Professor Oren Etzioni
Director of the Turing Center
              
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Much have I learned from my teachers, more from my colleagues,
   but from my students, most of all.
  --
Rabbi Hanina


Current Graduate Students

  1. Anthony Fader
  2. Alan Ritter

PhDs Advised

  1. Thomas Lin "Leveraging Knowledge Bases in Web Text Processing" (2012, Microsoft)
  2. Dr. Stefan Schoenmackers "Inference over the Web" (2011, Decide.com)
  3. Dr. Michele Banko (2009, Startups).  Michele's dissertation, Open Information Extraction for the Web, investigated the problem of extracting information from arbitrary Web text in a scalable, domain-independent manner.
  4. Dr. Mike Cafarella (2009, University of Michigan).  Mike's dissertation, Extracting and Managing Structured Web Data, bridged the gap between information extraction and databases.  Co-advisors: Dan Suciu and Alon Halevy.
  5. Dr. Doug Downey (2008, Northwestern University).  Doug's dissertation, Redundancy in Web-scale Information Extraction: Probabilistic Model and Experimental Result, investigated in depth what we can learn from finding extractions repeatedly in the Web corpus.
  6. Dr. Alex Yates (2007, Temple University).  Alex's dissertation, Information Extraction from the Web: Techniques and Applications, investigated the problem of unsupervised synonym resolution on the Web.
  7. Dr. Ana-Maria Popescu (2007, Yahoo Research).  Ana-Maria's dissertation, Information Extraction from Unstructured Web Text, investigated how to extract high-quality information from Web text.  Her most impressive demonstration was the Opine system, which extracted product attributes, and associated opinions, from reviews found on-line.
  8. Dr. Luke McDowell (2004, U.S. Naval Academy).  Luke's dissertation, Bringing Meaning to the Masses, investigated how to make the Semantic Web a reality and how to generalize the vision to encompass email as well.  Co-advisor: Alon Halevy.
  9. Dr. Mike Perkowitz. (2000, Amazon, Intel Research, Startups)  Mike's dissertation, Adaptive Web Sites, investigated web sites that automatically reconfigure their layout and presentation by analyzing user access patterns recorded in their server logs.
  10. Dr. Oren Zamir (1999, Google).  Oren's dissertation, Clustering Web Documents: A Phrase-Based Method for Grouping Search Engine Results, investigated the use of a novel and fast clustering algorithm to group the results of Web search engines into easily-browsed clusters.  The most distinctive aspect of the algorithm was its treatment of documents as strings of words, represented by a suffix tree, in contrast with the standard vector-based representation.
  11. Dr. Erik Selberg (1999, Microsoft).  Erik's dissertation, Towards Comprehensive Web Search, explored meta-search as embodied in MetaCrawler.  The dissertation was the first to show (back in WWW4, 1995) that the fraction of the Web covered by individual search engines such as Alta Vista and Lycos was very limited, demonstrating the need for meta-search engines.
  12. Dr. Keith Golden (1997, NASA Ames, Google).  Keith's dissertation, Planning Support for Softbots, investigated novel planning and knowledge representation techniques to support softbots.  Primary advisor: Dan Weld.
  13. Dr. Neal Lesh (1997, MERL, Harvard MPH, D-Tree International).  Neal's dissertation, Scalable and Adaptive Goal Recognition, focused on automating the construction of plan libraries adapting techniques from planning and concept learning.  His objective was to scale up goal recognition to domains containing millions of plans and goals.
  14. Dr. Richard Segal (1996, IBM Watson research center).  Richard's dissertation, Machine Learning as Massive Search, focused on data mining using massive search: our BRUTE data mining software can analyze over 100,000 hypotheses per second, when run on a SPARC-10.

Masters Students Advised

  1. Tessa Lau. Master's thesis: Privacy in a Collaborative Web Browsing Environment, 1997. (UW PhD with Weld and Domingos, now at IBM).
  2. Marc Langheinrich. Master's thesis: A domain independent architecture for efficient information retrieval on the World Wide Web, 1997 (University of Lugano in Switzerland).
  3. Jonathan Shakes. Master's thesis: Dynamic Reference Sifting: a Case Study in the Homepage Domain, 1996. (Amazon).
  4. Terrance Goan. Master's thesis: Learning About Software Errors, 1994. (Stottler Henke).

Undergraduate Students Advised

  1. Michael Skinner, 2008 (Google)
  2. Michael Schmitz, 2007 (Positronic)
  3. Kobi Reiter, 2006 (Google)
  4. Bao Nguyen, 2005, (Microsoft)
  5. Michael Lindmark, 2005 (Amazon)
  6. Tessa MacDuff, 2004 (Google)
  7. Jeff Lin, 2003 (Microsoft)
  8. Gary Lau, 1999 (Go2Net)
  9. Zhenya Sigal, 1997 (Microsoft)
  10. Christen Boyd, 1997 (Netbot)
  11. Darren Schack, 1996 (Real Networks)
  12. Adam Loving, 1996
  13. Nick Hart, 1996 (Real Networks)
  14. Nels Benson, 1995 (Japan)
  15. Dymitr Mozdyniewicz, 1995 (Quark)
  16. Guido Hunt, 1994
  17. Greg Fichtenholtz, 1994 (Hewlett-Packard, Stanford)
  18. William Alford, 1994 (PhD program, University of Wisconsin)
  19. Robert Spiger, 1993 (Lockheed, AI research center)
  20. Bruce Lesourd, 1993
  21. Julie Roomy, 1993 (Hewlett-Packard, OGI)
  22. Stephen Soderland, 1992 (PhD program, Umass Amherst, now research scientist at UW CSE)