David Mimno, assistant professor in the Information Science department at Cornell University, has been selected by the iSchool faculty as a research fellow for the 2017-2019 academic years. Research fellows are chosen because their work is relevant to the interests of the School's faculty and students. During the period of their appointments, fellows give at least one public lecture.
Mimno's interests include text mining, machine learning, digital humanities, computational humanities, and computer-assisted scholarship. His work is supported by a fellowship from the Sloan Foundation and an NSF CAREER Award.
"My ongoing research focuses on three areas," explained Mimno. "Machine learning systems need to be able to produce useful results while respecting privacy and copyright. Users also need better tools and guidance on ‘data cleaning,’ based on consistent, predictive theories that explain how characteristics of noisy, inconsistent collections affect the results of data mining algorithms. Finally, multi-modal analysis that links text and images can take advantage of recent stunning improvements in image analysis to provide new perspectives for scholars."
Mimno earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass). Prior to arriving at UMass, he worked for an internet auction startup; the Natural Language Processing Research Group at the University of Sheffield; and the Perseus Project, a cultural heritage digital library.
"I was delighted by the invitation to become a research fellow. The iSchool at Illinois is at the forefront of technological approaches to scholarship that take advantage of digitized libraries. But it also represents a long tradition of research in how we can manage information and support scholars and the general public. I hope we never forget that all of the amazing technology that we're building is ultimately about connecting people to the world around them," he said.