Dissertation title:

Agent Interactions in Decentralized Environments

Advisor:

Shlomo Zilberstein

Research interests:

Artificial Intelligence, Theoretical Computer Science, and Philosophy of Computer Science

Employment preference:

Academia

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

mwallen "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://rbr.cs.umass.edu/~mwallen/

Dissertation title:

Combinatorial Markov Random Fields and their Applications to Information Organization

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

Machine Learning and Information Retrieval

Current Position:

Research Scientist, HP Labs, Palo Alto

Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

ronb@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~ronb/

Dissertation title:

Low-cost and Robust Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

Information retrieval

Employment preference:

Academia or Industry

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

carteret "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~carteret/

Dissertation title:

PROPEL: An Approach Supporting User Guidance in Developing Precise and Accessible Property Specifications

Advisor:

Lori A. Clarke and George Avrunin

Research interests:

Software Engineering, Requirements Engineering

Employment preference:

Academia or Industry

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

rcobleig@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~rcobleig/

Dissertation title:

Learning and Inference in Probabilistic Logic with application to Natural Language Processing

Advisor:

Andrew McCallum

Research interests:

Machine learning, natural language processing

Employment preference:

Industry/Academia

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~culotta/

Dissertation title:

Whole-Body Strategies for Mobility and Manipulation

Advisor:

Roderic Grupen

Research interests:

Robotics

Employment preference:

Industry or Postdoctoral

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

pdeegan@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-robotics.cs.umass.edu/~pdeegan/

Dissertation title:

Distributed Sensing Networks: Archiving, Indexing, and Querying

Advisor:

Prashant Shenoy

Research interests:

Storage and networking aspects of operating systems, especially small-scale sensor network systems.

Current Position:

Member of Technical Staff Intern, VMware

Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

pjd "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~pjd/

Dissertation title:

Regularizing Query-Based Retrieval Scores

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

Information Retrieval and Machine Learning

Current Position:

Academia or Industry

Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

fdiaz@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~fdiaz/

Dissertation title:

Automatic Capture and Creation of Presentations from Multimedia Lectures

Advisor:

W. Richards Adrion & Allen Hanson

Research interests:

Technology for Education and Computer Vision

Employment preference:

Academia

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

pauld "at"cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://vis-cs.umass.edu/~pauld/

Dissertation title:

Incident Threading in News

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

Topic Detection and Tracking, Information Retrieval

Employment preference:

Academia or Industry

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

aofeng@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~aofeng/

Dissertation title:

Statistical Models for Text Query-Based Image Retrieval

Advisor:

R. Manmatha

Research interests:

Information Retrieval

Employment preference:

Research Scientist, Siemens Corporate Research

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

slfeng "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/

Dissertation title:

A Statistical Approach to Improving Accuracy in Classifier Ensembles

Advisor:

Paul E. Utgoff

Research interests:

Machine Learning, Statistics, Distributed Systems, Machine Perception

Employment preference:

Academia or Industry

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

gholness@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~gholness

Dissertation title:

Searching Question and Answer Archive

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information Retrieval

Current Position:

Software Engineer, Google Inc.

Graduation date:

September 2007

Email address:

jeon@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~jeon/

Dissertation title:

Efficient User Interaction In Information Retrieval

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

Information Retrieval and Machine Learning

Current Position:

Scientist, Microsoft Live Labs

Expected Graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

giridhar@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~giridhar

Dissertation title:

Geometric Constraint Systems with Applications in CAD and Biology

Advisor:

Ileana Streinu

Research interests:

Computational Geometry

Current Position:

Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science, Mount Holyoke College

Expected graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

alee "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~alee/

Dissertation title:

Pachinko Allocation: DAG-Structured Mixture Models of Topic Correlations

Advisor:

Andrew McCallum

Research interests:

Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing

Current Position:

Senior Software Development Engineer, Yahoo! Inc.

