Mind the Gap: Is Industry the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?
Miguel Martinez-Alvarez · 2014
There has been an enormous increase in available data in the last years. At the same time, and at least partially caused by it, novel and exciting lines of research have been proposed in different fields such as Information Retrieval, Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing. Nowadays, most organisations and individuals understand that having access to large amounts of data, and being able to process it provides a competitive advantage. Furthermore, this is only possible if “cutting the edge” research is combined with clear commercial goals. The academic landscape is organised as a set of almost disjoint niche areas, despite the fact that they share foundations, tools and methods. On the other hand, a commercial application exploits any techniques that can add value. My talk would focus on the suggestion that by relying more on industrial collaborations, multi-discipline projects will arise with the main implication that the gap between communities will become smaller. I will support this claim within the context of a news personalisation product developed by SIGNAL that could have not been possible without the combination of knowledge between different fields. Copyright c © 2014 for the individual papers by the paper’s authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. In: U. Kruschwitz, F. Hopfgartner and C. Gurrin (eds.): Proceedings of the MindTheGap’14 Workshop, Berlin, Germany, 4-March-2014, published at http://ceur-ws.org