speaker bios

Rosie Jones and Hema Raghavan (March 22, 2010)

Rosie Jones is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo!, based in Boston, MA. Her research interests include web search, geographic information retrieval, and natural language processing. She received her PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Tom Mitchell, where her doctoral thesis was titled Learning to Extract Entities from Labeled and Unlabeled Text. She co-organized the WSDM 2009 Workshop on Web Search Click Data (WSCD09) and gave a tutorial at SIGIR 2009 on "IR Prototypes and Web Search Hacks with Open Source Tools". She has served on the Senior PC for SIGIR 2007-2009, and is a Senior Member of the ACM.

Hema Raghavan is a Scientist in the Sponsored Search Sciences group of Yahoo! Labs. She works on large scale information retrieval and machine learning algorithms for better click through rate prediction for ads on Yahoo! Search. Prior to joining Yahoo! she obtained her PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she worked on Topic Detection and Tracking, Entity Models and Active Learning for Text Classification.

Jennifer Widom (September 16, 2009)

Jennifer Widom is the Fletcher Jones Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. She received her Bachelors degree from the Indiana University School of Music in 1982 and her Computer Science Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1987. She was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993. Her research interests span many aspects of nontraditional data management. She is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; she received the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2007 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2000; she has served on a variety of program committees, advisory boards, and editorial boards.
Her homepage is at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~widom.

Sue Dumais, Microsoft Research (Feb 19, 2008)

Susan Dumais is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research. She has been at Microsoft Research since 1997 and has published widely in the areas of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Her current research focuses on personal information management, user modeling and personalization, novel interfaces for interactive retrieval, and implicit measures of user interest and activity. She has worked closely with several Microsoft groups (Windows Desktop Search, Live Search, SharePoint Portal Server, and Office Online Help) on search-related innovations. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, she was at Bellcore and Bell Labs for many years, where she worked on Latent Semantic Indexing (a statistical method for concept-based retrieval), combining search and navigation, individual differences, and organizational impacts of new technology.

Susan has published more than 170 articles in the fields of information science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science, and holds several patents on novel retrieval algorithms and interfaces. She is Past-Chair of ACM's Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), and served on the NRC Committee on Computing and Communications Research to Enable Better Use of Information Technology in Digital Government, and the NRC Board on Assessment of NIST Programs. She is on the editorial boards of ACM: Transactions on Information Systems, ACM: Transactions on Human Computer Interaction, Human Computer Interaction, Information Processing and Management, Information Retrieval, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, and the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. She is an associate editor for the first and second editions of the Handbook of Applied Cognition, and serves on program committees for several conferences. She was elected to the CHI Academy in 2005, and an ACM Fellow in 2006. Susan is an adjunct professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, and has been a visiting faculty member at Stevens Institute of Technology, New York University, and the University of Chicago.

Martha Pollack (November 1, 2006)

Martha E. Pollack is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, where she also chairs the Computer Science and Engineering Division. She received her B.A. degree from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and has been a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh and a research staff member at the AI Center at SRI International. Pollack has conducted research in the areas of automated planning and execution monitoring, temporal reasoning and constraint satisfaction, and natural-language processing, as well as on assistive technology for cognitively impaired people. In April of 2004 she testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging about the potential value of assistive technology in an aging world. Pollack is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a recipient of the Computers and Thought Award (1991), an NSF Young Investigator's Award (1992), and the Univ. of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award (2000). She was program chair for IJCAI-97, is or has been on the editorial boards of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, AI Magazine, the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and Computational Linguistics, and was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2001-2005.

Susan Landau (October 25, 2006)

Susan Landau is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where she works on security, cryptography, and policy, including digital-rights management and surveillance issues. Landau had previously been a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, where she worked in algebraic algorithms. She is coauthor, with Whitfield Diffie, of ``Privacy on the Line: the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption'' (MIT Press, original edition: 1998; updated and expanded edition: 2007). She is a member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, a member of the editorial board of IEEE Security and Privacy, and she moderates the ``researcHers'' list, an international mailing list for women computer science researchers. Landau is an AAAS Fellow. She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.
Her hompage is at http://research.sun.com/people/slandau.

Barbara Ryder (October 11, 2006)

Barbara Ryder is a professor at Rutgers University, in the Division of Computer and Information Sciences.
Her homepage is at http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/%7Eryder/