Graduation date:

September 2007

Email address:

weili@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.ciir.cs.umass.edu/~weili/

Dissertation title:

Low-Latency Anonymity Systems: Statistical Attacks and New Applications

Advisor:

Brian Levine

Research interests:

Anonymity systems, security, empirical methods; also, peer-to-peer architectures and disruption tolerant networks

Current Position:

Mellon CTW Postdoctoral Fellow/Visiting Faculty, Department of Math and Computer Science, Wesleyan University

Expected Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

liberato@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~liberato/

Dissertation title:

On Joint Coding and Combinatorial Optimization in Communication Networks

Advisor:

Donald Towsley & Micah Adler

Research interests:

Networking, Algorithms and Information Theory, also interested in Social Networks/Machine Learning and Bioinformatics

Employment Preference:

Research Scientist, Adverplex, Inc.

Expected Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

liujn@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~liujn/

Dissertation title:

Cluster-Based Retrieval from the Language Modeling Perspective

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Classification, Information User Behavior, Knowledge and Information Management

Current Position:

Software Design Engineer V, Hewlett Packard

Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

xliu "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~xliu/

Dissertation title:

Effectively Modeling Term Dependencies in Information Retrieval

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information Retrieval, Machine Learning

Current Position:

Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research

Graduation date:

September 2007

Email address:

metzler@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~metzler

Dissertation title:

Skill Acquisition in Autonomous Agents

Advisor:

Andrew G. Barto

Research interests:

AI & Machine Learning

Employment preference:

Academia

Expected Graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

ozgur@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~ozgur/

Dissertation title:

Navigating Document Networks

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

Information retrieval with a focus on leveraging user interaction to improve retrieval performance.

Employment preference:

Academia

Expected Graduation date:

September 2008

Email address:

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~smucker/

Dissertation title:

Efficient Processing of Complex Features for Information Retrieval

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information Retrieval, Systems, Data Processing

Current Position:

Software Engineer, Google Inc.

Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

strohman@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~strohman/

Dissertation title:

Monitoring, Measurement, and Control of Multimedia Traffic in IP Networks

Advisor:

James F. Kurose & Donald F. Towsley

Research interests:

Computer Networks and Distributed Systems

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Illinois State University at Normal

Graduation date:

September 2007

Email address:

kwsuh@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-net.cs.umass.edu/~kwsuh

Dissertation title:

Local Training for Conditional Random Fields

Advisor:

Andrew McCallum

Research interests:

Information Retrieval

Current Position:

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California Berkeley

Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

casutton@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~casutton/

Dissertation title:

Optimization Techniques for Finite State Verification

Advisor:

Lori A. Clarke and George Avrunin

Research interests:

Software Engineering, Software Verification

Employment Preference:

Academia or Industry

Expected Graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

tjb@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~tjb

Dissertation title:

Topic Models in Information Retrieval

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information retrieval models, information extraction, table processing, question answering

Current Position:

Research Scientist, Yahoo! Inc.

Graduation date:

September 2007

Email address:

xwei@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~xwei/

Dissertation title:

Unified Detection and Recognition for Reading Text in Scene Images

Advisor:

Allen Hanson & Erik Learned-Miller

Research interests:

Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Probabilistic Reasoning

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Grinnell College

Expected Graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

weinman "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/~weinman/

Dissertation title:

Motion Generation with Workspace Structural Information for Autonomous Mobile Manipulation

Advisor:

Oliver Brock

Research interests:

Robotics

Employment Preference:

Industry

Expected Graduation date:

May 2008

Email address:

yuandong@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-robotics.cs.umass.edu/~yuandong/

Dissertation title:

Routing in DTN: Performance Modeling, Network Coding Benefit and Real Trace Studies

Advisor:

James F. Kurose and Donald F. Towsley

Research interests:

Computer Networks

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Fordham University

Graduation date:

September 2007

Email address:

ellenz@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-net.cs.umass.edu/~ellenz/

Dissertation title:

Predicting Retrieval Performance

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information Retrieval

Current Position:

Software Engineer, Google, Inc.

Graduation date:

February 2008

Email address:

yzhou "at" cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~yzhou/index.htm