Google Faculty Research Award for Evangelos Kanoulas

Evangelos Kanoulas, assistant professor at the Informatics Institute (UvA), awarded a Google Faculty Research Award of >50K Euro for his proposal on ‘Session-based Personalization: Models and Algorithms’

The Google Faculty Research Awards Program aims to recognise and support world-class, permanent faculty, pursuing cutting-edge research in areas of mutual interest. The objective is to identify and strengthen long-term collaborative relationships with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology.

Research proposal

Retrieval models, search algorithms, evaluation frameworks have been developed with a rather specific but often unrealistic user behavioural model in mind: a user with an information need poses a query to the search engine, receives back a SERP of organic results and ads (or a direct answer), interacts with it and abandons search, either being satisfied or not.

Often, however, the user is getting engaged in a longer and more advanced interaction with the search engine, by reformulating her query, drifting her need, and multitasking.

The major research question that Evangelos Kanoulas will answer in this project is how can contextual information accumulated along a search session enhance the quality of a ranking? In this project algorithms will be developed to account for this contextual information.

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