Eugene Agichtein

Education

• Ph.D. Computer Science, May 2005. Columbia University, New York, New York.
          Dissertation: Extracting Relations from Large Text Collections (advisor: Luis Gravano).
• M.S. Computer Science, May 2000. Columbia University, New York, New York.
• B.S. Engineering, May 1998. The Cooper Union, New York, New York.

Professional Employment

• September 2006 - present: Assistant Professor. Mathematics and Computer Science Department, Emory University
• May-June 2007: Visiting Researcher. Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, CA
• September 2004 - August 2006: Postdoctoral Researcher. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA
• 1998 - 2004: Research Assistant. Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York, NY
• Summer 2003: Research Intern. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA
• Summer 2001: Research Intern. IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA
• Summer 2000: Research Intern. NEC Research Institute, Princeton, NJ
• 1997-1998: Junior Research Scientist. The Proteus Project, New York University Computer Science Department, New York, NY

Honors and Awards

• Microsoft Research "Beyond Search" Award, 2007
• Best Paper Award, ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2006)
• Best Student Paper Award, 19th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2003)
• Award for Exemplary Service to the Computer Science Department, Columbia University, 2002
• Award for Excellence in Teaching, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University, 2001
• Full tuition scholarship, The Cooper Union, 1994-1998

PUBLICATIONS
http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~eugene/publications.html

Patent

• U.S. Patent 7,269,545: E. Agichtein and S. Lawrence. Method for retrieving answers from an information retrieval system.

Tutorials

1. Towards Web-Scale Information Extraction, Eugene Agichtein, webcast, ACM SIGKDD Web Seminar, March 2007
2. Scalable Information Extraction and Integration, Eugene Agichtein and Sunita Sarawagi, presented at the ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2006

Invited Papers

3. E. Agichtein, Web Information Extraction and User Information Needs: Towards Closing the Gap, in the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin issue on Web-Scale Data, Systems, and Semantics, December 2006
4. E. Agichtein, Scaling Information Extraction to Large Document Collections, in the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin issue on Searching and Mining Literature Digital Libraries, December 2005

Journal Papers

5. S. Sahay, S. Mukherjea, E. Agichtein, E. V Garcia, S. Navathe, and A. Ram, Discovering Semantic Biomedical Relations utilizing the Web, to appear in the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDE), special issue on Bioinformatics, 2008
6. P. Ipeirotis, E. Agichtein, P. Jain, and L. Gravano, Towards a Query Optimizer for Text-Centric Tasks, in ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), vol. 32, no. 4, 2007
7. E. Agichtein, S. Lawrence and L. Gravano, Learning to Find Answers to Questions on the Web, in ACM Transactions on Internet Technology (TOIT) Special Issue on "Machine Learning for the Internet", 2004
8. H. Yu and E. Agichtein, Extracting Synonymous Gene and Protein Terms from Biological Literature, in Bioinformatics, 2003 (also in Proc. of ISMB 2003)
9. F. M. Torres, E. Agichtein, L. Grinberg, G. Yu, and R. Q. Topper, A note on the application of the "Boltzmann simplex"-Simulated Annealing algorithm to global optimizations of argon and water clusters, Journal of Molecular Structure (THEOCHEM), 1997

