I am a PhD candidate in Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am working in the Text Information Management Group (TIMAN) and the Data and Information System Group (DAIS). My advisor is Prof. ChengXiang Zhai.

I am on the job market now!

Research (Selected Publications », Google Scholar)

My research interests include information retrieval and data mining. I have been working on formal retrieval models, query understanding and reformulation, Web search relevance and ranking, mobile and local search, content recommendation, statistical language modeling, machine learning for information retrieval, contextual and personalized search, query log analysis, etc.

Recent Honors/Awards

ACM CIKM Best Student Paper Award, 2011

UIUC C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award, 2012

Facebook Fellowship Finalist, 2011

Yahoo!-DAIS Research Excellence Award, 2011

Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award, 2010

Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Finalist, 2010

Professional Activities

Program committee member, CIKM 2012

Program committee member, Poster Program, CIKM 2012

Program committee member, Poster Program, SIGIR 2012

Program committee member, ECIR 2012

Program committee member, CIKM 2011

Program committee member, SIGIR 2011

Program committee member, Poster Program, SIGIR 2011

Program committee member, AIRS 2011

Program committee member, QRU Workshop, SIGIR 2010

Invited Reviewer, Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)

Invited Reviewer, Information Processing & Management (IPM)

Invited Reviewer, Neurocomputing