Susan Dumais

Principal Researcher, Adaptive Systems & Interaction Group, Microsoft Research

We're Hiring at MSR and LiveLabs ...

We're looking for great folks to advance the state-of-the-art and influence new products in the search arena.  We have internships and permanent positions in several areas including:  internet search, desktop search, personalization, and novel interfaces for search.
- Intern candidates can apply online at: http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/internships/default.asp
- Permanent employment opportunities at: http://labs.live.com

Research Activities:

I am interested in algorithms and interfaces for improved information retrieval, as well as general issues in and human-computer interaction. I joined Microsoft Research in July 1997. I work on a wide variety of information access and management issues, including: personal information management, web search, question answering, information retrieval, text categorization, collaborative filtering, interfaces for improved search and navigation, and user/task modeling.

Prior to coming to Microsoft, I worked on a statistical method for concept-based retrieval known as Latent Semantic Indexing. You can find pointers to this work on the Bellcore (now Telcordia) LSI page.

Workshops, Collaborations and Papers:

• Co-Chair.  SIGIR Doctoral Consortium.  Singapore, July 20, 2008.
• Co-Organizer: NSF Workshop on Personal Information Management.  Seattle WA, Jan 27-29, 2005.
• Co-Organizer: SIGIR Workshop on Implicit Measures of User Interests and Preferences.  Toronto CA, Aug 1, 2003.
• Collaborator: "Collaborative Information Retrieval" , a multidisciplinary research project to understand the social aspects of information retrieval in a variety of workplace settings. In collaboration with Raya Fidel and Harry Bruce (U Washington iSchool), Steve Poltrock (Boeing), A.M. Pehtersen (Riso National Laboratory), and Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft Research).

• Collaborator: "Keeping Found Things Found" , a research project to understand the ways in which people manage information for subsequent re-access. In collaboration with William Jones, Harry Bruce and Mike Eisenberg (U Washington iSchool).

