June 2016: My group has received funding as part of two 3-year, $1.2M learning analytics projects funded by the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS): LEAP (Analytics for Learners as People) and HOME (Holistic Modeling of Education).

Mar 2016: I'll be giving a keynote at the SIGIR 2016 Workshop on Searching as Learning (SAL 2016) in Pisa, Italy on July 21.

Mar 2016: I'll be visiting the University of Waterloo on May 16 to give a talk for the Data Systems Seminar.

Nov 2015: Happy to be visiting Purdue on Friday Nov. 20 to give a talk in the Machine Learning Seminar on optimizing search engine algorithms for educational goals.

Aug 2015: We are delighted to be hosting ACM SIGIR 2018 in Ann Arbor!

Feb 2015: I'll be presenting some of my group's recent work on the text analytics of student course feedback at the Southeast Educational Data Symposium at Emory University in Atlanta in late February.

Dec 2014: Our Project DSCoVaR, developing technology supporting middle school literacy, has received an Amazon Web Services in Education Research award.

Oct 2014: Happy to be visiting with colleagues this month to give invited talks at CWI in Amsterdam, a workshop on computational learning of language models in Stockholm, and an ETS-sponsored vocabulary assessment workshop in Princeton, NJ.

Aug 2014: The U.S. Dept of Education Institute of Education Sciences (IES), has funded our 3-year, $1.5m project to develop intelligent tutoring technology: Dynamic Support of Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition for Reading (DSCoVAR). Our aim is to help kids in middle school improve their literacy skills and develop some compelling new technology in the process.

Aug 2014: This month's Communications of the ACM features our article on Slow Search with colleagues from Microsoft Research.

Aug 2014: We'll be discussing new research directions that combine information interaction with educational goals, in our upcoming panel at ASIST 2014 in Seattle. Monday Nov 3: Searching as Learning: Novel Measures for Information Interaction Research. Soo Young Rieh, Jacek Gwizdka, Luanne Freund, Kevyn Collins-Thompson.

July 2014: I've just released a new working paper: Computational assessment of text readability: a survey of current and future research. An edited version to be published as a journal article this fall.

June 2014: The TREC 2014 Web Track guidelines have been posted here.

Dec 2013: I gave an invited plenary talk on risk-sensitive retrieval in New Delhi at FIRE 2013, the Indian Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation in New Delhi, Dec 6, 2013.

Dec 2013: I gave an invited talk at the Living Analytics Research Centre Seminar at Singapore Management University on Mon. Dec. 2, 2013.

Nov 2013: The TREC 2013 Web Track has successfully concluded, with some fascinating analysis of the new risk-sensitive retrieval task by several teams. I presented the track overview at TREC 2013: final version of paper to follow shortly.

July 2013: Our paper on intrinsic diversity in Web search won a Best Paper Award at SIGIR 2013 (Best Student-Led Paper).