Alum Connections - Fall 2009
In September, CIIR alum Ben Carterette (Ph.D. '08) received the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR '09) for his paper, "An Analysis of NP-Completeness in Novelty and Diversity Ranking." The award was sponsored by Yahoo! Carterette is currently as Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware.
This summer, Anita Raja (Ph.D. '03) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Software and Information Systems at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Raja was also married in June to Dr. Cephas Swamidoss. Their wedding was held in Chennai, India.
In July, Microsoft appointed Steven Sinofsky (M.S. '89) as President of its Windows and Windows Live Division. Prior to this position, Sinofsky was Senior Vice President of the Windows and Windows Live engineering group. He previously oversaw the development of the Microsoft Office system of programs, servers and services.
Evan Smith (M.S. '91, BS '88) is currently in his fourth year of medical school at the University of Chicago. Prior to returning to school, Smith was the Director of Engineering at Wellogic.