Semantics and Knowledge Bases for Next-Generation Scholarly Discovery

As web search is becoming more and more structured thanks to the availability of knowledge bases, scholar engines are also evolving towards that direction while facing the similar challenges and issues. This session focuses on bridging the gap between unstructured text and structured relationships to create new sematic scholar engines. We hope this session serves as a discussion forum to bring together researchers from both academia and industrial labs from different disciplines to work together and exchange ideas on how to jointly optimize scholar engines and knowledge base systems while sharing their respective experiences in dealing with common issues in both areas.

Speaker Details

Alex Wade is Director for Scholarly Communication at Microsoft Research, where he oversees a portfolio of researcher-focused products and services to explore emerging trends in the ways that research is disseminated, archived, and re-used. Alex holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from U.C. Berkeley, and a Masters of Librarianship degree from the University of Washington. During his career at Microsoft, Alex has managed the corporate search and taxonomy management services; and served as Senior Program Manager for Windows Search. Prior to joining Microsoft, Alex was Systems Librarian at the University of Washington, and held technical library positions at the University of Michigan and the University of California at Berkeley.

Dr. Yang Song is a Researcher at the Internet Services and Research Center (ISRC), Microsoft Research Redmond. He has been with Microsoft Research since 2009. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, data mining and user modeling. He has published over 40 scientific research works on international conferences, journals and books. He also holds five US patents. Dr. Song received his Ph.D. degree from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the Pennsylvania State University, and B.S. degree from Department of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, China.

Dr. C. Lee Giles is the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University with appointments in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, and Supply Chain and Information Systems. His research interests are intelligent cyberinfrastructure and big data, specialty search engines, information retrieval, knowledge and information extraction, data mining, entity disambiguation, and social networks with over 400 papers published in these areas. He was a co-creator of the popular academic search engine CiteSeer (now CiteSeerX) and related scholarly and scientific search engines. He is a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and INNS. He recently gave a keynote at the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2013) on “Scholarly Big Data: Information Extraction and Data Mining.” His research has been funded by NSF, DARPA, Microsoft, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Smithsonian, IBM, NEC, NASA, Ford, and others.

Jie Tang is an associate professor with Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. His interests include social network analysis, data mining, and machine learning. He published more than 100 journal/conference papers and holds 10 patents. He served as PC Co-Chair of WSDM’15, ASONAM’15, ADMA’11, SocInfo’12, KDD-CUP Co-Chair of KDD’15, Poster Co-Chair of KDD’14, Workshop Co-Chair of KDD’13, Local Chair of KDD’12, Publication Co-Chair of KDD’11, and as the PC member of more than 50 international conferences. He is the principal investigator of National High-tech R&D Program (863), NSFC project, Chinese Young Faculty Research Funding, National 985 funding, and international collaborative projects with Minnesota University, IBM, Google, Nokia, Sogou, etc. He leads the project Arnetminer.org for academic social network analysis and mining, which has attracted millions of independent IP accesses from 220 countries/regions in the world. He was honored with the Newton Advanced Scholarship Award, CCF Young Scientist Award, NSFC Excellent Young Scholar, and IBM Innovation Faculty Award.

Dr. Oren Etzioni is Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He was a Professor at the University of Washington’s Computer Science department starting in 1991, receiving several awards including GeekWire’s Hire of the Year (2014), Seattle’s Geek of the Year (2013), the Robert Engelmore Memorial Award (2007), the IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award (2005), AAAI Fellow (2003), and a National Young Investigator Award (1993). He was also the founder or co-founder of several companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013), and the author of over 100 technical papers that have garnered roughly 20,000 citations. The goal of Oren’s research is to solve fundamental problems in AI, particularly the automatic learning of knowledge from text. Oren received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, and his B.A. from Harvard in 1986.

Kuansan Wang is a Principal Researcher and Director of Internet Service Research Center and Conversational System Research Center at Microsoft Research in Redmond where he is currently conducting research in web search, large scale data mining, dialog systems and web-scale natural language processing. He joined the Speech Technology Group in Microsoft Research in 1998, and has been the software architect for Speech Server 2004, Microsoft Response Point 2007 and co-authored six ISO/ECMA/W3C standards. Kuansan has a BS, MS from National Taiwan University and PhD from U of Maryland, College Park, all in Electrical Engineering.

Series:: Microsoft Research Faculty Summit
Date:: July 24, 2015
Speakers:: Alex Wade, C. Lee Giles, Jie Tang, Kuansan Wang, Oren Etzioni, and Yang Song
Affiliation:: Microsoft Research, Pennsylvania State University, Tsinghua University, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

- Alex D. Wade
  
  Principal Program Manager
- Jeff Running
- Kuansan Wang
  
  Managing Director, MSR Outreach Academic Services
- Yang Song
  
  Researcher
Research Area
- Search and information retrieval