Cover

”I recently came up with this idea of using scrabble to illustrate my thesis, as I have been playing the scrabble game, Wordfeud, a lot on my smart phone. At first I was thinking of putting the image of an open book on the cover, but I think this design is better. My research is about simplifying search engines using matrix computation. The matrix with numbers under the magnifying glass represents the method. The scrabble words, like music, rhythm and bigband, represent the collection of information to be searched. They are chosen from my hobby, swing dance. Using words from my thesis like array, query and database, instead, would have been boring. The cover idea was mine. A friend made it. My fellow swing dancers like it a lot, too. Thanks to the illustration, it’s easy for them to understand what I’m talking about.”

Roberto Cornacchia, ‘Querying sparse matrices for information retrieval’, 29 May 2012, PhD Supervisor Professor Arjen de Vries (EEMCS faculty).