Papers in Refereed Conferences

10. Y. Liu, J. Bian, and E. Agichtein, Predicting Information Seeker Satisfaction in Community Question Answering, in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2008 (17% accepted)
11. J. Bian, Y. Liu, E. Agichtein and H. Zha. Finding the Right Facts in the Crowd: Factoid Question Answering over Social Media, in Proc. of the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2008 (11% accepted)
12. Y. Liu and E. Agichtein, You've Got Answers: Towards Personalized Models for Predicting Success in Community Question Answering (short paper), in Proc. of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2008 (25% accepted)
13. B. Li, Y. Liu, and E. Agichtein, CoCQA: Co-Training Over Questions and Answers for Predicting Question Subjectivity Orientation (full paper), in Proc. of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2008 (21% accepted)
14. E. Agichtein, C. Castillo, D. Donato, A. Gionis, G. Mishne, Finding High Quality Content in Social Media, in Proc. of the ACM Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM), 2008 (16% accepted)
15. C. Clarke, E. Agichtein, S. T. Dumais, and R. W. White, The Influence of Caption Features on Clickthrough Patterns in Web Search, in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2007 (18% accepted)
16. E. Agichtein, C. Burges, and E. Brill, Question Answering over Implicitly Structured Web Content, in Proc. of the IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence (WI), 2007 (17% accepted)
17. P. Jurczyk and E. Agichtein, Discovering Authorities in Question Answer Communities Using Link Analysis (short paper),  in Proc. of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2007 (26% accepted)
18. E. Agichtein, E. Brill, and S. T. Dumais, Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating User Behavior Information, in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2006 (19% accepted)
19. E. Agichtein, E. Brill, S. T. Dumais, and R. Ragno, Learning User Interaction Models for Predicting Web Search Result Preferences,  in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2006 (19% accepted)
20. P. Ipeirotis, E. Agichtein, P. Jain, and L. Gravano, To Search or to Crawl: Towards a Query Optimizer for Text-Centric Tasks, in Proc. of the ACM Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), Best Paper Award, 2006 (13% accepted)
21. E. Agichtein and Z. Zheng, Identifying “Best Bet” Web Search Results by Mining Past User Behavior (short paper),  in Proc. of the ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, (KDD), Industrial Applications track, 2006 (24% accepted)
22. E. Agichtein, Confidence Estimation Methods for Partially Supervised Relation Extraction (short paper), in Proc. of the SIAM Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 2006 (30% accepted)
23. E. Agichtein and S. Cucerzan, Predicting Accuracy of Extracting Information from Unstructured Text Collections, in Proc. of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2005 (18% accepted)
24. E. Agichtein and V. Ganti, Mining Reference Tables for Automatic Text Segmentation, in Proc. of the  ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2004 (12% accepted)
25. E. Eskin and E. Agichtein, Combining Text Mining and Sequence Analysis to Discover Protein Functional Regions, in Proc. of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB), 2004 (28% accepted)
26. E. Agichtein and L. Gravano, Querying Text Databases for Efficient Information Extraction, in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Best Student Paper Award, 2003 (14% accepted)
27. H. Yu and E. Agichtein, Extracting Synonymous Gene and Protein Terms from Biological Literature, in Proc. of the Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), 2003 (15% accepted)
28. E. Agichtein, S. Lawrence and L. Gravano, Learning Search Engine Specific Query Transformations for Question Answering,  in the 10th World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2001 (20% accepted)
29. E. Agichtein and L. Gravano, Snowball: Extracting Relations from Large Plain-Text Collections, in the 5th ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries (ACM DL), 2000 (33% accepted)

