Susan Dumais Explained

Susan T. Dumais
Birth Place:Maine, US
Nationality:American
Fields:Computer Science
Workplaces:Microsoft Research
Alma Mater:Indiana University
Bates College
Doctoral Advisor:Richard M. Shriffin
Doctoral Students:Jeff Huang
Known For:Human Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
Awards:ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award (2014)SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award (2020)SIGIR Academy (2021)

Susan Dumais (born August 11, 1953) is an American computer scientist who is a leader in the field of information retrieval, and has been a significant contributor to Microsoft's search technologies.[1] According to Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the Athena Lecture awards committee, “Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval."[2]

Biography

Susan Dumais is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and Managing Director of the Microsoft Research Northeast Labs, inclusive of MSR New England, MSR New York and MSR Montreal. Her research at Microsoft has focused on gaze-enhanced interaction, the temporal dynamics of information systems, user modeling and personalization, novel interfaces for interactive retrieval, and search evaluation. She is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington Information School, where she was the Ph.D. advisor for computer science professor Jeff Huang.

Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Dumais was a researcher at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), where she and her colleagues conducted research into what is now called the vocabulary problem in information retrieval.[3] Their study demonstrated, through a variety of experiments, that different people use different vocabulary to describe the same thing, and that even choosing the "best" term to describe something is not enough for others to find it. One implication of this work is that because the author of a document may use different vocabulary than someone searching for the document, traditional information retrieval methods will have limited success.

Dumais and the other Bellcore researchers then began investigating ways to build search systems that avoided the vocabulary problem. The result was their invention of Latent Semantic Indexing.[4]

Awards

In 2006, Dumais was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2009, she received the Gerard Salton Award, an information retrieval lifetime achievement award. In 2011, she was inducted to the National Academy of Engineering for innovation and leadership in organizing, accessing, and interacting with information. In 2014, Dumais received the Athena Lecturer Award for "fundamental contributions to computer science."[5] and the Tony Kent Strix award for "sustained contributions that are both innovative and practical" with "significant impact".[6] In 2015, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[7] In 2020 she received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award[8] and inducted into the ACM SIGIR Academy in 2021[9] .

External links

Notes and References

  1. News: 100 Top Women in Seattle Tech. 23 February 2016. Puget Sound Business Journal. 8 May 2009.
  2. News: Burns. Jay. Microsoft's Susan Dumais '75 Is a Big Reason Why, Computer-Wise, You Find What You Seek. 23 February 2016. Bates News. 28 October 2015.
  3. The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication. Communications of the ACM. G. W. Furnas, T. K. Landauer, L. M. Gomez, S. T. Dumais. 30. 964–971. 1987. 10.1145/32206.32212. 11. 10.1.1.118.4768. 3002280.
  4. Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis . . Journal of the American Society for Information Science . 41 . 6 . 391–407 . 1990 . 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199009)41:6<391::AID-ASI1>3.0.CO;2-9 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20120717020428/http://lsi.research.telcordia.com/lsi/papers/JASIS90.pdf . 2012-07-17 . 10.1.1.33.2447.
  5. News: Knies. Rob. Dumais Receives Athena Lecturer Award. 28 April 2014. Inside Microsoft Research. April 2014.
  6. Web site: The winner of the 2014 Tony Kent Strix Award is Dr Susan Dumais. 17 September 2014. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20140925204939/http://www.ukeig.org.uk/awards/tony-kent-strix. 25 September 2014.
  7. News: Tice. Lindsay. Lewiston native inducted into American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 23 February 2016. Lewinston-Auburn Sun-Journal. 28 October 2015.
  8. Web site: 2020 SIGCHI Awards.
  9. Web site: Awards – SIGIR 2021 . 2024-07-26 . sigir.org.