• J. Teevan, S. Dumais and D. Liebling (2008). To personalize or not to personalize: Modeling queries with variation in user intent.   To appear in Proceedings of SIGIR 2008.
• R. White, S. Dumais and J. Teevan (2008).  How medical expertise influence web search interaction.   To appear in Proceedings of SIGIR 2008.
• S. Dumais (2008). Faceted search.  To appear in Encyclopedia of Database Systems.
• E. Adar, J. Teevan and S. Dumais (2008). Large scale analysis of Web revisitation patterns.    In Proceedings of CHI'08, 1197-1206.  [Best Paper Award]
• B. Carterette, P. Bennett, D. M. Chickering and S. Dumais (2008).   Here or There: Preference judgments for relevance.  In Proceedings of ECIR 2008, 16-27. 
• J. Callan, J. Allan, C. Clarke, S. Dumais, D. Evans, M. Sanderson and C.X. Zhai (2007).  Meeting of the MINDS: An information retrieval research agenda.  In SIGIR Forum, 41(2), Dec. 2007, 25-34.
• D. Downey, S. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2007).   Heads and tails: Studies of web search with common and rare queries.   In Proceedings of SIGIR 2007 (poster), 847-848.
• J. Teevan, S. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2007).  The potential value of personalizing search.  In Proceedings of SIGIR 2007 (poster), 757-756.
• C. Clarke, E. Agichtein, S. Dumais and R. White (2007).   The influence of caption features on clickthrough patterns in web search.   In Proceedings of SIGIR 2007, 135-142.
• S. Dumais (2007).   The Person in Personal (slides).  WWW2007 Panel: Searching Personal Content.
• J. Leskovec, S. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2007).   Web projections: Learning from contextual subgraphs of the web.   In Proceedings of WWW 2007. 
• D. Metzler, S. Dumais and C. Meek (2007).   Similarity measures for short segments of text.   In Proceedings of ECIR 2007. 
• M. Sanderson and S. Dumais (2007).   Examining repetition in user search behavior.  In Proceedings of ECIR 2007. 
• D. Downey, S. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2007).   Models of searching and browsing: Languages, studies and application.  In Proceedings of IJCAI 2007, 2740-2747. 
• E. Agichtein, E. Brill, S. T. Dumais and R. Ragno (2006).   Learning user interaction models for predicting web search preferences.  In Proceedings of SIGIR 2006, 3-10. 
• E. Agichtein, E. Brill and S. T. Dumais (2006).   Improving web search ranking by incorporating user behavior.  In Proceedings of SIGIR 2006, 19-26. 
• F. Radlinksi and S. T. Dumais (2006).   Improving personalized web search using results diversification.  In Proceedings of SIGIR 2006, 691-692. 
• E. Cutrell, D. C. Robbins, S. T. Dumais and R. Sarin (2006).   Fast, flexible filtering with Phlat - Personal search and organization made easy.    In Proceedings of CHI'06.    [Best Paper Finalist]
  Try Phlat: http://research.microsoft.com/adapt/phlat
• E. Cutrell and S. T. Dumais (2006).  Exploring personal information.  Communications of the ACM (Special Issue: Supporting exploratory search), 49(4)50-51.
• E. Cutrell, S. T. Dumais and J. Teevan (2006).  Searching to reduce the need for personal information management.  Communications of the ACM (Special Issue: Personal information management), 49(1) 58-64.
• S. T. Dumais (2006).  LSA and information retrieval: Getting back to basics.  In T. K. Landauer, D. S. McNamara, S. Dennis and W. Kintsch (Eds.),  LSA: A Road to Meaning.   Lawrence Earlbaum, 293-321
• J. Teevan, S. T. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2005).  Personalizing search via automated analysis of interests and activities.  In Proceedings of SIGIR 2005, 449-456.
• J. Teevan, S. T. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2005).  Beyond the commons: On the value of personalizing Web search.  In Proceedings PIA 2005: Workshop on New Technologies for Personalized Information Access, 84-92.
• S. T. Dumais (2005).
The Interactive TREC Track: Putting the user into search.  In E. Voorhees and D. Harman (Eds.), TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval.  MIT Press.
• S. Fox, K. Karnawat, M. Mydland, S. T. Dumais and T. White (2005).  Evaluating implicit measures to improve the search experience.  ACM:TOIS, 23(2), 147-168.  Talk available on SIGIR Implicit Workshop Page.
• X. Shen, S. T. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2005).  Analysis of topic dynamics in web search.  In Proceedings of WWW 2005.
 
