I am a Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft's Bing R&D Division where I work on data modeling problems in Web Search. Currently my work focussed on online user experience metrics and visualization. Since joining Bing in 2009, some of the web search projects I responsible for prototyping and shipping are: machine-learned ranking and placement of vertical search results on the SERP; crawling policy that uses a machine-learned selection algorithm; index-based conflation of knolwedge in Bing Satori knowledge base; language-independent document quality classifiers; and as the Spam Dev Lead, I scaled out the spam removal process by establishing a ML+Editor-in-the-Loop process, introduced a modular ML-centric architecture for rapid model development and deployment, and contained spam attacks.

Prior to joining Microsoft, I was a Principal Scientist at the Yahoo! Labs from June 2007 to July 2009. At Yahoo! I was responsible for proposing and prototyping the machine-learned algorithm for web summarization (aka snippets/captions), and I was the Tech lead of the team that productized the ML summarization framework. The summarizer served over 3 billion queries per month in the US market and was deployed in various international markets.

From February 2001 to May 2006 I was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA, where I was an early member of the Webfountain project and worked on web search relevance and information extraction. Prior to joining IBM I was a Co-Director of the Language and Media Processing Laboratory, at the University of Maryland, College Park. I received my PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA in 1996.

I have over 80 publications in the areas of web search and mining, information retrieval and extraction, optical character recognition, computer vision, and systems. A paper I co-authored received the best paper award at the WWW 2003 conference. At University of Maryland (with colleagues) I raised over 3 million dollars from government and industry. I have co-chaired and have been a member of program committee of numerous conferences. I am a senior member of the IEEE.

In my spare time I enjoy mountaineering and running.

Citations

Selected Publications:

Papers Patents Workshop