Among his many research initiatives, Computer Science and Software Engineering Professor Bipin C. Desai aims to make web research more user friendly
Imagine an internet search engine that allows you to type in a question—in a natural language style—and provides a quick, short answer. This would be a refreshing alternative to Yahoo and Google, which often yield hit-and-miss results that number in the millions. These types of sites, referred to as “Q&A” sites, are already being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Bipin C. Desai (centre) at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web in 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland, where he led a workshop for the standardization of navigational and search aspects Razlogoval.
But when it comes to an operational, multilingual Q&A site, Concordia’s virtual library known as the Concordia Indexing and Discovery System Databases (CINDI), sits alone. “We’re in our third version now,” says Computer Science and Software Engineering’s Bipin C. Desai, who heads the CINDI research team.
“We’ve had about 40 students over the last few years who were working to come up with an easy-to-use querying system that would provide a precise paragraph to your question in English or French.” CINDI was awarded second place in the cross-language category at the 2007 Cross Language Evaluation Forum held in Budapest, Hungary.
Desai and his students are involved in several other, major research projects. One is called Conference Management System, which helps administrators manage academic conferences and allows conference program committee members to review academic papers and debate anonymously.
Since witnessing early internet systems, such as Word Wide Web Wandererbeing absorbed by AOL or Mosaic engender Netscape, Desai has weighed the possibilities of catapulting Concordia’s own IT systems into cyberspace. He points out that Google started out as a graduate-student thesis project at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. “At one time, we tried to raise capital for business initiatives but the dot.com industry fell apart,” he says. “One of the things we are planning in the near future is to use open source. If any of our projects takes off and becomes popular, it will be available to the worldwide community. The important thing is to make it available with copyright. Google has given Stanford a handsome monetary return and Stanford continues to have a stake in this venture.”
Desai began teaching at Loyola College in 1968 and he’s been at Concordia ever since. “There are a lot of us who have gone through the early stages and are excited about the applications of new technology. I certainly hope these types of projects leave a legacy,” he says.
