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
Proposal
Principal Investigators
Affiliations
Country
Panagiotis Ipeirotis - Anindya Ghose
New York University
USA
Bruce Croft
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Kevin Chang
Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Soumen Chakrabarti
IIT Bombay
India
Brian Davison
Lehigh University
ChengXiang Zhai
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Alistair Moffat
University of Melbourne
Australia
Gerd Stumme
Knowledge and Data Engineering Group; University of Kassel
Germany
Zoubin Ghahramani
University of Cambridge; Carnegie Mellon University; University College London
United Kingdom
Amelie Marian
Rutgers University
Eytan Adar - Brian Bershad - Steven Gribble
University of Washington; CSE
Lada Adamic - Suresh Bhavnani
School of Information; University of Michigan
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