Text Information Management and Analysis Group

Recent News:

[Aug 2012] TIMan group welcomes 5 new graduate students: Xueqing Liu (Ph.D.), Rongda Zhu (Ph.D.), Yinan Zhang (Ph.D.), Gurmeet Singh (MS), Han-Wen Yeh (MS), and 3 undergraduate students: Sean Massung, Danila Nikitin, and Chi (Ben) Zheng.

[Aug 2012] Congratulations to Maryam Karimzadehgan, Yuanhua Lv, and Duo Zhang on passing their Ph.D. thesis defenses!

[Aug 2012] Congratulations to Hyun Duk ("Jason") Cho and Jing Zou on graduating with MS in Computer Science!

[Jul 2012] Hongning Wang is one of the 14 students in the US and Canada to receive the prestigious Google Ph.D. Fellowship in 2012. Congratulations!

[Apr 2012] Congratulations to Hongning Wang on receiving the 2012 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge Award!

[Nov 2011] Yuanhua Lv's paper on lower bounding TF normalization has received the CIKM 2011 Best Student Paper Award! The paper identified a common problem of existing retrieval models and proposed a general way of solving the problem that can be applied to improve multiple state of the art retrieval models.

[Sept 2011] TIMan welcomes new MS student Nipun Sehrawat.

[Aug 2011] TIMan welcomes three new members: Ph.D. student Xiaolong Wang, MS student Hyun Duk (Jason) Cho, and BS/MS student Jing Zou.

Congratulations to Yue Lu and Alex Kotov on passing their thesis defenses!

[Jun 2011] Congratulations to Yanen Li and Huizhong Duan on winning the second place in the Microsoft Speller Challenge! Their system, CloudSpeller, used a hidden Markov model combined with a large lexicon constructed based on Wikipedia and Microsoft n-gram Web service; details can be found in this workshop paper.

[Jun 2011] ChengXiang Zhai will give a keynote talk at ACM SIGIR 2011 and at ICTIR 2011.

[Mar 2011] Ph.D. student Shima Gerani from University of Lugano is visiting TIMan group March-August 2011.

Highlights:

The TIMan group currently has 19 people, mostly Ph.D. students. Since the group was founded in 2002, 10 Ph.D. students, 14 M.S. students, and 5 undergraduate students have graduated and landed on jobs in both industry and academia.
We work on a wide range of research areas, including information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, bioinformatics, and Web information management.
Our research has been supported by various government agencies (e.g., NSF, NIH, DHS, DOI, NASA, AFOSR), companies (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, IBM), and private foundations (e.g., Alfred P. Sloan).
Group members have received many awards and honors, such as
- Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (ChengXiang Zhai, 2004)
- Sloan Research Fellowship Award (ChengXiang Zhai, 2008)
- ACM Distinguished Scientist (ChengXiang Zhai, 2009)
- IBM Faculty Award (ChengXiang Zhai, 2009)
- ACM SIGIR 2004 Best Paper Award (Hui Fang, Tao Tao, ChengXiang Zhai)
- ACM KDD 2006 Best Student Paper Award Runner-Up (Qiaozhu Mei, Dong Xin, Hong Cheng, Jiawei Han, ChengXiang Zhai)
- ACM KDD 2007 Best Student Paper Award Runner-Up (Qiaozhu Mei, Xuehua Shen, ChengXiang Zhai)
- Yahoo! PhD Student Fellowship (Qiaozhu Mei, 2007-2009; Xuanhui Wang, 2008-2009)
- Google Ph.D. Fellowship (Maryam Karimzadehgan, 2010; Hongning Wang, 2012)
- Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award ( Maryam Karimzadehgan, 2009; Yuanhua Lv, 2010; Hongning Wang, 2012)
- UIUC DCS C.L. and Jane Liu Award (Qiaozhu Mei, 2006-2007; Yue Lu, 2008-2009)