Going Places: Accelerating Search in Academic Research

We on the Search team want to congratulate the 12 winners of the Microsoft Live Labs “Accelerating Search in Academic Research” Awards.

Researchers from 36 countries submitted proposals for research to advance the field of search.  The 12 winners will receive grant money from Microsoft Live Labs and access to a set of MSN Search query logs in order to push forward our understanding of the Internet, search, and online social behaviors.

 The results of the research we’re funding are intended to be totally open to the public.  We’re encouraging the awardees to publish what they find in peer reviewed journals and at conferences.  Nothing about this is proprietary.  It’s our gift back to the research community.

Proposal

 Principal Investigators

Affiliations

Country

 Combining Econometric and Text Mining Approaches for Measuring the Effect of Online Information Exchange

 Panagiotis Ipeirotis – Anindya Ghose

 New York University

 USA

 Discovering and Using Meta-Terms

 

 Bruce Croft

 University of Massachusetts Amherst

 USA

Deepening Search: From the Surface to the Deep Web

 

 Kevin Chang

 Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 USA

Entity and Relation Types in Web Search: Annotation, Indexing and Scoring Techniques

 

 Soumen Chakrabarti

 IIT Bombay

India

 Incorporating Trust into Web Authority

 

 Brian Davison

 Lehigh University

 USA

Mine Query/Click Log for Collaborative Internet Search

 

 ChengXiang Zhai

 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 USA

 Predictive Exploitation of Click-Through Knowledge

 

 Alistair Moffat

 University of Melbourne

 Australia

 Social Search: Bringing the Social Component to the Web

 

 Gerd Stumme

 Knowledge and Data Engineering Group; University of Kassel

Germany

 Statistical Machine Learning for User Modelling

 

 Zoubin Ghahramani

 University of Cambridge; Carnegie Mellon University; University College London

 United Kingdom

 The Truth is Out There: Aggregating Answers from Multiple Web Sources

 

 Amelie Marian

 Rutgers University

 USA

 Vinegar: Leading Indicators in Query Logs

 

 Eytan Adar – Brian Bershad – Steven Gribble

 University of Washington; CSE

 USA

 VISP: Visualizing Information Search Processes

 

 Lada Adamic – Suresh Bhavnani

 School of Information; University of Michigan

 USA

 Each researcher, along with their proposal, submitted a budget which was used to determine one–year grant awards of between $30-50,000.  They’re also getting access to more than 15 million real-user queries with click through information,along with an increased query quota for use of the MSN Search API.

What’s important to know is that the search query logs they will be studying have been carefully scrubbed to be completely anonymous – there’s no information about who issued a query.  In addition, we’ve filtered the query terms themselves to remove credit card numbers, phone numbers, social security numbers and email addresses.

To support the researchers, the Search team and Microsoft Research staff took extra effort to make sure the data was clean, ensuring both customer privacy is protected while academic inquiry is preserved.  Researchers are under strict license in using the data, which also protects customer privacy.

We haven’t decided yet whether this RFP program will be awarded next year, but if you’re interested in other funding opportunities with Microsoft, keep checking back here:

http://research.microsoft.com/ur/us/fundingopps/default.aspx

–Ramez Naam, Director of Program Management, Search