Doctoral students John Foley and Emma Strubell are the 2016 recipients of the College's Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, sponsored by Yahoo!.
Emma has been doing ground-breaking work in efficient machine learning for natural language processing that can be run at large scale. This includes 5x - 10x speedups in part-of-speech tagging, parsing and named entity recognition with minimal loss of accuracy. For this work Emma won an ACL 2015 Outstanding Paper award. She is now doing new work in deep learning for NLP with similar goals.
John received the award for contributions to IR research as well as support of the Galago search engine and its users. John's in-depth understanding of the Galago search engine has enabled him to be a valuable source of support in the IRlab. It has also allowed his research to touch on efficiency and data structures issues in ways that would otherwise be impossible.
View the list of previous recipients.