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
