Chirag Shah's WebHome

	I am a PhD student at School of Information & Library Science (SILS) at UNC Chapel Hill. I received MTech (Computer Science) from IIT Madras, India and MS (Computer Science) from UMass Amherst. At UMass, I worked with W. Bruce Croft and James Allen in CIIR, and David Jensen in KDL. My work focused on issues related to High Accuracy Retrieval, Topic Detection and Tracking, and Applications of Social Networks in Information Filtering. At present I am working with Gary Marchionini on issues related to Collaborative Information Seeking, Faceted Interfaces, and Contexual Mining for Digital Preservation; and with Diane Kelly on issues related to User/System Relevance, and Perception of Search Engines.
During summer 2007 I interned at FXPAL in California working on various aspects of TRECVid as well as developing a framework for collaborative information retrieval. I spent summer of 2006 as a visiting research fellow at National Institute of Informatics (NII) at Tokyo working on formal aspects of Story Link Detection and TREC's Blog Track. I am teaching a self-designed course on Information Retrieval System Design and Implementation this fall. If you're interested in my YouTube crawling work, check out ContextMiner and TubeKit. You can read description about my research areas or see publications and talks. When I'm not studying or researching, I'm probably dancing, traveling, cooking, writing or engaged in something new that I just picked up!.