Yushi Jing

Video suggestion and discovery for youtube: taking random walks through the view graph

The rapid growth of the number of videos in YouTube provides enormous potential for users to find content of interest to them. Unfortunately, given the difficulty of searching videos, the size of the video repository also makes the discovery of new content a daunting task. In this paper, we present a novel method based upon the analysis of the entire user-video graph to provide personalized video suggestions for users. The resulting algorithm, termed Adsorption, provides a simple method to efficiently propagate preference information through a variety of graphs. We extensively test the results of the recommendations on a three month snapshot of live data from YouTube.

Learning Query-Specific Distance Functions for Large-Scale Web Image Search

Current Google image search adopt a hybrid search approach in which a text-based query (e.g., “Paris landmarks”) is used to retrieve a set of relevant images, which are then refined by the user (e.g., by re-ranking the retrieved images based on similarity to a selected example). We conjecture that given such hybrid image search engines, learning per-query distance functions over image features can improve the estimation of image similarity. We propose scalable solutions to learning query-specific distance functions by 1) adopting a simple large-margin learning framework, 2) using the query-logs of text-based image search engine to train distance functions used in content-based systems. We evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed system through comprehensive human evaluation, and compare the results with the state-of-the-art image distance function used by Google image search.

Google image swirl: a large-scale content-based image visualization system

Web image retrieval systems, such as Google or Bing image search, present search results as a relevance-ordered list. Although alternative browsing models (e.g. results as clusters or hierarchies) have been proposed in the past, it remains to be seen whether such models can be applied to large-scale image search. This work presents Google Image Swirl, a large-scale, publicly available, hierarchical image browsing system by automatically group the search results based on visual and semantic similarity. This paper describes methods used to build such system and shares the findings from 2-years worth of user feedback and usage statistics.