Qingyao Ai 


Assistant Professor at School of Computing, University of Utah starting Fall 2019.

My research mainly focuses on Information Retrieval and Machine Learning related topics. Currently I'm working on applying deep learning techniques on IR problems including ad-hoc retrieval, product search/recommendation and learning to rank. I'm currently looking for RA to work on IR related projects. 
 
I got my MS/Ph.D degree from College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, advised by Prof. W. Bruce Croft in the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). And I got my bachelor degree from Dept. Computer Science&Technology, Tsinghua Univeristy, and finished my undergraduate thesis project in THUIR lab, advised by Prof. Yiqun Liu. 

Experience
  • University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Research Assistant in CIIR, advised by Prof. W. Bruce Croft. Amherst, MA, USA, Sept. 2014 - Jul. 2019
  • Amazon Search, Data scientist Intern, mentored by Danial Hill and S. V. N. Vishwanathan, Palo Alto, CA, USA, May 2018 - Aug. 2018
  • Google Research, Ph.D. Intern, mentored by Xuanhui Wang, Nadav Golbandi and Michael Bendersky, CA, USA, Jun. 2017 - Sept. 2017
  • Microsoft Research, Research Intern in CLUES, mentored by Susan Dumais and Nick Craswell. Redmond, WA, USA,  Jun. 2015 - Sept. 2015
  • Tsinghua University, undergraduate thesis project in THUIR lab, advised by Prof. Yiqun Liu. Beijing, China, Sept. 2012 - Jun. 2014
Achievements
  • Research Gift from Amazon A9, 2017
  • UMass CICS Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, 2017
  • Ph.D. Qualifying Exam (Portfolio) passed with distinction, 2016
  • Outstanding Bachelor Graduate of Beijing (top 1%), 2014
  • Outstanding Bachelor Graduate of Tsinghua (top 10%), 2014
  • Excellent Graduate Project Award (top 4), 2014
  • Tsinghua Laboratory Contribution Award, Third Prize, 2014
  • Tsinghua Zhong Shi-Mo Scholarship (the highest award for students in Dept. CS&T, top 1), 2012
Services
  • PC Member: 
    • SIGIR
    • WWW
    • CIKM
    • ACL
    • EMNLP
    • ECIR
    • AIRS
    • CCL
  • Journal Review: 
    • TOIS
    • TOIT
    • TKDE
    • KAIS
    • JASIST