Partially funded by the Research Council of Norway as a Centre for Research-based Innovation (SFI), iAD is the only centre of its kind led by a commercial company. iAD will be directed by Fast Search & Transfer in collaboration with Schibsted, one of Europe’s largest media companies, Accenture, and leading universities: Cornell University, University College Dublin, Dublin City University, BI Norwegian School of Management and the universities in Tromsø (UiT), Trondheim (NTNU) and Oslo (UiO).
Information access technology has emerged as one of the most innovative technology areas impacting a wide range of industries, business models and even social patterns. Information access is also a highly prioritized research area in the EU research programs. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (GYM) have proven both the strategic and short term business value of search based systems in a consumer setting. FAST has emerged as the recognized leading provider of search based systems. This includes both embedding of search as an IT infrastructure component and search as a mission critical part of new services. FAST is globally considered as the only viable technology option for companies that need to compete or defend their online presence against GYM. Furthermore, search technology represents a disruptive threat to the database vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft that add search capabilities with an incremental approach. Dramatic changes in technology, business models and services are foreseen in information access. It is our belief that Norway has a unique opportunity to build a strong science and business platform to play a key role in the future of the information age. Integrating academic and corporate efforts with international centres of excellence will be of key importance in this effort.
The Information Access Disruptions (iAd) program targets core research for next generation precision, analytics and scale in information access. Furthermore, iAd builds international networks to identify and execute on global disruption opportunities enabled by emerging services in the information age.
RELAY contribution to the iAD Centre lies with the improvement of resource utilization and performance of distributed systems. The focus will be the scalability of iAD's approaches to information dissemination and contributions to the development of the iAD system architecture. The project has a strong practical focus, corroborating research ideas through prototype development and practical demonstration.
Paper accepted at ICC 2010
Invited talk by Kang Li 15. December
