Bin Tan

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

E-mail:

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

Education

Sept. 2003 - Present University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science
Adviser: Prof. 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

I am most interested in problems in text information management with a focus on contextual information retrieval, relevance feedback, user modeling and personalization. My thesis title is A study of language models for exploiting user feedback information in IR. I have a strong passion for building IR systems and tools.

Projects:

  • UCAIR, User-Centered Adaptive Information Retrieval (http://sifaka.cs.uiuc.edu/ir/ucair/)

    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. Algorithms have been developed to exploit short-term/long-term explicit/implicit feedback during a user's interaction with the retrieval system, and shown to effectively improve retrieval accuracy by producing a personalized ranking of result documents. I have been the main developer for the UCAIR Toolbar, which is a browser toolbar for personalized web search. The goal is to expand the toolbar into a general-purpose toolkit to provide a development/deployment/evaluation platform for the various contextual retrieval algorithms.

  • Bioinformatics Tutoring System

    The project was 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 was the main developer for the user interaction and data storage modules.

  • HARD Track of TREC 2005

    This work explored interactive query expansion using 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 transfer and 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 external resources. A WWW'08 paper ensued from 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 sharing software. This internship is followed by a 1-year research assistantship with 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