Ian M. Soboroff

Information retrieval, collaborative filtering and recommender systems, distributed information retrieval, large-scale text storage and retrieval; user interfaces; scripting languages.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

B.S., Computer Science, magna cum laude, May 1995.

M.S., Computer Science, January 1998.

Ph.D., Computer Science, September 2000 (conferred December 2000). Dissertation title: Combining Content-Based and Collaborative Filtering.

Visiting Research Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Sep 2000 - present.

Co-investigator of the Center for Architectures for Data-Driven Information Processing (CADIP). Designed a large-scale, agent-based distributed information retrieval system, CARROT-2, intended to support the storage and retrieval of hundreds of gigabytes of text. Researched algorithms for hybrid content-based collaborative information filtering, statistical methods for evaluating information retrieval systems without explicit relevance information, and theoretical models of information retrieval and filtering.

Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Jun 1997 - Sep 2000.

Advisor: Charles Nicholas. Member of the UMBC CSEE Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology and the Center for Architectures for Data-Driven Information Processing (CADIP), the Laboratory for Advanced Information Technology (LAIT), and the Graphics, Animation, and Visualization Laboratory (GAVL). Researched and implemented an algorithm for filtering information using a combination of content-based and collaborative information. Led UMBC participation in the Eighth Text REtrieval Conference Filtering Track. Investigated a method for automatically classifying text documents by author or writing style. Developed TKQML, a Tcl implementation of the KQML agent communication language, which served as the platform for a distributed information retrieval system. Researched visualization techniques for examining text collections which allow simultaneous viewing of 5-10 different information dimensions.

Visiting Researcher, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble, France, Sep 1998 - Mar 1999.

Worked with the Coordination Technologies group. Researched collaborative information environments for storing, annotating, and recommending documents in workgroups. Developed content-based and hybrid filtering tools to support an existing collaborative filtering system.

Instructor, UMBC Continuing Education, Spring 1996 - Spring 1998.

Designed and taught professional development courses in user interface design and implementation. These classes ranged in size and scope from individual tutorials in X/Motif programming to 15-20 student seminars in interface design principles.

Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Sep 1996 - May 1997.

Co-developed and co-taught two popular senior-level elective courses in user interface programming (covering X Windows, Motif, Tcl, and Java AWT). Course curricula included lectures, exams, and several large projects.

Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Sep 1995 - Aug 1996

Advisor: Russell Turner. Member of the UMBC CSEE Graphics, Animation and Visualization Laboratory. Researched minimally-immersive virtual reality systems. Developed virtual-reality support for a 3D animation system using stereo glasses and 6-DOF input devices. This support was then integrated into a 3D CT-scan visualization tool for radiologists at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Computer Scientist, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Manufacturing Systems Division, Summer 1994, Summer 1995.

Implemented software tools to support the ISO 10303 standard for the exchange of product and manufacturing process model data. These tools included precompilers from schema definitions to C++ template code, and scripts to automatically produce a World-Wide Web-based model browser from the schema definition.

Christopher D. Shaw, James M. Kukla, Ian Soboroff, David S. Ebert, Charles K. Nicholas, Amen Zwa, Ethan L. Miller, and D. Aaron Roberts (1999)

Interactive Volumetric Information Visualization for Document Corpus Management
International Journal on Digital Libraries, 2:2/3, pp. 144-156.

Ian Soboroff and Charles Nicholas

Collaborative Filtering and the Generalized Vector Space Model
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2000), Athens, Greece, August 2000.

Douglas W. Oard, Jianqiang Wang, Dekang Lin, and Ian Soboroff

TREC-8 Experiments at Maryland: CLIR, QA, and Routing
Working notes of the Eighth Text Retrieval Conference, NIST, Gaithersburg, MD, November, 1999.

R. Scott Cost, Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, Xiaocheng Luan, Yun Peng, Ian Soboroff, James Mayfield and Akram Boughannam

Agent Development with Jackal
(Poster with abstract) Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents '99), Seattle, Washington, May, 1999.

Ian M. Soboroff and Charles K. Nicholas

Combining Content and Collaboration in Text Filtering
Proceedings of the IJCAI 99 Workshop on Machine Learning and Information Filtering, Stockholm, Sweden, August 1999.

R. Scott Cost, Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, Xiaocheng Luan, Yun Peng, Ian Soboroff, James Mayfield, and Akram Boughannam

Jackal: a Java-based Tool for Agent Development
Working Papers of the AAAI-98 Workshop on Software Tools for Developing Agents, Madison, WI, July 1998.

