ChengXiang Zhai, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UIUC
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ChengXiang Zhai is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Genomic Biology and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He worked at Clairvoyance Corporation as a Research Scientist and, later, a Senior Research Scientist from 1997 to 2000. He received a B.S., a M.S., and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1984, 1987, and 1990, respectively. He also received a M.S. in Computational Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University in 1995 and 2002, respectively. His research interests broadly include text information management, natural language processing, machine learning, and bioinformatics. He has published more than 30 papers in top conferences and journals with contributions in information retrieval models, statistical language models, personalized search, text mining, collaborative filtering, and bioinformatics. His papers on applying statistical language models to information retrieval are among the most highly cited information retrieval 6 papers in recent years. His work on developing the next-generation retrieval models has won the Best Paper Award of ACM SIGIR 2004. He is the main architect and initial contributor of the Lemur language modeling for information retrieval toolkit, which has been widely used by people in the world for information retrieval research and development. He received the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), recognizing his work on User-Centered Adaptive Information Retrieval, which is funded by an NSF CAREER Award. He was the IR program chair of ACM CIKM 2004 and has served on the program committee of all the major conferences on information retrieval and many major conferences on natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining.