• X. Shen, S. T. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2005).  Investigations of topic dynamics in web search.  Microsoft Technical Report TR-2005-20.
• L. Streeter, D. Laham, S. Dumais, E. Z. Rothkopf (2004).  Cherches le quadrant Pasteur! A symposium in honor of  Tom Landauer.   In Experimental Cognitive Psychology and its Applications: Triple Festschrift in Honor of Lyle Bourne, Walter Kintsch, Thomas Landauer.
• P. N. Bennett, S. T. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2005).  The combination of text classifiers using reliability indicators.  Information Retrieval, 8(1), 2005, 67-100.
• D. Azari, E. Horvitz, S. T. Dumais and E. Brill (2004).  Actions, answers and uncertainty: A decision making perspective on web question answering.  Information Processing and Management, Special Issue on Bayesian Methods in Information Retrieval, 40(5), 2004, 849-868.
• H. Bruce, W. Jones and S. Dumais (2004).  Information behaviour that keeps found things found.  Information Research, 10(1), October 2004.
• H. Bruce, W. Jones and S. Dumais (2004).  Keeping and re-finding information on the web: What do people do and what do they need to do?  In Proceedings of ASIST 2004.
• E. Horvitz, S. Dumais and P. Koch (2004).  Learning predictive models of human memory landmarks.  In Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, Aug 2004.
• S. T. Dumais, E. Cutrell, R. Sarin and E. Horvitz (2004).  Implicit queries (IQ) for contextualized search.  In SIGIR 2004 Proceedings, 594.
• N. Belkin, S. Dumais, J. Scholtz and R. Wilkinson (2004).  Evaluating interactive information retrieval systems: Opportunities and challenges.  In Proceedings of CHI'2004, 1594-1595.
• E. Gabrilovich, S. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2004).  NewsJunkie: Providing personalized newsfeeds via analysis of information novelty.  In Proceedings of WWW'2004, 482-490.
• T. Paek, S. Dumais and T. Logan (2004).  WaveLens: A new view onto search results.  In Proceedings of CHI'04, 727-734.
• S. T. Dumais (2004).  Latent semantic analysis. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Volume 38, Chapter 4, 189-230. 
• S. T. Dumais, K. Bharat, T. Joachims and A. Weigend (2003).  SIGIR 2003 workshop report: Implicit measure of user interests and preferences.  SIGIR Forum, 37(2), Fall 2003.
• J. Allan, J. Aslam, N. Belkin, J. Callan, B. Croft, S. Dumais et al. (2003).  Challenges in information retrieval and language modeling.  SIGIR Forum 37(1), Spring 2003.
• S. Poltrock, J. Grudin, S. Dumais, R. Fidel, H. Bruce, A. Mark-Pejtersen.  Information seeking and sharing in design teams.  In Proceedings of the Conference on Supporting Group Work (Group 2003), 239-247.
• P. N. Bennett, S. T. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2003). Inductive transfer using layered abstraction-based ensemble learning: Modeling text classifier reliability. In ICML Workshop on The Continuum from Labeled to Unlabeled Data in Machine Learning and Data Mining.
• S. T. Dumais,  E. Cutrell, E., J. J. Cadiz, G. Jancke, R. Sarin and D. C. Robbins (2003). Stuff I've Seen: A system for personal information retrieval and re-use.  In Proceedings of SIGIR 2003.
• M. Ringel, E. Cutrell, S. T. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2003).  Milestones in time: The value of landmarks in retrieving information from personal stores. In Proceedings of Interact 2003.
• W. Jones, H. Bruce and S. Dumais.  How do people get back to information on the web? How can they do it better?  In Proceedings of Interact'2003, 793-796.
• D. Azari, E. Horvitz, S. T. Dumais and E. Brill (2003).  Web-based question answering: A decision making perspective.  In Proceedings of UAI'2003.
• S. T. Dumais (2003).  Data-driven approaches to information access. Cognitive Science, 27(3), May-June 2003, 491-524.
• W. Jones, S. Dumais and H. Bruce (2002).  Once found, what next?: A study of 'keeping' behaviors in the personal use of web information.  In Proceedings of ASIST 2002.
• H. Bruce, R. Fidel,  A.M. Pejtersen, S. Dumais, J. Grudin and S. Poltrock (2002).   A comparison of collaborative information retrieval (CIR) behaviors of two design teams.   In Information Seeking in Context (ISIC'2002).
• S. Dumais, M. Banko, E. Brill, J. Lin and A. Ng (2002). P. Bennett, S. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2002). Web question answering: Is more always better?  In Proceedings of SIGIR'02,  Aug 2002, pp. 291-298.
• P. Bennett, S. Dumais and E. Horvitz (2002).   Probabilistic combination of text classifiers using reliability indicators: Models and results.  In Proceedings of SIGIR'02,  Aug 2002, pp. 207-214.
• E. Brill, S. Dumais and M. Banko (2002). An analysis of the AskMSR question-answering system. In Proceedings of EMNLP 2002.
