Carnegie Mellon University
June 17, 2013

News Brief: Ph.D. Student Earns Google Fellowship in Information Exchange

Contact: Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice@cs.cmu.edu

Bhavani Dalvi MishraPITTSBURGH—Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute advised by William Cohen and Jamie Callan, was recently awarded the 2013 Google U.S./Canada Ph.D. Fellowship in Information Extraction.

This fellowship was one of just 15 Ph.D. fellowships that Google awarded in the U.S. and Canada. "The student nominations we received were exemplary in their quality," Google said in its award announcement, "but Bhavana especially stood out and was endorsed by the research scientists and distinguished engineers within Google who participated in the review."

Mishra's research develops new methods of extracting information from text to create and populate taxonomies and knowledge bases. She has developed unsupervised algorithms that locate tables in large Web datasets, and use the content of the tables, as well as other text, to identify new concepts (e.g., "football teams", "musical notes") and instances of those concepts (e.g., "Pittsburgh Steelers," "B flat").

Recently, Mishra developed a new method of using partially labeled training data to guide the discovery of known and new types of concepts in a large-scale dataset.

The fellowship begins in August. Google Ph.D. Fellowships cover tuition, fees, and a stipend for two years of academic study and research.

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