Automatic Disambiguation of Author Names: Foundations, Methods and Open Issues

Presentation video: https://youtu.be/SVGJLHePA9o

Abstract

Author name disambiguation is a well-known hard problem that has profound impacts on services provided by bibliographic repositories and similar platforms. Despite almost 20 years of research on the topic and efforts such as ORCID, there are still several open issues to be solved. In this talk, we will revisit this problem, presenting an overview of it and related taxonomy, and elaborate on some methods developed by our own research group that follow distinct approaches and tackle fundamental aspects of the problem such as self training and incremental disambiguation. Finally we will briefly discuss recent approaches and some open issues.

Speakers

  • Alberto H.F. Laender (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
  • Marcos André Gonçalves (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil)
  • Anderson A. Ferreira (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil)

Alberto H. F. Laender holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and an MSc degree in Computer Science, both from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and a PhD degree in Computing from the University of East Anglia, UK. He joined the Computer Science Department of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 1975, where he is currently a Full Professor and the head of the Database Research Group. In 1997, he was a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, working in the Picture Project team led by Dr. Moshé Zloof. He has served on the advisory committee of several Brazilian research funding agencies, having chaired the CNPq Computer Science Advisory Committee from 2010 to 2012. He was also a member of ACM SIGMOD’s Advisory Board (2006-2010) and SIGMOD’s Jim Gray PhD Dissertation Award Committee (2008-2011). Prof. Laender has also served as a program committee member for several national and international conferences and workshops on databases and Web-related topics, such as VLDB, ER, CIKM, WWW, WIDM, WebDB, JCDL, TPDL, DocEng, EC-Web, SPIRE, ICDE, SIGIR, AMW, SBBD, WebMedia and HT. He was also program committee chair of SPIRE 2002 and SBBD 2003, and program committee co-chair of WIDM 2003, WIDM 2004, CIKM 2007, AMW 2010 and WWW 2013 Workshops. He also served as the first Chief-Editor of the Journal of Information and Data Management (JIDM), the official publication of the Special Interest Group on Databases of the Brazilian Computer Society, and as a Steering Committee member of CIKM (2007-2013). He is a founder-member of the Brazilian Computer Society and one of the co-founders of Akwan Information Technologies, a Brazilian search technology company that was acquired by Google Inc. in 2005 to become its Research and Development Center for Latin America. Prof. Laender is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Science and of the Brazilian National Academy of Engineering, and in 2010 he was awarded the National Order of the Scientific Merit by the Brazilian President. He is the author of more than 180 refereed journal and conference papers, and his current research interests include Databases, Web Data Management, Digital Libraries and Bibliometrics.

Marcos André Gonçalves holds a degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Ceara (1995), a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the State University of Campinas (1997), a PhD in Computer Science from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) PhD from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (2006). He is currently an associate professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He has received several awards and honors throughout his career. He works in the area of Computer Science with emphasis on information retrieval, digital libraries and databases. He is currently an Affiliated Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Productivity Scholarship of CNPq (level 1-B) and Fapemig Researcher of the Minas Gerais Research Program.

Anderson A. Ferreira holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Viçosa (1993) and a master’s degree (1997) and a doctorate (2012) in Computer Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. He participated in several research projects developed at the Database Laboratory (LBD) at UFMG and was part of the team at the National Institute of Science and Technology for the Web – InWeb. He has several papers published in the main conferences and journals of Digital Libraries and Databases, such as, JCDL, SBBD/JIDM, JASIST, IPM and SIGMOD Record. He was coordinator of the Graduate Program in Computer Science at UFOP and member of the Chamber of Exact and Material Sciences – CEX at FAPEMIG. He is currently a professor at the Department of Computing at the Federal University of Ouro Preto and member of the research group Intelligent Data Management and Analysis – GAID. The main areas of interest involve Databases, Digital Libraries, Data Mining and Information Retrieval.