Miles Efron

I am an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Funded research Meeting the challenge of language change in text retrieval with machine translation techniques. Google Digital Humanities Research Award. [More Information] Defining and solving key challenges in microblog search. Google Research Award. [More Information] Links Teaching A partial list of my papers My CV (pdf). My profile on Google Scholar A brief biographical sketch IRpeat. My own blog about information retrieval. My research interests My work focuses on information retrieval. I am especially interested in statistical methods for learning from large bodies of text. Most of my research focuses on model selection problems in IR. Results from many applied statistical areas give us ways to negotiate the complexity and multiplicity of models that face us during retrieval. In the past I brought multi-model inference to dimensionality reduction problems in IR. More recently I have worked with time series models to improve term weighting. My time series work also speaks to my ongoing interest in diachronic issues in analyzying text (i.e. capitalizing on language change over time). On a more applied level, I am also working with IR problems that arise in social media applications such as microblogging. More broadly, my overall research goals focus on empirical approaches to helping people make sense of language. We increasingly find ourselves surrounded by text, but our attention is a scarce commodity. How can we present people with appropriate textual information in order to help them make decisions and interpret events? Contact Information Miles Efron Graduate School of Library and Information Science 501 East Daniel St. Champaign, IL 61820 Email: mefron AT illinois DOT edu