CS graduate student wins Google fellowship for search & information retrieval

Computer science PhD student Maryam Karimzadehgan has recently been awarded a Google PhD Fellowship for her research in search and information retrieval.  The fellowship is designed to honor and support research being done by students who are forging the future in the field of computer science.

Karimzadehgan’s research aims at developing general models and algorithms for searching, filtering and mining text – making it much, much easier to find the exact information you’re looking for. Her research interests span several related areas in information retrieval, including retrieval models, computational advertising, social networking, interactive search, expert finding, user modeling, and bioinformatics applications. She has developed a new effective estimation method for translation language model (how your computer interprets what you’re asking) that can improve search accuracy significantly over the state-of-the-art language models.

Karimzadehgan has also leveraged social networks in an effort to predict a user’s behavior using data from the people that user has the most contact with – this improves what is called “expert finding performance,” and explains why, if you’re friends with a bunch of gearheads constantly searching for car stats, your search engine will know that between jaguars with spots and Jaguar sports cars, you’ll want to know more about the latter. She is currently working on developing more effective retrieval models by applying machine learning techniques to improve ranking and optimizing search results over an entire session of user interactions, rather than at the level of each individual search.

The Google PhD Fellowship is intended to support university students who continue to be the source of some of the most innovative research in computer science, and, according to Google, is intended to foster those students “who are the future of our field.”  Google, ever mindful of the growing potential of global extension, brought the fellowship program in 2010 for the first time to Europe, Israel, China and Canada.   Awarded students “exemplify excellence in all areas,” and are those who are surely to impact not only their fields, but most likely the entire world. The Google Fellowship provides funding for tuition and expenses, an Android-powered phone, and a Google mentor.
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Contact: Jennifer LaMontagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4049.

Writer: Tom Hord, Department of Computer Science.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor.