Arjen P. de Vries (CWI) has been appointed professor Multimedia Dataspaces at the TU Delft on September 1st, 2008. A dataspace is all information belonging to one entity - a person, an enterprise or a community. Part of a dataspace contains multimedia information, e.g., web pages, online media, slides, e-mails and attachments. De Vries studies models, algorithms and system architecture of dataspace support platforms. He sees new opportunities and challenges for storage and retrieval of unstructured multimedia data by integrating statistical and database techniques. Of particular interest is ranking multimedia objects in dataspaces: How to provide personalized interactive access to a dataspace?
Search engines
At CWI, De Vries works as a senior researcher in the Database Architectures and Information Access group (INS1). He leads the Information Access team that studies the integration of information retrieval and databases. This integration is a prerequisite to creating the next generation of search engines, and handling multimedia and structured data. In the past, De Vries has worked on a variety of research topics, including multimedia information retrieval, collaborative filtering and personalised social media, enterprise search, database architecture and query processing, retrieval system evaluation, and ambient intelligence. His current research interest is the question how retrieval models should be adapted to the type of entity that is ranked, and how engineering effort for this adaptation should be limited.
