Biography: Ryen White is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests lie in understanding search interaction and in developing tools to help people search more effectively. He received his Ph.D. in Interactive Information Retrieval from the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, in 2004. Ryen has published over 100 conference papers and journal articles in Web search, log analysis, and user studies of search systems. He has received six best-paper awards, including two at the ACM SIGIR conference (2007, 2010), one at the ACM SIGCHI conference (2011), and one in JASIST (2010). His doctoral research received the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation Award for the best Computer Science Ph.D. dissertation in the United Kingdom in 2004/2005. Ryen has co-organized numerous workshops on information seeking, in particular exploratory search, including an NSF-sponsored invitational workshop, and has guest co-edited special issues in these areas for a variety of outlets, including Communications of the ACM and IEEE Computer. Since 2008, he has co-organized the annual HCIR Symposium. Ryen has served as area chair for many top conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, and CIKM, and currently serves on the editorial board of ACM TOIS, ACM TWEB, and the Information Retrieval Journal. In addition to academic impact, his research has been shipped in many Microsoft products, including Bing, Xbox, Internet Explorer, and Lync.

I serve on the editorial board of:

I have also served as an area chair / senior PC member for:

"Information Retrieval" at CIKM 2012
"Queries and Query Analysis" at SIGIR 2012
WSDM 2012
"Information Retrieval" at CIKM 2011
"Users and Interactive IR" at SIGIR 2011
"Behavioral Analysis and Personalization" at WWW 2011
"Information Retrieval" at CIKM 2010
"Web IR and Social Media Search" at SIGIR 2010
"Search" at WWW 2010

Education/Employment

Senior Researcher : 2012 - Present
Microsoft Research, Redmond, U.S.A.

Researcher : 2006 - 2012
Microsoft Research, Redmond, U.S.A.

Faculty Research Associate : 2004 - 2006
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies,
University of Maryland, College Park, U.S.A.

Ph.D. Candidate : 2001 - 2004
Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, U.K.
Supervisors: Joemon M. Jose, Ian Ruthven, C.J. van Rijsbergen
Title: Implicit Feedback for Interactive Information Retrieval

Visiting Research Scientist : Fall 2003
Information School, University of Washington, Seattle, U.S.A.

Bachelor of Science (joint honours) : 1997 - 2001
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, U.K.
Majors: Computing Science and Management Studies

Awards

Best Paper Award at ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI 2011)
Honorable Mention Award at ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI 2011)
Best Paper Award at 33rd ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2010)
Best Paper Award in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (for best article in JASIST in 2010)
Best Paper Award at 30th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007)
BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Award for the best Computer Science Ph.D. dissertation in the United Kingdom for 2004/2005
Best Student Paper Award at the 26th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2004)
Best Paper Award at the 9th IFIP TC13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2003)
UNISYS Executive of Interest Project Prize for best Undergraduate Computing Science Thesis, Dept. of Computing Science, University of Glasgow (2000/2001)

Publications

A current list of my publications is available here.

Teaching Experience

Spring 2006: Co-instructor (with Bill Kules) of LBSC 795 (Principles of Human-Computer Communication).

Spring 2005: Co-instructor (with Doug Oard) of LBSC 878 (Doctoral Seminar in Information Storage and Retrieval).

I have experience in lecturing, tutoring and demonstrating students of a variety of skill levels. Tutoring involved leading groups of around 20 students in discussions about their work, helping them resolve problems and assessing their work. Those teaching related activities I have engaged in during my Ph.D. in the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow are:

Level 1 Tutor (Sessions 2001/2002 and 2002/2003): Responsibility for tutoring modules in Programming and Computer Systems.
Level 2 Tutor and Degree Exam Marker (Session 2003/2004): Responsibility for tutoring modules in Software Design and Implementation, Database Systems and Human-Computer Interaction.
Level 4 Guest Lecturer - Information Retrieval 4 (Sessions 2002/2003 and 2003/2004): Lectured on Interactive Information Retrieval and Experimental Design and Analysis
M.Sc. in Information Technology Guest Lecturer - Information Retrieval (Session 2002/2003): Lectured on building Information Retrieval Systems using the Java Programming Language