ChengXiang Zhai is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002. He worked at Clairvoyance Corp. as a Research Scientist and, later, a Senior Research Scientist from 1997 to 2000. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and bioinformatics. He serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Information Retrieval Journal , and is a program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004 , NAACL HLT 2007, and ACM SIGIR 2009. He received the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the ACM SIGIR 2004 Best Paper Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2008,