W. Bruce Croft

Last updated

W. Bruce Croft is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work focuses on information retrieval. [1] He is the founder of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and served as the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems from 1995 to 2002. He was also a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board from 2000 to 2003. Since 2015, he is the Dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was Chair of the UMass Amherst Computer Science Department from 2001 to 2007.

Contents

Bruce Croft formed the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) in 1991, since when he and his students have worked with more than 90 industry and government partners on research and technology projects and have produced more than 900 papers. Bruce Croft has made major contributions to most areas of information retrieval, including pioneering work in clustering, passage retrieval, sentence retrieval, and distributed search. One of the most important areas of work for Croft relates to ranking functions and retrieval models, where he has led the development of one of the major approaches to modeling search: language modelling. In later years, Croft also led the way in the development of feature-based ranking functions. Croft and his research group have also developed a series of search engines: InQuery, the Lemur toolkit, Indri, and Galago. These search engines are open source and offer unique capabilities that are not replicated in other research retrieval platforms source – consequently they are downloaded by hundreds of researchers world wide. As a consequence of his work, Croft is one of the most cited researchers in information retrieval.

Education

Croft earned a bachelor's degree with honors in 1973 and a master's degree in computer science in 1974 from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He earned his Ph.D in computer science from the University of Cambridge in 1979 and joined the University of Massachusetts, Amherst faculty later that year.

Honors and awards

Croft has received several prestigious awards, including:

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

In information science and information retrieval, relevance denotes how well a retrieved document or set of documents meets the information need of the user. Relevance may include concerns such as timeliness, authority or novelty of the result.

Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father of Information Retrieval". His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. It was the very first system to use the now popular vector space model for Information Retrieval.

Clyde Lee Giles is an American computer scientist and the David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at the Pennsylvania State University. He is also Graduate Faculty Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Courtesy Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems, and Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory. He was Interim Associate Dean of Research in the College of IST. His graduate degrees are from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona and his undergraduate degrees are from Rhodes College and the University of Tennessee. His PhD is in optical sciences with advisor Harrison H. Barrett. His academic genealogy includes two Nobel laureates, Arnold Sommerfeld and prominent mathematicians.

The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval". SIGIR also co-sponsors the Vannevar Bush Award, for the best paper at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ricardo Baeza-Yates</span>

Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates is a Chilean-Catalan-American computer scientist that currently is the Director of Research of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University in the Silicon Valley campus. He is also part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. He is an expert member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's US Technology Policy Committee as well as IEEE's Ethics Committee.

Bibliographic coupling, like co-citation, is a similarity measure that uses citation analysis to establish a similarity relationship between documents. Bibliographic coupling occurs when two works reference a common third work in their bibliographies. It is an indication that a probability exists that the two works treat a related subject matter.

Relevance feedback is a feature of some information retrieval systems. The idea behind relevance feedback is to take the results that are initially returned from a given query, to gather user feedback, and to use information about whether or not those results are relevant to perform a new query. We can usefully distinguish between three types of feedback: explicit feedback, implicit feedback, and blind or "pseudo" feedback.

Query expansion (QE) is the process of reformulating a given query to improve retrieval performance in information retrieval operations, particularly in the context of query understanding. In the context of search engines, query expansion involves evaluating a user's input and expanding the search query to match additional documents. Query expansion involves techniques such as:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval</span> Subgroup of the Association for Computing Machinery

SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. The scope of the group's specialty is the theory and application of computers to the acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval and distribution of information; emphasis is placed on working with non-numeric information, ranging from natural language to highly structured data bases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GroupLens Research</span> Computer science research lab

GroupLens Research is a human–computer interaction research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities specializing in recommender systems and online communities. GroupLens also works with mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.

Learning to rank or machine-learned ranking (MLR) is the application of machine learning, typically supervised, semi-supervised or reinforcement learning, in the construction of ranking models for information retrieval systems. Training data may, for example, consist of lists of items with some partial order specified between items in each list. This order is typically induced by giving a numerical or ordinal score or a binary judgment for each item. The goal of constructing the ranking model is to rank new, unseen lists in a similar way to rankings in the training data.

David Ron Karger is an American computer scientist who is professor and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) is a research center at the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst. It is a leading research center in the area of Information Retrieval and Information Extraction. CIIR is led by Distinguished Professor W. Bruce Croft and Professor James Allan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monika Henzinger</span> German computer scientist

Monika Henzinger is a German computer scientist, and is a former director of research at Google. She is currently a professor at the University of Vienna. Her expertise is mainly on algorithms with a focus on data structures, algorithmic game theory, information retrieval, search algorithms and Web data mining. She is married to Thomas Henzinger and has three children.

ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Gonzalo Navarro Badino is a full professor of computer science at the University of Chile and ACM Distinguished Member, whose interests include algorithms and data structures, data compression and text searching. He also participates in the Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering and the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data .. He obtained his PhD at the University of Chile in 1998 under the supervision of Ricardo Baeza-Yates with the thesis Approximate Text Searching, then worked as a post-doctoral researcher with Esko Ukkonen and Maxime Crochemore.

Wei Wang is a Chinese-born American computer scientist. She is the Leonard Kleinrock Chair Professor in Computer Science and Computational Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles and the director of the Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi). Her research specializes in big data analytics and modeling, database systems, natural language processing, bioinformatics and computational biology, and computational medicine.

Hsiao-Wuen Hon is a Taiwanese-US researcher in speech technology, and coauthor of the book Spoken Language Processing. He is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft and Chairman of Microsoft's Asia-Pacific R&D Group.

James Allan is the Chair of Faculty and Professor of computer science at University of Massachusetts Amherst and was named an ACM Fellow 2020, for his research and contributions to the area of information retrieval. His research has been cited more than 20,000 times. In 2019, James Allan was elected to be the treasurer of the Computing Research Association for a term of two years.

References

  1. Croft, W. Bruce. "Biography" (PDF). Retrieved May 7, 2019.