Christopher D. Shaw, David S. Ebert, James M. Kukla, J., Amen Zwa, Ian M. Soboroff, and D. Aaron Roberts

Data Visualization Using Automatic Perceptually-Motivated Shapes
SPIE'98 Conference on Visual Data Exploration and Analysis, January, 1998.

Ian M. Soboroff, Charles K. Nicholas, James M. Kukla, David S. Ebert

Visualizing Document Authorship Using N-grams and Latent Semantic Indexing
Proceedings of the Workshop on New Paradigms in Information Visualization and Manipulation (NPIVM '97), Las Vegas, NV, November, 1997. Published by ACM Press, 1998.

David S. Ebert, James M. Kukla, Christopher D. Shaw, Amen Zwa, Ian Soboroff, and D. Aaron Roberts

Automatic Shape Interpolation for Glyph-based Information Visualization
IEEE Visualization '97, Late Breaking Hot Topics, Phoenix, AZ, October, 1997.

R. Scott Cost, Ian Soboroff, Jeegar Lakhani, Tim Finin, Ethan Miller, Charles Nicholas

TKQML: A Scripting Tool for Building Agents Proceedings of the 1997 Conference on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL '97), Providence, RI, July, 1997.
Published as Intelligent Agents IV, Munindar P. Singh, Anand S. Rao, and Michael J. Woolridge, Eds., Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Vol. 1365. (Springer-Verlag, February 1998).
An extended version is available as UMBC CSEE Technical Report CS TR-97-04.

R. Scott Cost, Ian Soboroff, Jeegar Lakhani, Tim Finin, Ethan Miller, Charles Nicholas

Agent Development Support for Tcl
Poster and extended abstract appearing in Proceedings of the Fifth Tcl/Tk Workshop, Boston, MA, July, 1997.

Russell Turner, Enrico Gobbetti, Ian Soboroff

Head-Tracked Stereo Viewing with Two-Handed 3D Interaction for Animated Character Construction.
Computer Graphics Forum 15(3), Blackwell.
Special Issue on Proceedings EUROGRAPHICS Conference, Poitier, France, 1996.

Charles Nicholas, Grace Crowder, and Ian Soboroff

CARROT: an Agent-Based Architecture for Large-Scale Document Information Systems
UMBC CSEE Technical Report CS-TR-2000-01, August, 2000.

Ian Soboroff, R. Scott Cost and Peter Finin

TKQML Users' Manual
UMBC CSEE Technical Report.

Ian Soboroff, Charles Nicholas, and Michael Pazzani

Workshop on Recommender Systems: Algorithms and Evaluation
SIGIR Forum, vol. 33, no. 3, Fall, 1999.

Ian M. Soboroff

Collaborative Filtering with LSI: Experiments with Cranfield
UMBC CSEE Technical Report CS-TR-98-01, May, 1998.

Spring 1998: Designed and taught a six-session, 12-hour course in X/Motif Programming for UMBC Continuing Education.

Spring 1997: Teaching Assistant, CMSC 437: Graphical User Interface Programming. Designed and taught half of course on X/Motif programming.

Fall 1996: Teaching Assistant, CMSC 437/691C: Graphical User Interface Programming. Assisted in development and teaching of the course material.

Spring 1996: Designed and taught a seven-hour, two-session seminar in User Interface Design for UMBC Continuing Education. This course has been taught on several occasions as part of a multi-week course in software engineering.

• An Introduction to Latent Semantic Indexing
  Bowie State University, November, 1999.
• Combining Content-Based and Collaborative Filtering
  Panel discussion on Text Filtering Technologies, ASIS Annual Conference, November, 1999.

• Student Representative, UMBC CSEE Promotion and Tenure Committee, Fall 1999
• Student Representative, UMBC CSEE Promotion and Tenure Committee, Fall 1997

• Publicity Chair, ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2001
• Proposal Reviewer, NSF Information and Intelligent Systems Division
• Conference Webmaster, ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2000
• Reviewer, Recherche d'Informations Assistée par Ordinateur (RIAO) '99
• Organizer, ACM SIGIR '99 Workshop on Recommender Systems
• Reviewer, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-33)
• Student volunteer and Webmaster, CIKM '99
• Student volunteer (Web and Workshop proceedings), CIKM '97
• Student volunteer, Conference on Agent Technologies, Architectures and Languages (ATAL) '97
• Student volunteer, SIGGRAPH '96

• Association for Computing Machinery
• USENIX
• Upsilon Pi Epsilon, National Computer Science Honor Society

• Member, Junior Instructor, UMBC Tae Kwon Do club