Prabhakar Raghavan, CTO at Verity, Inc., on building a secure foundation for information retrieval. On the Web: a few tens of TBytes. In enterprises: many orders of magnitude more than that. The technical challenges inside companies are very different from those for the Web. The primary factor is what we call "fine-grained security." In summary, fine-grained security is the ability to interlace search with security at the document and individual levels. A huge technical challenge! Another challenge is the diverse types of documents. I'll describe some of the framework for the solution ... Security is every bit as important as searching. This aspect of secure search is the foundation from which we build up deeper functionality ... [What] I think really is the harbinger of the future, is to invoke ideas from social network theory. Prabhakar Raghavan gave the most recent talk in the Dertouzos Lecturer Series, which I attended. In this interview, he's talking about some of the same topics. Worth reading (and thinking about). At the interface between academia and industry, the first few bits and pieces of a solution are starting to come together. At least people are now thinking about the right problems ... Additionally, Raghavan discusses his experiences working at IBM's Almaden laboratory. As I read this section, I was thinking about the future impact of IBM's recent sale of part (most?) of this lab to Hitachi. (See my recent log entry for more details.) Where the Algorithm Meets the Electronics | 
