7/25/2016
Written by
Two University of Illinois computer science PhD students have been honored with Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge awards. Arash Termehchy was honored for his work on keyword search over semi-structured and structured data, and Kai-Wei Chang was honored for his work in machine learning and natural language processing. The two were among the 27 national winners selected by Yahoo!
Arash Termehchy’s research interests lie in the broad areas of data management, information retrieval, and data mining. Termehchy’s research activities are currently focused on topics related to search over combined structured and unstructured data, semi-structured retrieval methods, query intent, information extraction, and database structure mining. His recent work to define the concept of design independent schema free query interfaces won a Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. Termehchy conducts his work with computer science professor Marianne Winslett.
Kai-Wei Chang’s work in artificial intelligence has led him to explore topics in large-scale optimization and its applications to machine learning, and structural learning and its applications to natural language processing. Chang’s work has received Best Paper honors at the ACM SGIKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence. Chang conducts his work with computer science professor Dan Roth.
The Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges program was created to recognize outstanding graduate student researchers who Yahoo! Believes has the greatest potential to make significant contributions and become thought leaders in their area of research. This year’s awards support research in new scientific areas that will deliver next generation Internet technologies.