Welcome

In an effort to post more often, I've decided to open up a blog on a commercial site with more full-featured editing/indexing options.

As way of introduction, I'm a PhD student in Information Retrieval at Binghamton University. I'm currently doing a dissertation on applying higher order HTML document features to several different fields of HTML analysis, currently focusing on genre classification. Genre classification is looking at consistent themes in web page design and information in order to help guide a user to the information they are looking for.

The main point of this blog is to serve as a brainstorming pad for my ideas on using visual features. A large area of research in academia is devoted to analyzing the text of an HTML web page, yet VERY little is devoted to analyzing the layout of the page. This is primarily because text documents were all the rage 50 years ago when most of the research was being done. Furthermore, in several tasks like content classification, its not really as important. However, in other fields like the up and coming genre classification, it can be much more useful.

While I believe starting a blog about academic research is in some ways dangerous (there's this pervasive academic atmosphere of quasi hiding what you're doing until you publish it or at least have the resources to do it better than anyone else), I think it should spur me to be quicker in my implementation of ideas.