ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

Biography

Zhai received the BS (1984), MS (1987, under Guoliang Zheng), and PhD (1990, under Jiafu Xu) in Computer Science from

Nanjing University Nanjing University (NJU; ) is a national public research university in Nanjing, Jiangsu. It is a member of C9 League and a Class A Double First Class University designated by the Chinese central government. NJU has two main campuses: the Xianl ...

. He spent 1990 to 1993 working at

's State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology. In 1993, he left for America to pursue a second PhD, this time at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

(CMU) with

David A. Evans David A. Evans (January 11, 1941 – April 29, 2022) was an American chemist who was the Abbott and James Lawrence professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He was a prominent figure in the field of organic chemistry and his research focus ...

. Evans then left to spend more time with the company ClariTech. Zhai obtained from CMU a MS (1997) in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

and then started working with

John Lafferty John Lafferty or Laverty (1842 – November 13, 1903) was a sailor in the U.S. Navy during the American Civil War and is one of only 19 people in history to receive the Medal of Honor twice. Biography According to his first Medal of Honor c ...

. He finally received from CMU a PhD in Language and Information Technologies in 2002. Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor (2002–2008), Associate Professor (2008–2013), Professor (2013–2018), and Donald Biggar Willett Professor (2018–) at the UIUC Department of Computer Science. He also holds joint appointments with the

Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) is ainterdisciplinaryfacility for genomics research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Institute was built in 2006 to centralize biotechnology research at the University o ...

, Department of Statistics, and School of Information Sciences at UIUC.

Awards

* ACM SIGIR

Gerard Salton Award The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to r ...

, 2021, "for significant and sustained contributions to information retrieval and data science. His work has defined many of the theoretical foundations of the language modeling approach, yielding major insights into areas such as smoothing methods, relevance feedback, topic diversification, and text representations that incorporate positional information. He and his collaborators have also pioneered the axiomatic approach to information retrieval, which continues to provide inspiration for retrieval model and evaluation research." *ACM SIGIR

Academy An academy ( Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy ...

inductee, 2021 *

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...

, 2017, "for contributions to information retrieval and text data mining." *ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2016, for paper ''A study of smoothing methods for language models applied to Ad Hoc information retrieval'' *ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2016, for paper ''Document language models, query models, and risk minimization for information retrieval'' *ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award, 2014, for paper ''Beyond independent relevance: methods and evaluation metrics for subtopic retrieval'' *ACM Distinguished Member, 2009 *

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White ...

(PECASE), 2004, "for his work on user-centered, adaptive intelligent information access. His techniques expect to improve search-engine performance, support better information organization and enable understanding of large volumes of information. Zhai's work in information retrieval is expected to enhance curricula and provide new educational tools for the growing information technology workforce." *ACM SIGIR Best Paper Award, 2004, for paper ''A formal study of information retrieval heuristics''

Personal

Zhai's son Alex has earned three medals at the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except i ...

References

American computer scientists University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Nanjing University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Natural language processing researchers {{US-scientist-stub