Dr. Susan T. Dumais

A Principal Researcher in the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group of Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington Information School. Before joining Microsoft in 1997, she was a researcher at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), where she and her colleagues conducted research into what is now called the vocabulary problem in information retrieval which demonstrated, that different people use different vocabulary to describe the same thing. One implication of this work is that because the author of a document may use different vocabulary than someone searching for the document, traditional information retrieval methods will have limited success. she and the other Bellcore researchers then began investigating ways to build search systems that avoided the vocabulary problem. The result was their invention of Latent Semantic Indexing.[2] In 2006, she was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2009, she received the Gerard Salton Award, an information retrieval lifetime achievement award.