I have worked on a wide spectrum of information access problems ranging from predictive analytics and content tracking to entity linking and online learning to rank. Most of my research has been conducted during 2007–2014 at Information and Language Processing Systems (ILPS) at the University of Amsterdam and it continues today at Apple. In the table below, I list an overview of my research interests over the years:
Time span | Research topic |
---|---|
2020– | Voice search, evaluation |
2014–2019 | Product search, online learning to rank, evaluation |
2012–2014 | Entity linking, summarization, recommender systems |
2008–2012 | Predictive analytics, social media, content tracking |
2007–2008 | Speech recognition in user generated content |
As of September 6, 2021, I have published 55 papers with a total of 1,829 citations; my H-index is 20. You can access my publications via my Google Scholar profile.
Community Service
I have served in the program committee member of the following venues.
Year | Venue |
---|---|
2021 | Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) |
International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) | |
SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce (SIGIReCom) | |
Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ) | |
Journal of Information Retrieval (IRJ) | |
2020 | Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) |
SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce (SIGIReCom) | |
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) | |
Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) | |
European Conference on Informantion Retrieval (ECIR) | |
2019 | Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) |
SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce (SIGIReCom) | |
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) | |
Word Wide Web conference (WWW) | |
Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) – Outstanding PC Member Award, Session chair on Graphs | |
2018 | Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) |
The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) | |
Word Wide Web conference (WWW) | |
2017 | Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) |
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) | |
2016 | Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) |
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) | |
2015 | International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR) |
International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) | |
Information Processing & Management (IPM) | |
Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) | |
Artificial Intelligence (AIRE) | |
Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) | |
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) | |
2014 | Workshop on Machine Learning for Predictive Models Information Processing & Management (IPM) |
Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) | |
Information Retrieval Facility Conference (IRFC) | |
Workshop on Social Multimedia and Storytelling Neurocomputing Journal | |
Information Retrieval Journal (IRJ) | |
Social News On the Web | |
IEEE’s Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering | |
European Conference on Informantion Retrieval (ECIR) | |
2013 | Journal of Internet Services and Applications |
International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing | |
International Workshop and Challenge on News Recommender Systems | |
Information Retrieval Facility Conference (IRFC) | |
Information Processing & Management (IPM) | |
Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) | |
The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) | |
Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) | |
European Conference on Informantion Retrieval (ECIR) | |
Transactions on the Web (ToW) | |
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) | |
2012 | The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop |
European Conference on Informantion Retrieval (ECIR) | |
2011 | Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL) |
2009 | Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE) |
Member of Ph.D. Examining Committees
Year | Role | Ph.D. candidate | Research topic |
---|---|---|---|
2021 | Examiner | Seyyed Hadi Hashemi | Modeling Users Interacting with Smart Devices |
2017 | Copromotor | David Graus | Entities of Interest |
2014 | Examiner | Damiano Spina Valenti | Entity-based Filtering and Topic Detection for Online Reputation Monitoring in Twitter |
Student Supervision
I am happy to have worked with more than a dozen of Ph.D., M.Sc., and B.Sc. students on a variety of research topics for their theses. Some of these masters theses have made it to a publication, some have won national thesis awards and some others have won best paper/poster awards.
Year | Student and research topic |
---|---|
2021 | M.Sc. Param Popat on application-specific language models |
2020 | M.Sc. Sashank Gondala on error-driven pruning of language models |
B.Sc. Sahas Dendukuri on acoustic embeddings | |
2017 | Ph.D. David Graus on Entities of Interest |
2014 | B.Sc. Thijs van der Velden on real-time music charts on Twitter |
M.Sc. Bart Eijk on recommendation ensembles for music discovery | |
M.Sc. Varvara Tzika on retrieval of classifieds in auction sites | |
M.Sc. Guido van Bruggen on analyzing real-time context of TV broadcasts | |
M.Sc. Selvi Ratnasingam on information diffusion across languages in news and social media | |
M.Sc. Nikos Voskarides on learning entity relations in big data | |
2013 | M.Sc. Kerim Meijer on evaluating performance of distributed search systems |
M.Sc. Andrei Oghina on recommending content on news sites | |
M.Sc. Mathias Breuss on recommending content on Twitter | |
2012 | M.Sc. Mark Bakker on predicting movie Awards using Twitter |
B.Sc. Gijs van der Voort on classifying tweets as reviews | |
2011 | B.Sc. Philo Kamenade on information propagation in Twitter |
2010 | M.Sc. Kamran Massoudi on microblog retrieval |
If you are B.Sc. or M.Sc. student looking for an internship or project on the area of query understanding, online learning to rank, and/or evaluation of learning to rank methods, get in touch. We usually have a bunch of cool projects on these areas.
Ph.D. Thesis

I defended my Ph.D. thesis, Mining Social Media: Tracking Content and Predicting Behavior, in December 2012. I worked on my thesis at the University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of Prof.Dr.Maarten de Rijke. Maarten has been a great supervisor and exemplary researcher. Without his guidance and the people from ILPS and my co-authors, this thesis would not have been possible. Thank you.
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