Sameer Singh is one of two UMass Amherst students to win an award from Yahoo! to further his research that's helping invent the future of the Internet. L to R: Professor Andrew Barto, Chair, UMass Amherst Computer Science Department; Singh; and Ken Schmidt, Yahoo! Academic Relations.
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Yahoo! to help fund research for two rising computer scientists
Friends, collaborators, and fellow UMass Amherst computer science graduate students, Sameer Singh of New Delhi and Michael Wick ’06 of Amherst, have each won a highly competitive award from Yahoo! for their research proposals.
Singh and Wick were two of the 23 winners of the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenge that encourages top graduate students to help invent the future of the Internet. Each winner received $5,000 to support their research and in September, they will convene with the other award winners at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, to present and defend their findings to their peers and to Yahoo! Labs leaders.
Singh says he’s excited to learn from and network with widely known research scientists whose work he’s familiar with, but even more eager to get to know his fellow award winners. “Perhaps we’ll launch our own Internet company and give out our own awards someday,” he jokes.
This is the second year of the prestigious Yahoo! Award program, and the second time two students from UMass Amherst’s highly ranked computer science department have won. The campus is a leader in artificial intelligence and has received research support from Yahoo! and other industry innovators.
Though Internet search methods have improved dramatically over the past decade, there’s still much work to be done before search engines can get users to the information they want quickly and efficiently. Both Singh and Wick focus their research on improving information extraction. Wick explains, “There are voluminous amounts of data scattered about on the Web in unstructured formats. I’m looking at ways to distill that information and store it in a more structured way so that it is more easily searchable.”
Singh is trying to solve the difficult problems common names present in computer searches. His program would differentiate among many people with the same name. Both students work in Professor Andrew McCallum’s Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory.