About iRiS
The Information Retrieval, Integration and Synthesis (iRiS) Lab is a research group at School of Computing and Information (SCI), University of Pittsburgh.
We are researchers and educators who are interested in and are actively working on various cutting-edge intelligent and social information technologies to advance people’s capabilities of accessing relevant information, online or in-domain, in support of their decision making. This focus fits nicely to the current data and information exploration environment, where there is too much data for people to process and consume, therefore, people need information technologies to assist them.
At the same time, we believe that the role that intelligent technologies can play is not to replace humans but rather to assist, collaborate and augment humans in the access process. The relationship between humans and the technologies is a synergistic one where humans and machines work together to resolve the needs of the humans. Therefore, we are interested in making technology as enabler rather replacer, and it is people who initiate the needs of access, provide meaningful context, and utmost measures of success or failure of the technologies.
We further emphasize that technologies should aim to resolve real world problems, where interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches are natural and have the greatest impact. We actively build research teams and projects that involve faculty and students from different disciplines and various universities/institutions. We particularly like to collaborate with domain experts who have real world in-domain problems.
The set of technologies that we have extensive knowledge and experience are artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, information retrieval, human information access, scholar data management, and open government data access.
Awards Received
- ACM SIGIR CHIIR 2023 Best Short Paper Award (2023).
- ACM SIGIR CHIIR 2019 Best Poster Award (2019).
- iConference 2017 Best Poster Award (2017).
- ACM SIGIR CHIIR 2017 Best Student Paper Award (2017).
- iConference 2013 Best Paper Award Honorable Mention (2013)
Lab Members
Director
 |
Professor, School of Computing and Information. Research Interests: addresses the challenges inherent in the detection and extraction of relevant information from the unlimited resources available on the Web, most of which is irrelevant to the user's particular need or interest. |
Current Graduate Students
 |
Doctoral Student | Dept. of Informatics and Networked Systems Research interests: Natural Language Understanding in Biomedical Area, Multi-Model Generation, Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning, Large Language Model Deployment |
 |
Doctoral Student | Dept. of Informatics and Networked Systems Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Text mining, Knowledge Representation |
 |
Doctoral Student | Dept. of Informatics and Networked Systems Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Text mining, Knowledge Representation |
 |
Doctoral Student | Intelligent Systems Program Research interests: Information retrieval, Text mining and student modelling |
 |
Doctoral Student | Intelligent Systems Program Research interests: Articial Intelligence, Machine Learning |
 |
Doctoral Student | Dept. of Information Science Program Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Text mining |
 |
Doctoral Student | Dept. of Information Culture and Data Stwardship Research interests: Human Data Interaction, Information Behaviour, Health Informatics |
Past Graduate Students
 |
Assistant Professor | Graduate Institute of Library and Information Science, National Chung Hsing University Research interests: Human-Computer Interaction, Information Behavior, User Usability and Smart Applications, Information Retrieval, Digital Humanities |
 |
Assistant Professor | School of Information, San Jose State University Research interests: Information behavior, exploratory search |
 |
Spencer Goodwin Librarian | Vanderbilt University Research interests: Digital Libraries, Information Retrieval and Data Curation |
 |
Research Scientist | Alibaba Group Research interests: Combining social network analysis and topic modeling in recommendation, information retrieval |
 |
Associate Professor | Dept. of Library and Information Science National Taiwan University and the Director of Talent empowerment Center at National Institute of Cyber Security Research interests: Online community behaviors, academic social networking, scholarly communication, information visualization |
 |
Jiepu Jiang Research Scientist | Google Research interests: Query model and relevance feedback, query and query reformulation, modeling contexts in retrieval, using entities in retrieval, bibliometrics and webometrics. |
 |
Database System Administrator | School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh Research interests: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), music information retrieval, information visualization |
 |
Assistant Professor, School of Business, SUNY New Paltz Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Medical Document Mining |
 |
Associate Professor | Dept. of Management Information Systems, National Chengchi University Research interests: Semantic enriched search, exploratory search, open corpus personalization, HCI, information retrieval |
 |
Research Scientist | Salesforce Research Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Text mining, Machine Learning |
 |
Assistant Professor | Incheon National University Research interests: Expert finding, digital reference service |
 |
Postdoc | Cornell University Research interests: Information behavior, HCI, Open government Data |
 |
Doctoral Student | Intelligent System Program Research interests: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine |
 |
Zhen Yue Research Scientist | Yahoo Research interests: Interactive information retrieval, collaborative web search, information retrieval evaluation Now, Research Scientist at Yahoo. |
 |
Software Engineer | Google Research interests: Information retrieval |
 |
Machine Learning Researcher | Zoom Research interests: Natural language processing, Machine learning |
Past Visiting Students and Scholars
 |
Visiting Doctoral Student | School of Information Management, Wuhan University Now Associate Professor | School of Information Management, Wuhan University Research interests: NLP, information retrieval, text mining and social network analysis |
 |
Visiting Doctoral Student | School of Information Management, Wuhan University Now Assistant Professor | Central China Normal University Research interests: Cross-device Search Behavior, Information Seeking Behavior, Human-computer Interaction |
 |
Visiting Doctoral Student | Dept.of Information Management, Nanjing University of Science & Technology Now Assistant Professor | School of Government, Beijing Normal University Research interests: Information organization,Text mining,Social tags quality,user behaviour |
 |
Visiting Doctoral Student | School of Information Management, Wuhan University Now Assistant Professor | School of Information Management, Wuhan University Research interests: Information behavior, Mobile application usage, Mobile search behavior, Cross-device search behavior |
 |
Yonggu Lee Postdoc | Information Science and Technolgy |
 |
Visiting Doctoral Student | Peking University Now Professor and Vice Provost of Undergraduate College | Wuhan University Research interests: Information Retrieval, information organization, multilingual information processing, metadata, digital library |
 |
Peng Wu Visiting Scholar | Associate Professor of Department of information Management, School of Management & Economics, Nanjing University of Science &Technology Now Professor and Dean of School of Intelligent Manufacture, Nanjing University of Science &Technology Research interests: mental models of online users, computer simulations of crowd behaviour in online opinion environments, knowledge engineering< |
 |
Jingjing Zhang Visiting Doctoral Student | Dept.of Information Management, Nanjing University of Science & Technology Research interests: User behavior on social media, Online user's emotion modeling, Cognitve behavior of online users |
 |
Visiting Doctoral Student | Dept. of Information Management, Nanjing University of Science & Technology Now Assistant Professor | Soochow University Research interests: Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, User Behavior |
Selected Projects
- “Transferable, Controllable, Applicable Keyphrase Generation”
Funded by Amazon Research Award, Duration: 2020-2021 PI. Award Amount: $80,000 + $20,000 AWS Credits.