• S. Dumais (2002).  Web experiments and test collections: Are they meaningful? WWW 2002 panel.
• M. Banko, E. Brill, S. Dumais and J. Lin (2002).  AskMSR: Question answering using the worldwide Web.  In AAAI Spring Symposium on Mining Answers from Text and Knowledge Bases.
• E. Brill, J. Lin, M. Banko, S. Dumais and A. Ng (2001).  Data-intensive question answering.   In TREC 2001 Proceedings.  Nov. 2001. 
• W. P. Jones, H. Bruce and S. T. Dumais (2001). Keeping found things found on the web.  In Proceedings of CIKM'01.  Nov. 2001, pp.119-126. 
• K. Collins-Thompson, C. Schweizer and S. T. Dumais (2001).  Improved string matching under noisy channel conditions. In Proceedings of CIKM'01.  Nov. 2001, pp.357-364. 
• R. Jin and S. T. Dumais (2001).   Probabilistic combination of content and links.  In Proceedings of SIGIR'01,  Sept. 2001, pp.402-403.
• S. T. Dumais and M. P. Czerwinski (2001).   Building bridges from theory to practice.  In HCI International 2001, 9th Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.  Session on Contributions of Basic Research in Psychology to Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction.  August 2001.
• L. Wenyin, S. T. Dumais, Y. F. Sun, H. J. Zhang, M. P. Czerwinski, B. Field (2001).  Semi-automatic image annotation.  In Proceedings of Interact 2001, Eighth IFIP TC.13 Conference on Human Computer Interaction.  July 2001.
• S. T. Dumais (2001).  When do you want to go 'where everybody knows your name'?:  A framework for personalization.   Invited talk at DELOS/NSF Workshop on Personalization and Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries.   June 18-20, 2001, Dublin.   Powerpoint slides.
• S. T. Dumais, E. Cutrell and H. Chen (2001).   Bringing order to the web: Optimizing search by showing results in context.   In Proceedings of CHI'01, Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2001, pp. 277-283.
• Information Week article by Stuart Johnson on our contributions to SharePoint Portal Server.   Microsoft Research who benefits?  Information Week, March 21, 2001, 69-74.
• R. Fidel,  H. Bruce, A. M. Pejtersen, S. T. Dumais, J. Grudin  and S. Poltrock.  Collaborative information retrieval (CIR). The New Review of Information Behaviour Research, 2000, Vol 1, 235-247.
• S. T. Dumais, E. Cutrell and H. Chen (2000).  Classified displays of web search results.  Invited presentation at ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop, Nov 12, 2000, pp.87-90.
• S. T. Dumais and H. Chen (2000).  Hierarchical classification of web content (pdf file). Proceedings of SIGIR'00, August 2000, pp. 256-263.
• H. Chen and S. T. Dumais (2000).  Bringing order to the web: Automatically categorizing search results. (pdf file) Proceedings of CHI'00, Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 145-152.
• S. T. Dumais (1999). Beyond content-based retrieval: Modeling domains, users and interaction. Keynote address at IEEE: Advances in Digital Libraries'99, May 19-21, 1999. Powerpoint slides
• M. P. Czerwinski, S. T. Dumais, G. G. Robertson, S. Dziadosz, S. Tiernan and M. van Dantzich (1999). Visualizing implicit queries for information management and retrieval. (Postscript file) In Proceedings of CHI'99, Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 560-567
• S. T. Dumais (1999). Talk at Library of Congress, Feb 8 1999. LOC Talk. (Powerpoint slides).
• S. T. Dumais (1999). Statistical challenges for information retrieval. Tutorial at Uncertainty'99, Jan 3-5, 1999.
• S. T. Dumais (1998). Using SVMs for text categorization.  In IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine, Trends and Controversies, Marti Hearst, ed., 13(4), July/August 1998.  All articles on this topic available here. 
• Forbes article by William Baldwin on our anti-Spam work. Spam killers. Forbes, Sept 21, 1998, 254-255.
• S. T. Dumais, J. Platt, D. Heckerman and M. Sahami (1998). Inductive learning algorithms and representations for text categorization. (PDF file) In Proceedings of ACM-CIKM98, Nov. 1998, pp. 148-155. For additional technical details about the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms we use, see John Platt's home page.
• M. Sahami, S. Dumais, D. Heckerman, and E. Horvitz (1998). A Bayesian approach to filtering junk e-mail. (Postscript file) AAAI'98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization, July 27, 1998, Madison, Wisconsin.
• S. T. Dumais (1997). Tightly coupling structure and search. (Powerpoint slides) SIGIR'97 Workshop on information reduction, July 27-31, 1997.
• S. T. Dumais (1997). Data mining and the Web. (Powerpoint slides) Panel at Knowledge Discovery and Databases (KDD) , August 14-17, 1997.

