Susan Dumais (born August 11, 1953) is an American computer scientist who is a leader in the field of information retrieval, and has been a significant contributor to Microsoft's search technologies. According to Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the Athena Lecture awards committee, “Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval."

Biography

Susan Dumais is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and Managing Director of the

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Northeast Labs, inclusive of MSR New England, MSR New York and MSR Montreal. She is also an Affiliate Professor at the

University of Washington Information School The Information School (or iSchool) at the University of Washington is an undergraduate and graduate school that offers BS, MLIS, MS, and PhD degrees. Formerly the Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences (GSLIS), the Information S ...

. Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Dumais was a researcher at Bellcore (now

Telcordia Technologies iconectiv is a supplier of network planning and network management services to telecommunications providers. Known as Bellcore after its establishment in the United States in 1983 as part of the break-up of the Bell System, the company's name ...

), where she and her colleagues conducted research into what is now called the vocabulary problem in

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...

. Their study demonstrated, through a variety of experiments, that different people use different vocabulary to describe the same thing, and that even choosing the "best" term to describe something is not enough for others to find it. One implication of this work is that because the author of a document may use different vocabulary than someone searching for the document, traditional

methods will have limited success. Dumais and the other Bellcore researchers then began investigating ways to build search systems that avoided the vocabulary problem. The result was their invention of

Latent Semantic Indexing Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the do ...

Awards

In 2006, Dumais was inducted as a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. In 2009, she received the

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 ...

, an information retrieval lifetime achievement award. In 2011, she was inducted to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...

for innovation and leadership in organizing, accessing, and interacting with information. In 2014, Dumais received the Athena Lecturer Award for "fundamental contributions to computer science.". and the

Tony Kent Strix award Tony may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tony (given name), including a list of people and fictional characters * Gregory Tony (born 1978), American law enforcement officer * Motu Tony (born 1981), New Zealand international rugby leagu ...

for "sustained contributions that are both innovative and practical" with "significant impact". In 2015, she was inducted into the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

.In 2020 she received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.

References

External links

Home page at Microsoft Research
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dumais, Susan Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Microsoft employees Microsoft Research people Living people American women computer scientists American computer scientists University of Washington faculty Information retrieval researchers Microsoft technical fellows American women academics 1953 births 21st-century American women