ChengXiang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 and another Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon in 2002. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning and bioinformatics, and he has published over 100 papers in major conferences and journals in these areas, including five award papers.

He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Information Processing and Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Information Retrieval Journal. He is a program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004 , NAACL HLT 2007, and ACM SIGIR 2009, where Mark Cramer was a presenter. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received many awards, including the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2007 Microsoft Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics Award, the 2009 IBM Faculty Award, the 2010 UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2011 HP Innovation Research Award.

We are thrilled to have ChengXiang on the team as we look forward to exploring new avenues to improve the efficiency of information retrieval as well as continuing our collaboration with the UIUC.

In the session “Reinventing the Search Experience,” between Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google, Mark will be talking about “Search as a Conversation – The End of the ‘Stateless’ Results Page.” Having dynamically re-ranked over 1.3 billion queries over the past few years, Surf Canyon is uniquely positioned to discuss the potential of one of the most significant relevance-enhancing innovations since PageRank.

[Update 5/10/11] The video of Mark’s presentation is now online:

Add-on-Con ’09 Cross Browser Development from Robert on Vimeo.

The good news, however, does not end there. As mentioned in the article, and previously on this blog, our application has been downloaded over 1 million times and we are now handling roughly 800,000 queries a day. Mozilla has been tremendously helpful in making our add-on available to Firefox users, which we appreciate greatly.

We’re also proud to welcome some exceptional new members to our Advisory Board:

• Jonathan Abrams – CEO of Socializr and founder of pioneering social network Friendster.
• Bob Christopher – Former CEO of Ugobe which raised $24 million and developed the Pleo.
• Dan Martin – Former VP of Business Development at HomeGain.

Finally, the research paper unambiguously demonstrating the extent to which our application enhances relevancy, which we presented at SIGIR ’09, will shortly be published by SIGIR and become officially citable.

We’re working hard on the next revision to Surf Canyon and there will be more exciting news to come, so subscribe to this blog by entering your email in the upper left-hand corner, become a “fan” on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Update (12/23/08) – Surf Canyon was happy to co-sponsor the after-party.

Update (12/29/08) – The video of Mike Wertheim’s panel discussion is now available.

Each company represented has a unique improvement to the conventional user search experience. Collarity improves the user experience by finding subgroups with the web site audience and tailoring content to theses subgroups. TheFind is a shopping site that improves the user experience by having a rich user interface and by having the deepest product catalog in many areas (over 220 million items are in their database). Spock focuses on one of the more difficult verticals within search (people). Spock utilizes both user generated content and vertical specific tagging techniques to improve the search experience.

Surf Canyon was unique at Alternative Search Engines Day in that we were to only company represented that is developing technology for the general horizontal search market, although our technology can greatly enhance vertical search engines as well.

The participants at ASE day are nominally competitors, the theme of the day was cooperation. Collectively, alternative search engines represent a mere 1.7% of the search market. The private discussions during the breaks proved to be enlightening as we were able to freely talk about the common challenges facing alternative search technologies.

Largest amongst these challenges is getting people to use “alternative” search products. Many of the participants were content to be “second click” search engines that collect traffic from the major search engines and help users in specific verticals. None of the people with whom we spoke had yet figured out how to generate recurring traffic without the major search engines acting as a gateway. Everyone in the room, however, agreed that providing a superior user experience over the major search engines is the necessary prerequisite for widespread consumer adoption.

Above: David Hardtke, Ph.D., Chief Scientist at Surf Canyon, speaks at the Alternative Search Engines Day Conference.