I'm an associate professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland. I joined the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2004, shortly after completing my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. My Ph.D. thesis was in theoretical linguistics (minimalist syntax)! I was promoted to associate professor in March 2009.

In addition, 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. A recent focus is large-data distributed applications with MapReduce (aka "cloud computing").

News

2009/07/19		Tutorial at SIGIR 2009: "Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce"
2009/06/10		Presentation on Genetic Sequence Analysis in the Clouds [pptx, pdf] at the Hadoop Summit 2009.
2009/05/31		Tutorial at NAACL HLT 2009: "Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce" (with Chris Dyer)
2009/05/13		Investing in the Cloud: A Breakfast Conversation
2009/05/06		Tech Talk at Google about cloud computing research and educational activities at Maryland
2009/04/15		Presentation at the Washington DC Hadoop Users Group (HUG) Meeting.
2009/04/03		Slides from a short course I taught on cloud computing and Hadoop.
2009/03/31		Quoted in a Washington Post article on cloud computing.
		[More cloud computing and MapReduce/Hadoop stuff...]

Research

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