Bin Tan

602 E. Clark St. Apt. 34
Champaign IL, 61820

E-mail: bintan@uiuc.edu

http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~bintan

Research Interests

I am generally interested in text information management, which includes web search and text mining. My main focus is contextual search, using explicit/implicit user feedback to learn a better model of the user's information need, so that search results can be personalized to achieve higher retrieval accuracy.

Education

Sept. 2003 - Present University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science
M.S. in Computer Science
Adviser: ChengXiang Zhai
GPA: 4.0
Sept. 1999 - June 2003 Nanjing University, China
B.S. in Computer Science
GPA: 3.9

Experiences

June 2005 - Present Research Assistant for Prof. ChengXiang Zhai

Projects:

  • UCAIR (User-Centered Adaptive Information Retrieval) (ongoing)

    Existing retrieval systems usually base their retrieval decisions solely on query text, with little consideration of the differences in users' search contexts. The aim of the UCAIR project is to make the retrieval process context-aware. We have developed algorithms that exploit short-term/long-term explicit/implicit feedback during a user's interaction with the retrieval system, shown to effectively improve retrieval accuracy by producing a personalized ranking of documents. We have also implemented UCAIR Toolbar (for which I am the main developer), which is a browser toolbar for web search that provides an experiment/production platform for the contextual retrieval algorithms.

  • Bioinformatics Tutoring System

    The project is focused on using NLP and user modeling techniques to produce an adaptive tutoring system for bioinformatics students, capable of tailoring its tutoring strategy to the actual progress of a student. I am the main developer for the user interaction and data storage modules.

  • HARD Track of TREC 2005

    This work explores interactive query expansion with relevance feedback terms (as opposed to documents) in the language modeling framework. We achieved one of the top results among the track participants.
Summer 2008 Intern at Google, Inc.
Mentor: Jon Trowbridge

I developed system tools to process user data for a Google hosting service.
Summer 2007 Intern at Yahoo, Inc.
Mentor: Fuchun Peng

I developed algorithms to segment web search queries to semantic units using language modeling and Wikipedia. A WWW'08 paper is produced based on this work.
Summer 2006 Intern at Nextumi, Inc. (now ShareThis, Inc.)
Supervisor: David Goldberg

I worked on text mining and information retrieval algorithms for the company's social network software. This internship is followed by a 1-year research assistantship for and sponsored by the company.
Sept. 2003 - May 2005 Teaching Assistant for CS423 Operating Systems Design

My duty included designing/grading assignments/exams, holding office hours and giving guest lectures.

Honors and Awards

Programming Skills

Major Publications

Other Publications

Patents