Recent News: I'll be spending March and April of 2012 in Australia, working with Alistair Moffat at the University of Melbourne. Besides, of course, being excited to go to Australia, I'm also really looking forward to working with some fantastic IR efficiency researchers.
I am a fifth year graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I work in the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, under James Allan. I officially advanced to PhD candidacy in May of 2010. My next milestone to reach is to propose my thesis, which is set (in my mind) for Summer 2012, after I get back from Australia. I am also one of the primary developers of the Galago search engine.
I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. I followed that up by earning my M.S. in Computer Science from University of Nevada, Las Vegas while concurrently working full-time at ISRI, a research laboratory that managed large volumes of data for the Dept. of Energy during the Yucca Mountain Project.
A copy of my CV (circa January 2012) can be found here.
I spent the summer of 2009 at Yahoo! Labs, working in the Advertising Sciences group under Stefan Schroedl. My work primarily centered on user modeling and click prediction in sessions. I also worked on an internal project with several folks from Yahoo! Barcelona.
The summer of 2010 had me at Microsoft Research (Redmond), continuing on work related to cyberchondria with Ryen White and Eric Horvitz. Turned into a great project on analyzing user intent during health-related searches, and I presented a paper on it in SIGIR 2011.
In the past I've worked on a fairly wide array of projects. One of my earliest projects included Authorship Attribution - trying to match a text to an author given previous examples of that author's work. I've also worked on looking for trends in medical search logs, text reuse in template-sourced emails, cross-document cross-lingual coreference retrieval, and large-scale document clustering.
| Course Name | Role | Semester/Year |
|---|---|---|
| CS646: Information Retrieval | Grader | Fall/2009 |
| CS197C: C++ for Java Programmers | Teaching Associate (TO) | Spring/2009 |
| CS197C: C++ for Java Programmers | Teaching Associate (TO) | Spring/2010 |
| CS197C: C++ for Java Programmers | Teaching Associate (TO) | Spring/2011 |
| CS197C: C++ for Java Programmers | Teaching Associate (TO) | Fall/2011 |
I have taught CS197C for four semesters now. It's designed to teach C++ to people who already have a good working knowledge of Java. In past years I have tried to be as comprehensive as possible in covering the language, which has the class rather time-intensive for the students. This year, due to some changes in the courses offered in the department, I will focus only on major aspects of the language via implementation of some well-known data structures and algorithms. Hopefully this will strengthen the students' backgrounds of algorithms in general as well as give them a good working knowledge of C++.
I am still crystallizing my "teaching philosophy". It definitely evolves every time I teach. I do know that at my core, my teaching mantra is something like "If you're willing to put in the work, then so am I", which has held steady since I've started teaching. I've also learned that it's better to be organized and efficient than it is to be lenient when teaching. I have tried giving students flexible due dates, and it turned out to be more work than it was worth. Tha doesn't mean I don't think extensions should be given; I think they should be given very sparingly, and each student only gets so many. In the future, I intend to fully specify my curriculum before the class starts, and not deviate from it. Other teachers seem to have a great deal of success with this model, therefore I plan to adopt it as my teaching style.
Cartright, M.A., Feild, H., and Allan, J. "Evidence Finding using a Collection of Books". Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Online books, complementary social media and crowdsourcing (BooksOnline '11). Glasgow, Scotland. Oct 23, 2011. (pdf) (won Best Workshop Paper)
Cartright, M.A. and Allan, J. "Efficiency Optimizations for Interpolating Subqueries". Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference of Information and knowledge management (CIKM), Glasgow, Scotland. Oct 24-28, 2011. (pdf)
Cartright, M.A., White R., and Horvitz, E. "Intentions and Attention in Exploratory Health Search". Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Beijing, China. July 24-28, 2011. (pdf)
Marc-Allen Cartright, James Allan, Andrew McGregor, and Victor Lavrenko. "Fast Query Expansion Using Approximations of Relevance Models". Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management (CIKM), Toronto, ON, Canada. Oct 26-30, 2010. (pdf)
Cartright, M., Seo, J., and Lease, M. "UMass Amherst and UT Austin @ The TREC 2009 Relevance Feedback Track". Proceedings of TREC 2009.
Cartright, M., Aktolga, E., and Dalton, J. 2009. "Characterizing the subjectivity of topics." In Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in information Retrieval (Boston, MA, USA, July 19 - 23, 2009). SIGIR '09. ACM, New York, NY, 642-643. (pdf)
Elif Aktolga, Marc-Allen Cartright, and James Allan. "Cross-Document Cross-Lingual Coreference Retrieval". Proceedings of the ACM 17th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Napa Valley, California USA. Oct. 26-30, 2008. (pdf)
Cartright, M. and Bendersky, M. "Towards Scalable Data-Driven Authorship Attribution". CIIR Technical Report. 2008. (pdf)
Cartright, M., Taghva, K. "Document Boundary Determination Using Structural and Lexical Analysis". Master’s Thesis, Department of Computer Science, UNLV. Lied Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 2007.
Cartright, M.A., Feild, H., and Allan. J, "Evidence Finding using a Collection of Books." BooksOnline 2011.
Cartright, M.A. and Allan, J. "Efficiency Optimizations for Interpolating Subqueries." CIKM 2011.
Cartright, M.A., White, R., and Horvitz, E. "Intentions and Attention in Exploratory Health Search". SIGIR 2011.
Cartright, M., Seo, J., and Lease, M. "UMass Amherst and UT Austin @ The TREC 2009 Relevance Feedback Track". TREC 2009.