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If
things go according to plan for David Dobkins, your future forays
into the World Wide Web may turn out to be visits to another dimension.
"Web search now is done by brute force methods," he
explains, "that take little advantage of the context of a
search. For example, a search for the word 'house' will not match
documents that contain the word 'residence.'" So Dobkins,
a professor of computer science at Princeton University, turned
to Euclid to help find a solution.
"Based on keywords that represent the semantics of a document,"
he says, "we can assign to each document a sample point in
an appropriate dimensional Euclidean space. Then, a query document
is also a point in the same space. Search for Web hits is the
same as searching for near neighbors in Euclidean space."
To immerse himself in this--and other--problems, Dobkins spent
his Fulbright term at Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel. There
he found a strong and innovative computer industry and a community
of like-minded scholars interested in his field of research. Israel
was his family's first choice for a Fulbright location, Dobkin
explains, because of its rich culture, its fast-growing technology
industry and its high proportion of English-speaking citizens.
"We looked for a country where English was spoken and that
was exotic," he says. "Israel seemed to be the right
place."
For Dobkins, his time in Israel was a wonderful chance to focus
on his work. "The luxury of having six months without juggling
day-to-day responsibilities and crises was fabulous for my research,"
he admits. And immersing himself into another culture was a bonus.
"I've gained a far better understanding of the educational
system in Israel," he says, "and of the politics and
the people. I hope I've also given my colleagues there a similar
understanding about America."
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