Papers in Refereed Workshops and Poster and Demonstration Sessions

30. Q. Guo, E. Agichtein, C. Clarke and A. Ashkan. Understanding "Abandoned" Ads: Towards Personalized Commercial Intent Inference via Mouse Movement Analysis, in Proc. of the SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Information Retrieval in Advertising (IRA), 2008
31. A. Ashkan, C. Clarke, E. Agichtein and Q. Guo. Characterizing Query Intent From Ad Clickthrough Data, in Proc. of the SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Information Retrieval in Advertising (IRA), 2008
32. J. Bian, Y. Liu, E. Agichtein and H. Zha, A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media,  in Proc. of the WWW Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval (AIRWeb), 2008
33. Q. Guo and E. Agichtein, Exploring Client-Side Instrumentation for Personalized Search Intent Inference: Preliminary Experiments,  in Proc. of the  AAAI 2008 Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization and Recommender Systems (ITWP), 2008
34. B. Li, Y. Liu, A. Ram, E. V. Garcia, and E. Agichtein, Subjectivity Analysis for Questions in QA Communities (poster), in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2008
35. Y. Liu, E. Agichtein, On the Evolution of the Yahoo! Answers QA Community (poster), in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2008
36. Q. Guo, E. Agichtein, Exploring Mouse Movements for Inferring Query Intent (poster),  in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2008
37. P. Jurczyk and E. Agichtein. HITS on Question Answer Portals: an Exploration of Link Analysis for Author Ranking (poster),  in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2007
38. L. Xiong and E. Agichtein. Towards Privacy-Preserving Query Log Publishing, in Proc. of the Query Log Analysis: Social and Technological Challenges Workshop at WWW 2007
39. S.Sahay, E. Agichtein, E.V. Garcia, B. Li, and A. Ram. Semantic Annotation and Inference for Medical Knowledge Discovery, in Proc. of NSF Symposium on Next Generation Data Mining Techniques  (NGDM), 2007
40. E. Agichtein and S. Cucerzan, Predicting Extraction Performance by Using Context Language Models, n Proc. of the SIGIR Workshop on Methodologies and Evaluation of Lexical Cohesion Techniques in Real-World Applications (SIGIR ELECTRA), 2005
41. E. Agichtein, S. Cucerzan, and E. Brill, Analysis of Factoid Questions for Effective Relation Extraction (poster),  in Proc. of the ACM SIGIR 2005
42. E. Agichtein, P. Ipeirotis, and L. Gravano, Modeling Query-Based Access to Text Databases, in Proc. of the Sixth International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB), 2003 (25% accepted)
43. E. Agichtein, C.T. H. Ho, V. Josifovski, and J. Gerhardt. Extracting Relations from XML Documents, in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Volume 2814, "Conceptual Modeling for Novel Application Domains"; also in the International Workshop on XML Schema and Data Management (XSDM), 2003
44. E. Agichtein and Luis Gravano, QXtract: A Building Block for Efficient Information Extraction from Plain-Text Databases (demo), in the ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2003
45. E. Agichtein, L. Gravano, J.Pavel, V. Sokolova, A. Voskoboynik. Snowball: A Prototype System for Extracting Relations from Large Text Collections (demo),  in the ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2001
46. A. Borthwick, J. Sterling, E. Agichtein, and Ralph Grishman. Exploiting Diverse Knowledge Sources via Maximum Entropy in Named Entity Recognition, in the Sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, 1998
47. E. Agichtein, E. Eskin and L. Gravano. Combining Strategies for Extracting Relations from Text Collections, in the ACM SIGMOD Workshop on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (DMKD, 2000  

Other Publications and Abstracts

48. S. Sahay, B. Li, E. V. Garcia, E. Agichtein, and A. Ram,Domain Ontology Construction from Biomedical Text,  to appear in Proc. of the  2007 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI), 2007
49. S. Cucerzan and E. Agichtein, iFactoid Question Answering over Unstructured and Structured Content on the Web at TREC 2005, in the proceedings of the TREC 2005 conference
50. E. Agichtein, Extracting Relations From Large Text Collections, Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, 2005
51. A. Borthwick, J. Sterling, E. Agichtein, and R. Grishman, NYU: Description of the MENE Named Entity System as used in MUC-7,  in the proceedings of the 7th Message Understanding Conference (MUC-7)

Invited Talks

• May 2008: Searching Social Media: Yahoo! Research, New York
• May 2008: User Behavior Modeling for Searching the Web and Social Media: Center for Disease Control (CDC), Atlanta, GA
• April 2008: User Behavior Modeling for Searching the Web and Social Media: Invited talk at the SIAM Data Mining Conference (SDM 2008)
• October 2007: Patterns in User Behavior in Web Search and Social Media: University of Waterloo, Information Retrieval seminar
• February 2007: Patterns in Search: Mining Web Search User Behavior: Georgia Institute of Technology, GVU Center brownbag
• January 2007: Patterns in Web Search: Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara
• November 2006: Information Access and Knowledge Discovery in Unstructured Data: Emory University, School of Public Health, Biostatistics Seminar
• Spring 2006: Surfacing Information in Large Unstructured Datasets: Emory University, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), University of California-Riverside, University of Maryland-College Park (Computer Science department), University of Maryland Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Colloquium, New York University (Proteus research group), Microsoft Research
• 2004: Extracting Relations from Large Text Collections: Florida International University, College of William and Mary, Microsoft Research (job talk), IBM Almaden Research Center, Rice University
• 2001: Finding Answers to Questions on the Web: Machine Learning Workshop at Snowbird

