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Blog renovations

I finally got around revamping the categories here a bit. Now most of the miscellanous stuff is somewhere else - I hate when a misc category gets too large. It should for the few entries, which don't fit elsewhere. I also lost the fairly inactive library category. Few minor changes on the look of the blog wraps up the renovations. Now let's just hope I get more energy to write about stuff here, right?

23.04.2006 klo 09:23 | Comments 1 comment(s) | TrackBack (0)

Master's thesis

I finally finished something I've been doing for over a year now. I started work on my master's thesis (or pro gradu, as it's called in Finland) last year on the Spring term and now it's complete, all 71 pages of it. It's a relief, having it off my hands. Now I'm just waiting for the evaluation.

One thing's for sure: it's not going to become a big hit. Actually, the initial print run is a whopping six copies: one for the library, two for the department and three for me (to be distributed to my parents and myself). Of course, it will also appear in the University thesis database as a PDF, so anybody interested in can print it out themselves. There might be few people doing their work on similar topic, who might be interested, but even that's a bit unlikely.

My topic is Using multi-valued relevance in XML retrieval evaluation, I'm working in the context of the INEX XML retrieval conference. I created an evaluation tool to use the Cumulated Gain based measure XCG, hoping to overcome the problems of overlap and overpopulated recall bases in XML retrieval. I succeeded, too.

If you didn't understand anything of the last paragraph, don't worry: many students of Information Studies wouldn't understand it, either. It's a bit of a specialty field. I do hope choosing a slightly obscure topic will secure me a decent grade, though - at least my thesis isn't a bog-standard information seeking behaviour of group X type of thing one sees quite often. Those can be interesting, of course, but I do feel it can also be an easy way out, too...

23.04.2006 klo 08:45 | Be the first to comment | TrackBack (0)