated interesting results. More than 100 papers have been published, some at prestigious international conferences. Others were published in prominent journals. A partial listing appears below:

1)      L.-P. Liu, Y. Yu, Y. Jiang, and Z.-H. Zhou. TEFE: A time-efficient approach to feature extraction. In: Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'08), Pisa, Italy, 2008, pp.423-432 (Long paper, acceptance rate 70/724=9.6%)

2)      S.-P. Kuo and Y.-C. Tseng, " A Scrambling Method for Fingerprint Positioning Based on Temporal Diversity and Spatial Dependency", IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering

3)      Jaewoo Kang, Jeffrey F. Naughton, Schema Matching Using Interattribute Dependencies, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 20, No. 10, October 2008, p 1393-1407.

4)      D. Xu, T.J. Cham, S. Yan and S.-F. Chang, Near Duplicate Image Identification with Spatially Aligned Pyramid Matching, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2008

5)      Huizhong Duan, Yunbo Cao, Chin-Yew Lin and Yong Yu. Searching Questions by Identifying Question Topic and Question Focus, to appear in Proc. of 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics:Human Language Technologies (ACL 2008:HLT), June 15-20, 2008, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

6)      X. Quan, E. Chen, Q. Luo and H. Xiong, Adaptive Label-Driven Scaling for Latent Semantic Indexing, accepted by ACM SIGIR 2008

7)      Haiqiang Chen, Xueqi Cheng, Yue Liu, Finding core members in virtual communities, WWW 2008, Beijing, China.

The following selected links exhibit online demonstrations of the research results:

• Supporting Bidirectional Personalized Object Queries
• Tag Clustering on Social Networking Site
• Semi-Supervised Information Extraction
• Recommender System in Blog Space

Additional  Resources

Relevant conferences also provide inspiration and reference for researchers in the Internet Services field. Here are some selected conference website links.

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• The International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2)
• Web 2.0 Conference
• ACM SIGIR Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval
• ACM SIGMM Special Interest Group on Multimedia
• Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)
• Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF)