I'm an assistant professor in the iSchool (College of Information Studies) at the University of Maryland, College Park. I joined the faculty in August 2004, shortly after completing my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. I'm affiliated with a number of other organizations:

• Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab (CLIP)
• Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL)
• Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS)
• Department of Computer Science
• National Center of Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine

I work at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). Put simply, I develop technologies that help users find what they're looking for. A lot of my research is in the life sciences domain, where I'm looking to help scientists access the biomedical literature. Recently, I've been working on large-data distributed applications with MapReduce (i.e., "cloud computing").

Believe it or not, my Ph.D. thesis was in theoretical linguistics (minimalist syntax)!

Research

• Publications
• Downloads
• Current and Former Students
• Cloud⁹: A MapReduce Library for Hadoop
• The complex interactive Question Answering task (ciQA) at TREC
• The CLIP colloquium series

Teaching

• My cloud computing course, version 2.0 (Fall, 2008)
• LBSC 690: Information Technology (Fall, 2008)
• My cloud computing course, version 1.0 (Spring, 2008)
• INFM 700: Information Architecture (Spring, 2008)
• LBSC 796/INFM 718R: Information Retrieval Systems (Spring, 2006)
• LBSC 690: Information Technology — Gallery of Final Projects