News

Award for a Distingushed Body of Research and Commitment to Exceptional Research Engagement (09/17/15)
Congratulations to Jimmy Huang who received the LA&PS Award for Distinction in Research, Creativity and Scholarship!

Congratulations to Jessie Zhao for a successful defense of her PhD (03/23/15)
Jessie Zhao successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on March 23! Her presentation was titled "Term Association Modelling in Information Retrieval".

Congratulations to Xiaofeng Zhou for a successful defense of her PhD (06/26/14)
Xiaofeng Zhou successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on June 26! Her presentation was titled "Statistical Modeling to Information Retrieval for Searching from Big Text Data and Higher Order Inference for Reliability".

ACM TOIS and ACM SIGIR'14 paper acceptance (04/15/14)
Congratulations to Jessie Zhao and Jeff Ye!

Zhao, J., Huang, X. J. and Ye, Z. "Modeling Term Associations for Probabilistic Information Retrieval'', ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS). ACM Publisher. Vol 32, No. 2, Article 7, 47 pages. April 2014. ISSN: 1046-8188 and EISSN:1558-2868 (PDF)

Ye, Z. and Huang, X. J. "A Simple Term Frequency Transformation Model for Effective Pseudo Relevance Feedback'', Proceedings of the 37th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'14), Gold Coast, Australia. July 6-11, 2014 (Acceptance rate: 82/387 = 21%). (PDF)

Zhao, J. and Huang, X. J. "An Enhanced Context-sensitive Proximity Model for Probabilistic Information Retrieval'', Proceedings of the 37th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'14), Gold Coast, Australia. July 6-11, 2014.

NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (PDF) (06/27/13)
Congratulations to Dr. Vivian Hu who was awarded NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship for two years!

Congratulations to Dawid Kasperowicz for a successful defense of his Master degree (06/25/13)
Dawid Kasperowicz successfully defended his Master on March 24! His presentation was titled "Semantic Concept Extraction from Electronic Medical Records for Enhancing Retrieval Performance".

ACM SIGIR'13 paper acceptance (04/15/13)
Congratulations to Atanaz Babashzadeh, Xiangdong, Parvaz Mahdabi and Mariam Daoud!

Mahdabi, P., Gerani, S., Huang, X. J. and Crestani, F. "Leveraging Conceptual Lexicon: Query Disambiguation Using Proximity Information for Patent Retrieval'', Proceedings of the 36th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'13), Dublin, Ireland. 28 July - 1 August, 2013 (Acceptance rate: 73/366 = 19.9%). (PDF)

Babashzadeh, A., Huang, X. J. and Daoud, M. "Exploiting Semantics for Improving Clinical Information Retrieval'', Proceedings of the 36th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'13), Dublin, Ireland. 28 July - 1 August, 2013

An, X. and Huang, X. J. "Boosting Novelty for Biomedical Information Retrieval Through Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis'', Proceedings of the 36th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'13), Dublin, Ireland. 28 July - 1 August, 2013.

Congratulations to Vivian Hu for a successful defense of her PhD (03/25/13)
Vivian Hu successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on March 25! Her presentation was titled "Search Beyond Traditional Probabilistic Information Retrieval".

ACM SIGIR'12 paper acceptance (04/30/12)
Congratulations to Jun Miao, Jeff Ye and Jessie Zhao! All of them will attend SIGIR'12 from Aug 11-16.

Miao, J., Huang, X. J. and Ye, Z. "Proximity-based Rocchio's Model for Pseudo Relevance Feedback'', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'12), Portland, Oregon, August 12-16, 2012 (Acceptance rate: 98/483 = 20%). (PDF)

Ye, Z., Huang, X. J. and Miao, J. "A Hybrid Model for Adhoc Information Retrieval'', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'12), Portland, Oregon, August 12-16, 2012.

Zhao, J. and Huang, X. J. "Rewarding Term Location Information to Enhance Probabilistic Information Retrieval'', Proceedings of the 35th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'12), Portland, Oregon, August 12-16, 2012.

