What's New
Bruce Croft contributes to 100th Anniversary Issue of Proceedings of the IEEE
CIIR Director Bruce Croft and Mark Sanderson (former CIIR Post-Doc; now a Professor at RMIT University) contributed to the 100th Anniversary Issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE with their paper "The History of Information Retrieval Research."
More on the IEEE special issue.
Search & Mining Awards announced
Graduate students Henry Feild and Limin Yao are this year's recipients of the Department's Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, sponsored by Yahoo!. View the list of previous recipients.
Benjamin Marlin joins CIIR
We are pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Benjamin Marlin has joined the CIIR. Dr. Marlin joined the Computer Science Department tenure-track faculty in Fall 2011. His research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics with an emphasis on the development of probabilistic models and highly scalable approximate inference and learning methods. His applied research makes use of these techniques in number of areas including recommender systems and collaborative filtering, ranking, and medical informatics.
Best Paper Award at BooksOnline 2011 Workshop
Marc-Allen Cartright, Henry A. Field and James Allan received the Best Paper Award at the BooksOnline 2011 Workshop (held during CIKM 2011) for their paper "Evidence Finding using a Collection of Books."
CIIR alum Eric Brown and Watson take on Jeopardy! challenge
In late 2006, Eric Brown (UMass Amherst CS Ph.D. ’96) joined a dozen other researchers at IBM's Watson Research Center and, under the lead of principal investigator David Ferrucci, took on the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge, where the goal is to build a QA system, named Watson, that can play the popular television quiz show Jeopardy! and beat a human champion. In a CS newsletter article, Dr. Brown describes the project. To showcase their results, Watson will compete against Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The matches will air on February 14, 15, and 16, 2011.
Hanna Wallach wins Best Paper Award at AISTATS 2010
Assistant Professor Hanna Wallach (along with co-authors Ryan Prescott Adams and Zoubin Ghahramani) won the Best Paper Award at AISTATS 2010 (the Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics) for the paper "Learning the Structure of Deep Sparse Graphical Models."
Hanna Wallach joins CIIR
We are pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Hanna Wallach and her students Meagan Day and Rachel Shorey are now part of the CIIR. Dr. Wallach joined the Computer Science Department in Fall 2010 as part of UMass Amherst's interdisciplinary research cluster in computational social science. Her primary research goal is to develop new mathematical models and computational tools for analyzing vast quantities of structured and unstructured data in order to identify and answer social science questions.
James Allan named SIGIR Chair
Professor James Allan was named to a 3-year term as Chair of SIGIR (the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval). ACM SIGIR addresses issues ranging from theory to user demands in the application of computers to the acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval, and distribution of information.
CIIR Alums Author SIGIR '09 Best Paper
CIIR alum Fernando Diaz (Ph.D. '04), former CIIR Research Professor and UMass Amherst CS alum Jamie Callan (Ph.D. '93), and co-authors Jaime Arguello (CMU) and Jean-Francois Crespo (Yahoo! Labs Montreal), received the Best Paper Award at the 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '09) for their paper "Sources of Evidence for Vertical Selection." Fernando is currently a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Labs Montreal and Jamie is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ben Carterette, CIIR Alum, receives Best Paper Award
Ben Carterette (Ph.D. '08), Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware, won the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval for his paper "An Analysis of NP-Completeness in Novelty and Diversity Ranking." The conference was held at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, U.K., in September 2009. The award was sponsored by Yahoo! Research.
Bruce Croft gives keynote speech at ECIR 2009
Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft gave a keynote speech at ECIR 2009 in Toulouse, France entitled "Query Evolution."
CIIR Alum Reunion
The CIIR/IRLab held a reunion during the SIGIR 2009 conference held in Boston, MA on Wednesday, July 22, 2009. In addition to gathering together old friends, we celebrated Bruce Croft's 30th year at UMass Amherst and James Allan's 15th year. View group photo from the event.
New IR Textbook
A new textbook, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice, written by W. Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman was published in 2009 by Addison-Wesley. A full draft is available for review online. Metzler and Strohman are CIIR alums. Metzler (Ph.D. '07) is currently at Yahoo! Research and Strohman (Ph.D. '08) is at Google.
Bruce Croft gives keynote speech at CIKM 2008
Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft gave a keynote address entitled “Unsolved Problems in Search” at the 2008 ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in October. In addition, Croft gave a speech, “Longer Queries, Better Answers?,” as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus in June.
David Smith joins CIIR
David Smith, a Ph.D. candidate from Johns Hopkins University, joined the CIIR as a Research Assistant Professor in September. Smith brings his experience in the areas of natural language processing and machine translation to the CIIR.
CIIR alums author SIGIR '08 Best Paper
CIIR alumnus Jeremy Pickens (Ph.D. '04) and co-authors Gene Golovchinsky, Chirag Shah (CIIR alum; MS '06), Pernilla Qvarfordt, and Maribeth Back received the Best Paper Award at the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '08) for their paper "Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Exploratory Search." Jeremy is a Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Labs and Chirag is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
CIIR presented 8 papers and 2 posters at SIGIR 2008
The 31st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '08) featured 8 papers and 2 posters from the CIIR. SIGIR 2008 received 496 submissions and accepted 85 papers (a 17% acceptance rate). CIIR attendees at SIGIR '08 included Bruce Croft, James Allan, Michael Bendersky, Ben Carterette, Greg Druck, Giridhar Kumaran, Kyung Soon Lee (CIIR Visiting Researcher, '07-'08), Jangwon Seo, Mark Smucker, and Xiaobing Xue.
SIGIR 2009 held in Boston, MA
James Allan, UMass Amherst CS Professor and CIIR co-director, and Northeastern University's Jay Aslam are the General co-Chairs of SIGIR '09 conference held in Boston, Massachusetts in July 2009. See sigir2009.org for details.
Carterette receives Microsoft Live Labs Fellowship (2007-2008)
Microsoft announced that CIIR graduate student Ben Carterette was selected for a Microsoft Live Labs Fellowship. In the 2007-2008 competition, Microsoft chose only four Live Labs fellows and 12 Microsoft Research fellows.
