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

I work at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). A recent research focus is large-data distributed applications with MapReduce. Check out my new Cloud Computing Center!

Also of interest: my forthcoming MapReduce book.

News

2009/10/02		Featured in a New York Times article titled "Training to Climb an Everest of Digital Data"
2009/10/05		CLuE PI Meeting 2009 for the Google/IBM Academic Cloud Computing Initative (ACCI) in the bay area
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...]

Cloud Computing Projects

• The University of Maryland Cloud Computing Center
• Cloud⁹: A MapReduce Library for Hadoop
• Ivory: A Hadoop toolkit for Web-scale information retrieval

Research

• Publications
• Cloud computing
• Downloads
• The complex interactive Question Answering task (ciQA) at TREC
• The CLIP colloquium series

Teaching

• My cloud computing course, version 3.0 (Spring 2010)
• CMSC 723: Computational Linguistics I (Fall 2009)
• LBSC 888: Doctoral Seminar (Fall 2009)
• 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