[Building Sakai] Help wanted!

[N. Matthijs]

(First of all I want to apologize for abusing this list, but I wasn't sure
what the appropriate list is and this is an emergency as well :)  ...)

As most of you know, I'm currently doing a Masters course in Computer
Speech, Text and Internet Technology at the University of Cambridge.

It's a one-year Masters course on the state-of-the-art in Speech and
Language Processing and its application to Internet Technology. The main
aim of the MPhil course is to teach the fundamental theory of speech and
natural language processing and its use in a variety of advanced
applications, especially those related to the Internet.

In the last term, I have to undertake a 3 month research project. My
project is about Personalized Search. I'll look at how the computer can
learn a user's interests by looking at different data sources like
browsing history, search queries, ... and how we can use those interests
to make the output of search engines more biased towards the user using it
and make searching the web more effective. Because there are no publicly
available corpora or data sets available for this, I need to gather my own
data set. That's why I need your help!

I've created a FireFox add-on that captures some of that data. It doesn't
get in the way of anything and respects your privacy. If you want to help
me out, please visit http://alterego.caret.cam.ac.uk and install the
add-on. That's all you need to do. The page also contains more information
about the project. This is very important for me as I need to collect as
much data as possible.

You can also win a prize ;).


Please let me know if you've got any additional question.

Thanks for your help!
Nicolaas Matthijs