Who I am

I am an assistant professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland, College Park. I joined the faculty in August 2004, shortly after completing my Ph.D. in 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

What I work on

• I primarily work at the intersection of natural language processing and information retrieval. A lot of my research focuses on question answering (QA), where the goal is to develop systems that return "answers", not merely "hits".
• A lot of my research is in the clinical and biomedical domain, given my affiliation with the National Library of Medicine.
• I'm also interested in issues related to information-seeking behavior and interactive retrieval systems.
• My Ph.D. thesis was in theoretical linguistics (minimalist syntax).

My research

• Publications
• Downloads
• Current and Former Students
• Cloud⁹: A MapReduce Library for Hadoop

My teaching

• Cloud Computing: Web-Scale Information Processing Applications (Spring, 2008)
• INFM 700: Information Architecture (Spring, 2008)
• LBSC 690: Information Technology (Fall, 2007)
• LBSC 796/INFM 718R: Information Retrieval Systems (Spring, 2006)
• LBSC 690: Information Technology — Gallery of Final Projects

Other

• The complex interactive Question Answering task (ciQA) at TREC
• The CLIP colloquium series
• Random thoughts