PhD Student Yuanhua Lv Wins Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge Award

University of Illinois computer science PhD student Yuanhua Lv has been selected as one of the winners of the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge award for 2010-2011.  The Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate-student researchers who will have the greatest potential to make significant contributions and become thought leaders in their research fields.  Lv was recognized for hsi groundbreaking work in the area of Computational Advertising.

The Key Scientific Challenges Program focuses on a variety of scientific issues, from developing algorithms that turn raw information into personally relevant experiences, to discovering insights about online advertising and experimenting with new sociological models for how people engage with the Web. 

Lv works with computer science professor ChengXiang Zhai in areas related to information retrieval, computational advertising, Web search, text mining, and machine learning.  Lv and Zhai have collaborated most recently on the creation of a Positional Relevance Model for Pseudo-Relevance Feedback.  The model is used to effectively select from feedback documents those words that are focused on the query topic based on positions of terms in feedback documents to expand the user’s original query.

Lv’s PRM is an extension of the relevance model to exploit term positions and proximity so as to assign more weights to words closer to query words based on the intuition that words closer to query words are more likely to be related to the query topic.  His work demonstrates that PRM effective and robust for pseudo-relevance feedback, significantly outperforming the relevance model in both document-based feedback and passage-based feedback.

The 2010 winners, in addition to receiving $5,000 in unrestricted seed funding, will convene at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California in September for the exclusive Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit where they will spend two days with the Yahoo! Labs scientists presenting their work and jointly discussing the future of these fundamental scientific challenges and ultimately how their research can have the greatest impact on the next generation of the Internet.

“As an industry we’re developing the scientific models and disciplines we need to more fully understand and drive the Web’s evolution and impact,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo!’s Chief Scientist and head of Yahoo! Labs. “This year’s Key Scientific Challenge winners all represent innovative, critical research into the new sciences that will shape the next 20 years of Internet innovation.”