I am a scientist and innovator with over 15 years of international experience in research and demonstrated product impact. I am currently Director of Research at Yahoo! and was previously at Telefonica, IDIAP-EPFL, Fuji Xerox, IBM, Siemens, and AT&T Bell Labs. I hold a Ph.D. from Columbia University [bio , CV, LinkedIn].

At Yahoo!, I manage the Social Media Engagement (SOMER) and Learning for Multimedia and Vision (LMV) teams in sunny Barcelona and Bangalore, respectively. My teams and I analyze web-scale data, design, build applications, and contribute directly to products used by millions of people. Our research is applied globally across various media properties such as Yahoo! News, Flickr, and Yahoo! image and video search, among others.

I'm interesteed in understanding human behavior through large-scale data analysis and turning the knowledge gained into actions by improving and creating new products. I like building things, so design and implementation key are elements. Part of my efforts focus on thinking about and developing the foundations of Human-Centered Computing, at the intersection of data science [social network analysis, behavioral insights], user experience [interaction models, multimedia, design], and business [visualization, analytics].

I like to make art, travel, read, and explore different cultures. I have worked and lived in 8 cities in 4 continents [Bogota, New York, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo, Lausanne, Madrid, Barcelona, Daejeon] and traveled in over 70 countries [Flickr, personal].

We participate in the Social Sensor, ARCOMEM, and the CENIT Social Media projects. We also publish widely [publications].

 

e-mail: ajaimes [ at ] caa dot columbia dot edu

NEW!

Co-chair, Practice and Experience track, WWW 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, May 13-17, 2013.

Co-chair, Industry Track, The 21st Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2013), Rome, Italy, June 10-14, 2013.

General chair, ACM Multimedia 2013, Barcelona, Oct. 21-25, 2013.

LA-WEB 2012 in Cartagena, Colombia, Oct. 25-27, 2012.

Recent Invited Talks:

  • Yahoo! Big Thinker series, Bangalore, India, November, 2012.
  • International Workshop on Search Computing, Sept. 25-26, Brussels, Belgium.
  • Affective Computing for Mobile HCI Workshop, Sept. 17-18, Istanbul, Turkey.
  • Intl. Summer School on Ubiquitous Interaction, Oulu, Finland, May 28-June 1, 2012
  • Winter School on Information Retrieval, Zinal, Switzerland, January 2012
  • Keynote, VIII Top-IX Conference,"Big Data in a Living Web", Torino, Italy, Dec. 2011
  • Keynote, IEEE Intl. Conf. on Mobile Multimedia (MUM 2011), Beijing, China, December 2011
  • Madrid Science Week, Panel on Digital Living, November 2011
  • W3C Social Business Jam, leading session on Mobile & Social, November 10, 2011
  • ASSETS Workshop, Pisa, Italy, October 2011
  • ICME 2011 Panel on Social Media, Barcelona, Spain, July 2011
  • Summer School on Social Networks, Alicante, Spain, June 2011
  • BDigital Global Congress 2011, Barcelona, Spain, June 2011
  • Workshop on Global Research Data Infrastructures: The Big Data Challenges, Capri, Italy, May 2011
  • EC Media Search Cluster Meeting, Trento, Italy, April 2011
  • WWW 2011 Panel on Social Media, Hyderabad, India, March 2011

Recent Papers:

  • "PRiSMA: Searching Images in Parallel," ACM Multimedia 2012 (with Pancho Tolchinsky and Luca Chiarandini)
  • "Predicting Participants in Public Events using Stock Photos," ACM Multimedia 2012 (with Neil O'Hare and Luca Aiello)
  • "Image Ranking Based on User Browsing Behavior," ACM SIGIR 2012 (with M. Trevisiol, L. Chiarandini, L. Aiello)
  • "Understanding and Leveraging Tag-based Relations in On-line Social Networks," ACM HyperText 2012 (with M. Lipczak, B. Sigurbjornsson)
  • "Discovering Social Photo Navigation Patterns," at ICME 2012 (with M. Trevisiol, L. Chiarandini)
  • "Lin-spiration: Using a Mixture of Spiral and Linear Layouts to Explore Time Series," at IUI 2012 (with E. Graells)
  • "Correlating Financial Time Series with Micro-Blogging Activity," at WSDM 2012 (with E.J. Ruiz, V. Hristidis, C. Castillo, A. Gionis).
  • "Do All Birds Tweet the Same? Characterizing Twitter Around the Word," at CIKM'11 (with B. Poblete, R. Garcia, M. Mendoza).
  • "Social Network Analaysis and Mining for Business Applications," Special Issue on Machine Learning for Business Applications, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2011 (with F. Bonchi, A. Gionis, C. Castillo).
  • "Who Uses Web Search for What? and How?" at WSDM 2011 (with I. Weber).
  • "Demographic Information Flows" at CIKM 2010 (with I. Weber).
  • "Sonify Your Face: Facial Expressions for Sound Generation," at ACM Multimedia 2010 (with R. Valenti, N. Sebe)

Recent Professional activities:

Senior program committee member (ACM RecSys 2011, IJCAI 2011, ICWSM 2011, etc.)