Google Travel Award and Donald B. Crouch Travel Award (07/01/11)
Congratulations to Jessie Zhao who received Google Travel Award for Women and Xiaofeng Zhou who received Donald B. Crouch Travel Award! Both of them will attend SIGIR'11 from July 24 to 28.

Two full papers accepted at ACM SIGIR 2011 (04/08/11)
Zhou, X., Huang, X. J. and He, B. "Enhancing Ad-hoc Relevance Weighting Using Probability Density Estimation", Proceedings of the 34th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'11), Beijing, China, July 24-28, 2011 (Acceptance rate: 108/545 = 19.8%).

Zhao, J., Huang, X. J. and He, B. "CRTER: Using Cross Terms to Enhance Probabilistic Information Retrieval", Proceedings of the 34th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'11), Beijing, China, July 24-28, 2011 (Acceptance rate: 108/545 = 19.8%).

Microsoft Research Internship (03/27/11)
Vivian Hu received the "Stars of Tomorrow" internship award from Microsoft Research and will start her internship in May.

Welcome Dr. Mariam Daoud from Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, France and Dr. Chenghua Li from St. Francis Xavier University (09/01/10)
Welcome Dr. Mariam Daoud from IRIT and Dr. Chenghua Li to join our research lab as Postdoctoral Research Fellows.

Welcome Dr. Thomas Lynam from University of Waterloo (10/1/09)
Dr. Thomas Lynam joins our research lab as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow from University of Waterloo, where he completed his Ph.D. recently in Information Retrieval.

IEEE/WIC/ACM WI-IAT'10 will be held in Toronto! (08/17/09)
The IEEE/ACM WI-IAT'10 will be held in Toronto! Professor Jimmy Huang will be the Program Chair.

Welcome Dr. Ben He from University of Glasgow (07/26/09)
Welcome Dr. Ben He from University of Glasgow to join our research lab as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Two Postdoctoral Fellowships available in Information Retrieval Lab (05/31/09)
These two PDFs will be funded jointly by the Early Researcher Award and the Ministry of Research & Innovation. Applicants should submit a CV and links to representative papers to Prof. Jimmy Huang. Applications must be received by July 31, 2009 and the successful applicants will begin postdoctoral research in Information Retrieval Lab by Dec 31, 2009.

Congratulations to Yang Liu for a successful defense of her PhD (05/11/09)
Yang Liu successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on May 8! Her presentation was titled "Review Mining from Online Media".

ACM SIGIR'09 paper acceptance (04/11/09)
Huang, X. and Hu, Q. "A Bayesian Learning Approach to Promoting Diversity in Ranking for Biomedical Information Retrieval", Proceedings of the 32th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'09), full paper, Boston, USA, July 19-23, 2009 (Acceptance rate: 78/494 = 15.8%).

IEEE ICDM'08 paper acceptance (09/17/08)
Liu, Y., Huang, X., An, A. and Yu, X. "Modeling and Predicting the Helpfulness of Online Reviews", Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'08), full paper, Pisa, Italy, Dec. 2008 (Acceptance rate: 70/724 = 9.7%).

ACM CIKM'10 will be held in Toronto! (06/20/08)
The ACM CIKM'10, which is one of the most prestigious and competitive conferences in Information Retrieval, Database and Knowledge Management will be held in Toronto! Professor Jimmy Huang will be the conference chair.

ICES and NRC Internship (06/17/08)
Yang and Hashmat will do an internship at ICES and NRC.

Petro Canada Young Innovators Award (5/15/08)
Congratulations to Jimmy Huang who received the Petro Canada Young Innovators Award!

NSERC Scholarship (1/23/08)
Congratulations to Hashmat Rohian who received the NSERC Scholarship!

Early Researcher Award (08/17/07)
Congratulations to Jimmy Huang who received the Early Researcher Award!

ACM SIGIR'07 paper acceptance (04/06/07)
Liu, Y., Huang, X., An, A. and Yu, X. "ARSA: A Sentiment-Aware Model for Predicting Sales Performance Using Blogs", Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'07), full paper, Amsterdam, July 23-27, 2007 (Acceptance rate: 86/491 = 17.5%).

Dean's Award for Outstanding Research (02/18/06)
Congratulations to Jimmy Huang who received the Dean's Award for Outstanding Research!