student Emine Yilmaz, '07,
in Cambridge, England, she became
one of an elite group of students to
have such an opportunity. Yilmaz
works alongside interns from Princeton,
Brown, UCLA, and Georgia Tech, as
well as from England's Cambridge
and Oxford universities and other top
institutions around the world.
get to learn how they are doing their
research and you learn about different
cultures," says Yilmaz, who is from
Istanbul, Turkey. "It's also exciting
because I'm getting a chance to work
with some of the best researchers in the
world. My boss, Stephen Robertson,
founded many fundamental algorithms
for information retrieval." Robertson
is manager of Microsoft's Information
Retrieval and Analysis group, which is a
subgroup of the Machine Learning and
Perception group.
learning, trying to figure out ways of
measuring search engine performance.
While at Northeastern, Yilmaz, her
adviser, Jay Aslam, and graduate student
Virgil Pavlu devised a new approach
to rating search engine effectiveness,
in order to save time but still get
accurate results. Their method, which
is based on random sampling, involves
evaluating the performance of retrieval
systems when the relevance judgments
are incomplete.
e-mail," says Yilmaz. "He was shocked
because he was in the process of writing
a paper based on a very similar idea."
The fortuitous e-mail got Yilmaz the job.
search engine works and the real prob-
lems associated with it," says Yilmaz.
"Normally, in academia, you're working
with artificial data, since you don't have
access to everything companies do.
Real data is different--it's more prob-
lematic because there is more of it and
it's dynamic."
search engine. Part way through her
internship, she had the opportunity to
present a poster on "Inferring Document
Relevance via Average Precision" at the
the Special Interest Group on Information
Retrieval (SIGIR) conference, held in
Seattle, Washington, this August. "That
was very exciting," she says. "It's great to
get good feedback from other researchers."
to be the only female researcher working
in the Machine Learning and Perception
group, out of more than 30 interns.
women in this field," she says. "When
I get back to Northeastern, I hope to do
what I can to encourage more women
to get into computer science."
at Microsoft Research in England.