Dumais on Search: Bell Labs Roots Are Thriving
October 23, 2019
We just love a genuine Search guru, and Dr. Susan Dumais is one of the best. The illustrious Dr. Dumais is now a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Deputy Lab Director of MDR AI. If you wanted to know the history of information retrieval, she would be the one to hear tell about it—and now you can, courtesy of the Microsoft Research Podcast. Both the 38-minute podcast itself and a transcript are posted at, “HCI, IR and the Search for Better Search with Dr. Susan Dumais.” The good doctor describes what motivates her in her work:
“I think there are two commonalities and themes in my work. One is topical. So, as you said, I’m really interested in understanding problems from a very user-centric point-of-view. I care a lot about people, their motivations, the problems they have. I also care about solving those problems with new algorithms, new techniques and so on. So, a lot of my work involves this intersection of people and technology, thinking about how work practices co-evolve with new technological developments. And so thematically, that’s an area that I really like. I like this ability to go back and forth between understanding people, how they think, how they reason, how they learn, how they find information, and finding solutions that work for them. In the end, if something doesn’t work for people, it doesn’t work. In addition to topically, I approach problems in a way that is motivated, oftentimes, by things that I find frustrating. We may talk a little bit later about my work in latent semantic indexing, but that grew out of a frustration with trying to learn the Unix operating system. Work I’ve done on email spam, grew out of a frustration in mitigating the vast amount of junk that I was getting. So, I tend to be motivated by problems that I have now, or that I anticipate that our customers, and people will have in general, given the emerging technology trends.”
She and host Gretchen Huizinga go on to discuss the evolution of search technology over the last twenty years, beginning with the first HTML page crawlers that indexed but a couple thousand queries per day. They also cover Dumais’ work over the years to build bridges, provide context in search, and bring changing content into the equation. We hope you will check out the intriguing and informative interview for yourself, dear reader.
Cynthia Murrell, October 23, 2019
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