Having conducted early research into the strategies and benefits of Implicit User Modeling for Personalized Search, we are pleased to announce that ChengXiang Zhai, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has joined Surf Canyon’s Board of Advisers.

ChengXiang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 and another Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon in 2002. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning and bioinformatics, and he has published over 100 papers in major conferences and journals in these areas, including five award papers.

He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Information Processing and Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Information Retrieval Journal. He is a program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004, NAACL HLT 2007 and ACM SIGIR 2009, where Mark Cramer was a presenter. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received many awards, including the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2007 Microsoft Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award, the 2009 IBM Faculty Award, the 2010 UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2011 HP Innovation Research Award.

We are thrilled to have ChengXiang on the team as we look forward to exploring new avenues to improve the efficiency of information retrieval as well as continuing our collaboration with the UIUC.