This project proposes to develop novel keyphrase prediction models that are transferable to different domains without the need of large amounts of domain-specific data and controllable for generating phrases of various genres. more here - “Development and Implementation of a Health e-Librarian with Personalized Recommender (HELPeR)”
Funded by NIH NLM, Duration: 2019-2023 MPI. Award Amount: $1,480,406.
The overall goal of this proposal is to build and implement a "Health E-Librarian with Personalized Recommendations (HELPeR)" - a personalized information access system with a hybrid recommender engine that adapts to different aspects of the patient. - “IRIS: Intelligent Recommender for Instructors and Students -- Completing Personalized
Assessment Loop,”
Funded by Provost’s Personalized Education Grant, University of Pittsburgh, Duration: 2019-2020 PI. Award Amount: $14,995.
This project will build a personalized education system, called IRIS, to recommend learning materials to be specific to the assessment outcomes and at the appropriate knowledge level for the student. - “IRIS: Intelligent Recommender for Instructors and Students -- Completing Personalized
Assessment Loop,”
Funded by Provost’s Personalized Education Grant, University of Pittsburgh, Duration: 2019-2020 PI. Award Amount: $14,995.
This project will build a personalized education system, called IRIS, to recommend learning materials to be specific to the assessment outcomes and at the appropriate knowledge level for the student. - “CARE: Clinical Abbreviation Resolution Engine”
Funded by Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance Project and UPMC, Duration: 2018-2020 PI. Award Amount: $222,351.
Our Clinical Abbreviation Resolution Engine (CARE) project utilizes the latest deep learning models and trains them on large-scale collections of clinical reports to improve abbreviation resolution. The project also develops a clustering-based annotation strategy and interface to quickly generate annotated data for model development. - Open Corpus Personalized Learning
Funded by NSF, Duration: 2015-2018
This project merges research on text analysis, human learning, and personalization to enable open corpus personalized learning. - Teen Health Information Behavior and Social Q&A
Funded by OCLC/ALISE, Duration: 2015
This project investigates teens' assessments of the Accuracy, Credibility, and Reliability of health information in Yahoo! Answers about eating disorders. The aim is to contribute to the greater understanding of youth information behavior, health information literacy, and the role of Social Q&A in the provision of health information to young people. - Tapping into Public Academic Information on the Social Web: Towards a Novel Academic Recommendation Framework
Funded by NSF, Duration: 2010-2012
This project aims to explore the utility of new and rapidly expanding public academic information resources on the social Web. The goal is to develop a quality assessment and an association discovery framework for online academic information, and ultimately to establish a novel framework for supporting researchers in accessing, organizing, utilizing, and exchanging all types of academic information. - User-centric, Adaptive and Collaborative Information Filtering
Funded by NSF, Duration: 2007-2012, Partner: CMU CLAIR group
Working with our CMU partner, the objective of this project is to develop new technologies for Adaptive Filtering (AF) -- the problem of learning and adapting to a user's information needs "on-the-fly". We propose a new framework called "Enriched Vector Space Model" (EVSM) that allows a rich representation of user's interests in terms of queries, entities (person names, locations, dates), topical categories (politics, crime, economics), implicit and explicit feedback received from the user. Such user profiles can be used to perform more intelligent and personalized information filtering for each user. - Adaptive, Robust, and Distilled Information Access
Funded by DARPA GALE Program, Duration: 2005-2007.
We propose to develop and demonstrate an integrated set of techniques for building an adaptive, robust and distilled information access module for information distillation, which is able to handle electronic newswire, transcriptions from broadcast news, telephone conversations, and talk shows, and web documents from newsgroups and weblogs, no matter whether they are originally in English or in Chinese, Arabic or surprise languages. - Digital Library for Learning Digital Library
Funded by University of Pittsburgh, Provost's Innovation in Teaching Award. Duration: 2005-2006.
This project designed and developed an interactive, integrated and active learning environment using digital library technologies, with the goals to improve the quality of the student's learning experience and increase the effectiveness of that experience.
Publications and Resources
We have published more than 200 articles in internationally-recognized journals and conferences in these areas, which include information science journals and conferences such as Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, ACM Transaction on Information Systems, Journal of Information Science, ACM SIGIR, CIKM, WWW, and CSCW, and medical informatics journals and conferences such as Journal of Medical Internet Research (Aging, and Cancer), Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research, Innovation in Applied Nursing Informatics, Innovaton in Aging, IEEE EMBS International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics.
You can access our lab's publications via Daqing's profiles at the following online sites:
Contact Information
Daqing He, Ph.D.
Room 614, Information Science Building
135 North Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Tel: (412) 624 9317 Fax: (412) 648 7001
Email: dah44 AT pitt DOT edu