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Emory University

• Fall 2008: CS572  – Information Retrieval and Web Search
• Fall 2008: CS171 – Introduction to Computer Science II: Elementary Data Structures and Algorithms
• Spring 2008: CS171 – Introduction to Computer Science II: Elementary Data Structures and Algorithms
• Fall 2007: CS571: Natural Language Processing
• Spring 2007: CS171 – Introduction to Computer Science II: Elementary Data Structures and Algorithms
• Fall 2006: CS584 – Information Retrieval and Web Search

Other Educational Activities

• Ph.D. thesis committee: Dawid Kurzyniec, Emory University Mathematics and Computer Science Department, Feb. 2007
• Ph.D. thesis proposal committee: Dawid Kurzyniec, Emory University Mathematics and Computer Science Department, Dec. 2006
   
• Fall 2001: Head Teaching Assistant, “Database Systems” course, Columbia University
• Spring 1999: Teaching Assistant, “Advanced Database Systems” course, Columbia University
   

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

Conference and Workshop Organization

• Co-Chair: CIKM 2008 Workshop on Searching Social Media (SSM 2008)
• Co-Chair: SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Information Retrieval in Advertising (IRA 2008)
• Tutorials Co-Chair (Information Retrieval): Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2008)
• Senior PC Member: ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2008)
• Senior PC Member, ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007)

Conference Technical Program Committee Service

• PC Member, ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2009, WSDM 2008)
• PC Member, Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2009, EMNLP 2008, EMNLP 2007)
• PC Member, Annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2009, ECIR 2008)
• PC Member, ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2008, KDD 2006)
• PC Member, AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Web track (AAAI 2008)
• PC Member, Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2008, COLING/ACL 2006)
• PC Member, IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2008)
• PC Member, International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2008)
• PC Member, The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2007)
• PC Member, The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2007, K-CAP 2005)
• PC Member, Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB 2007)
• PC Member, ACM International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006)
• PC Member, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2006, ICDM 2005)
• PC Member, European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD 2006)
• PC Member, Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology Conference (ISMB 2006, ISMB 2005, ISMB 2004)

Other Peer Reviewing Service

• Program Committee Member - Workshops and Poster sessions: WSDM 2009 Workshop on Mining Click Data (WSCD09), ICDE 2008 Workshop on Ranking in Databases (DBRank 2008), SIGIR 2007 Workshop on Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval, WWW 2007 Workshop on Query Log Analysis: Social and Technological Challenges (QueryLogs 2007), ICDE 2007 Workshop on Text Data Mining and Management (TDMM 2007), IJCAI-2007 Workshop on Analytics for Noisy Unstructured Text Data (AND 2007), Bar Ilan Symposium on Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (BISFAI 2007), CIKM 2006 International Workshop on Health Information and Knowledge Management (HIKM 2006), International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK 2006), Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems Workshop (NGITS 2006), International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM 2006), Event Extraction and Synthesis Workshop at AAAI 2006, Semantic Mining in BioMedicine Symposium (SMBM 2004), International World-Wide Web Conference (WWW) Posters Track (WWW 2002).
   
• Journal and Conference Referee: Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), ACM Transactions on Database Systems (ACM TODS), International Journal on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB Journal), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), IEEE Internet Computing (IEEE IC), IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (IEEE ICDE), ACM International Conference on Management of Data (ACM SIGMOD), International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB).

UNIVERSITY SERVICE

• Fall 2007-present: Department Graduate Committee
• Fall 2006-present: Computer Science Ph.D. Admissions Committee

Last updated: August 2008.