Thorsten Joachims gave a keynote address on "Learning from user interactions" at the Eighth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), one of the leading conferences on search and data mining on the Web. He discussed how intelligent systems that learn from their users can be designed in a principled way. View the Abstract. To see Slides.
Also, graduating PhD student Karthik Raman was named a recipient of an Outstanding Reviewer Award at the same conference