Germany’s first big data professor
Matthias Hagen holds Germany’s first Chair in Big Data and intends to improve the way we search the Internet.
Sometimes, researching something on the Internet feels a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. We discover a certain website one day, but just a day later have no idea how we stumbled across it, let alone what its address was. Other times our search engine spews out thousands of “hits”, yet virtually none of them is of any use to us. One major reason why it is not always possible to find what one is looking for on the Web is the huge volume of information. And it’s growing every day: one study claims that the worldwide data volume will increase ten-fold by the year 2020. “Big data” is the key word in this context, referring to the enormous flood of digital data.
On a quest for a smart search engine
One person who knows all about this is Matthias Hagen. A junior professor at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, he has held Germany’s first Chair in Big Data Analytics since the 2013/14 winter semester. Together with his group of young researchers, he is working on developing new tools and algorithms to advance the process by which big data is analysed. His work also aims to improve the way we search the Internet. Matthias Hagen even believes that entirely new search engines might be the way forward. “Our information requirements are growing, yet mainstream search engines do not help with more exploratory searching such as in literature research. In many cases they also fail to produce any meaningful results if the user enters complete questions. This is what we are working on”, he explained in an interview with German daily “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. One thing in the junior professor’s mind is for example a search engine which can be asked a question and will then display an explanatory video rather than linking to a forum in which the problem is discussed. To ensure that such smart search engines do not remain but a pipe dream, Hagen and his colleagues first have to gather data: how do users move around on the Internet, what sort of search terms do they enter, and how do they access information? The answers to these questions are supplied by an “ideal user” which the big data researchers wish to simulate. To this end, they are combining numerous different user types in a matrix with a view to discovering which search option is most effective.
M100 Sanssouci Colloquium on “Media Freedom in the Age of Big Data” on 12 September 2014 in Potsdam