Other Papers and Talks Online:

• Many of my earlier papers can be found on the Bellcore LSI page.
• Landauer, T. K. and Dumais, S. T. (1997) A solution to Plato's problem: the Latent Semantic Analysis theory of acquisition, induction and representation of knowledge. (html) Psychological Review, 104(2) , 211-240. This paper takes a somewhat broader cognitive science perspective on dimension reduction and inductive learning.

Other Activities:

• ACM Fellow, elected 2006.
• CHI Academy, elected 2005.
• Chair of ACM:SIGIR, 1999-2003.
• National Research Council, Board on Assessment of NIST Programs. 2001-2005.
• National Research Council, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board committee on Computing and Communications Research to Enable Better Use of Information Technology in Government.  1998-2000.
• CHI Program Committee, 2000-2006; Area Chair 2002, 2003.
• SIGIR Program Committee, 2000-2007;  Area Chair 2001, 2005;  Co-Chair 2006.
• WWW Program Committee, 2002-2007.
• CIKM Program Committee, 2000-2005, 2007.
• HLT/NAACL Program Committee, 2003-2005; Co-Chair 2004.
• JCDL Program Committee, 2002, 2004.
• KDD Program Committee, 2000, 2003, 2007.
• RIAO Program Committee, 2000, 2003.
• AAAI Program Committee, 2001, 2004.
• ACL Program Committee, 2003.
• NIPS Program Committee, 2002.
• TREC Program Committee.
• Associate Editor Handbook of Applied Cognition, second edition (2007), Frank Durso, editor, John Wiley and Sons.
• Associate Editor Handbook of Applied Cognition (1999), Frank Durso, editor, John Wiley and Sons.
• Advisory Board Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Blaise Cronin, editor.
• Editorial Board Human Computer Interaction, Tom Moran, editor.
• Editorial Board ACM: Transactions on Information Systems, Gary Marchionini, editor.
• Editorial Board ACM: Transactions on Human Computer Interaction, Jack Carroll, editor.
• Editorial Board Information Processing and Management, Tefko Saracevic, editor.
• Editorial Board Information Retrieval, Paul Kantor, Josiane Mothe and Justin Zobel, editors.
• Editorial Board Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval.  Jamie Callan and Fabrizio Sebastiani, editors.
• Editorial Board New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (NRHM), Douglas Tudhope, editor.

Family Pics:

• Tom and Sue: 1) Tom and Sue at home
• The Boat: 1) The new boat; 2) Tom w/ boat; 3) Sue w/ boat
• Tom's New Car: Tom and the red Cadillac;
• Living in Washington: 1) Seattle; 2) Olympic Mtns; 3) Lake Washington and us; 4) Mt. Ranier from plane
• Vacation in Australia, Sept 1998: 1) Boat ride in Melbourne; 2) Stanley St; 3) Koala and us; 4) Koala
• Vacation in Greece, Aug 2000: 1) Olympic Stadium; 2) Erechtheion Porch of Maidens; 3) Plaka; 4) Sunset near Divani; 5) Santorini caldera; 6) Santorini houses; 6) Santorini houses; 7) wine break; 8) Chania port; 9) Chania lighthouse; 10) Knossos 
• Samantha's Shower, Sept 2000: 1) the spread; 2) closeup of the goodies; 3) tea from the hostess; 4) guests; 5) guests; 6) guests; 7) Samantha and Christine; 8) grand finale; 9) Samantha and Kevin 
• Samantha and Matt's Wedding, Oct 21, 2000: 1) fall leaves; 2) coast at boothbay harbor; 3) wedding ceremony; 4) the elliots; 5) jerry and date; 6) cake time; 7) dancing w/ dad; 8) the brothers stanley sing acappella  
• Rocky the Lobster Performs:  1) Sea Cruise;  2) Rock the Boat
• The Kitchen, Before ( fridge, side,  more side ) and After ( fridge, side, tom's stove)