DIRECTOR - SEMANTIC COMPUTING

Evelyne Viegas is the Director of Semantic Computing at Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, U.S.A. Semantic Computing is about interacting with data in rich, safe and semantically meaningful ways, to create the path from data to information, knowledge and intelligence. In her current role, Evelyne is building initiatives which focus on information seen as an enabler of innovation, working in partnership with universities and government agencies worldwide. In particular she is creating programs around computational intelligence research to drive open innovation and agile experimentation via cloud-based services; and projects to advance the state-of-the-art in knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty at web scale.

Prior to her present role, Evelyne has been working as a Technical Lead at Microsoft delivering Natural Language Processing components to projects for MSN, Office, and Windows. Before Microsoft, and after completing her Ph.D. in France, she worked as a Principal Investigator at the Computing Research Laboratory in New Mexico on an ontology-based Machine Translation project. Evelyne serves on international editorial, program and award committees.

Conference (Co-) Chair

• International Conference on Semantic Computing, September 18-21, 2011. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA. 
   

• Data Driven Functional Programming, POPL, Rome, Italy, January 22, 2013; co-organized by Judith Bishop, Microsoft Research; Karin Breitman, EMC Labs; Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research 
• First Workshop on Programming the Semantic Web, ISWC, Boston, MA, US, November 11, 2012; co-organized by Karin Breitman, EMC Labs; Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz-Landau; Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research; Jan Vitek, Purdue University 
• Spelling Alteration for Web Search Workshop, City Center - Bellevue, WA. July 19, 2011; co-organized by Evelyne Veagas, Microsoft Research; Jianfeng Gao, Microsoft Research; Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research; Jan Pedersen, Microsoft. 
• SIGIR 2010 Web N-gram Workshop, Geneva, Switzerland, July 23, 2010; co-organized by Chengxiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; David Yarowsky, Johns Hopkins University; Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research; Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research; Stephan Vogel, Carnegie Mellon University.
• Workshop on Confidential Data Collection for Innovation Analysis in Organizations 2009, Redmond, Sept 6-7, 2009; co-organized by Nick Bloom, Stanford University; Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois at Chicago; Christian Schunn, University of Pittsburgh; Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research. Sponsored by National Science Foundation.
• Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics 2009 Workshop, Redmond, June 10-11, 2009; co-organized by Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research and Ewa Dominowska, OSD - Bing. Sponsored by External Research and OSD-Bing.
• WSDM 2009 Web Search Click Data 2009, Barcelona, Spain, Feb 8, 2009; co-organized by Nick Craswell, Microsoft; Rosie Jones, Yahoo! Labs; Georges Dupret, Yahoo! Labs; Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research. Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Invited talks  

• Invited speaker at Integrating, Representing, and Reasoning over Human Knowledge: A Computational Grand Challenge for the 21st Century, Snowbird, Utah, August 7-14, 2010
• Invited plenary panelist on the Industry Panel at the AAAI Spring Symposium "Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence", Stanford University, California, March 22–24, 2010
• Invited plenary panelist to Advancing the Study of Innovation and Globalization in Organizations 2009 by NSF and the Conference Board, Nurnberg, Germany, May 29-30, 2009
• Invited talk at the 2009 Workshop on Web Search Click Data 2009, Barcelona, Spain, February, 8, 2009
• Invited talk at the 7^th International Semantic Web Conference, Karlsruhe, Germany, October 26-30, 2008
• Invited speaker on Overview of Microsoft Research and Data Intelligence, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, Toulouse, France, October 23, 2008
• Invited speaker on “Data Intelligence for Search Innovation” at the MSRA workshop on Internet Services and Cloud Computing, Beijing, China, October 7, 2008
• Invited talk by the National Science Foundation and the Conference Board on “Large Scale Real World Data for Open Innovation" at the Global conference on developing a national research data infrastructure for the study of innovation, Arlington, July 23, 2008

Journal articles, Papers with Programme Committee Reviewed 

• Ganesan, K., Zhai, C. and E. Viegas (2012) "Micropinion Generation: An Unsupervised Approach to Generating Ultra-Concise Summaries of Opinions," In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web 2012 (WWW '12)
• Li, H., Xu, G., Croft, W.B., Bendersky, M., Wang, Z. and E. Viegas (2012) "QRU-1: A Public Dataset for Promoting Query Representation and Understanding Research," In Proceedings of the Workshop on Web Search Click Data," (WSCD'12), 2012.
• Kodeswaran, P. and E. Viegas (2010) “Towards A Privacy Preserving Policy Based Infrastructure for Social Data Access To Enable Scientific Research,” Policy 2010.
• Syed, Z. and E. Viegas (2010) “A Hybrid Approach to Unsupervised Relation Discovery Based on Linguistic Analysis and Semantic Typing” In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, Los Angeles, CA, June 1-6, 2010.
• Wang, K., Thrasher, C., Viegas, E., Li, X. and P. Hsu (2010) “An Overview of Microsoft Web N-gram Corpus and Applications” In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, Los Angeles, CA, June 1-6, 2010
• Syed, Z., Viegas, E. and S. Parastatidis (2010) “Automatic Discovery of Semantic Relations using MindNet” In Proceedings of Language Resources Evaluation Conference, Malta, May 17-23, 2010.
• Parastatidis, S., Viegas, E. and T. Hey (2010) A 'Smart' Cyberinfrastructure for Research - A view of semantic computing and its role in research. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 52 No. 12, Pages 33-37
• Kodeswaran, P. and E. Viegas (2009) "Applying Differential Privacy to Search Queries in a Policy Based Interactive Framework" In Proceedings of The 18th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Hong Kong, China, Nov 2-6, 2009.
• Craswell N., Jones R., Dupret G., Viegas E. (2009) ACM Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Web Search Click Data. ISBN: 978-1-60558-434-8.

Programme Committee Member, Reviewer  

• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) on AI and the Web
• Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Spring Symposium "Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence”
• International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)
• Journal of Web Semantics
• Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Third International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW)

Books

Evelyne Viegas (1999, 2007) Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons. Kluwer Academic Press.

Pierrette Bouillon, Laurence Jacqmin, Graham Russell, Lyne Da Sylva, Francoise Vandooren and Evelyne Viegas (1998) Traitement automatique des langues naturelles. Textbook on Natural Language Processing. Editions Duculot, Deboeck et Larcier, 1998, Paris, Bruxelles.

Patrick Saint-Dizier and Evelyne Viegas (1995, 2005) Computational Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press