Soumen Chakrabarti is a Professor of Computer Science at IIT Bombay. He got his PhD from University of California, Berkeley and worked on Clever Web search and Focused Crawling at IBM Almaden Research Center. He has also worked at Carnegie-Mellon University and Google. He works on linking unstructured text to knowledge bases and exploiting these links for better search and ranking. Other interests include link formation and influence propagation in social networks, and personalized proximity search in graphs. He has published extensively in WWW, SIGKDD, EMNLP, ACL, IJCAI, AAAI, SIGIR, VLDB, ICDE and other conferences. His work on keyword search in databases got the 10-year influential paper award at ICDE 2012. He is also the author of one of the earliest books on Web search and mining.
Soumen Chakrabarti received his B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1991 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992 and 1996. At Berkeley he worked on compilers and runtime systems for running scalable parallel scientific software on message passing multiprocessors.
He was a Research Staff Member at IBM Almaden Research Center from 1996 to 1999, where he worked on the Clever Web search project and led the Focused Crawling project. In 1999 he joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, where he was Associate Professor during 2003--2014, and Professor since then. In 2004 he was Visiting Associate professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. During 2014--2016 he was Visiting Scientist at Google.
He has published in the WWW, SIGIR, SIGKDD, EMNLP, ACL, IJCAI, AAAI, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, SODA, STOC, SPAA and other conferences as well as Scientific American, IEEE Computer, VLDB and other journals. He won the best paper award at WWW 1999. He was coauthor on the best student paper at ECML 2008. His work on keyword search in databases got the 10-year influential paper award at ICDE 2012. He won the Bhatnagar Prize in 2014. He is fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS), and the Indian National Science Academy (INSA). He holds twelve patents on Web-related inventions. He is also author of one of the earliest books on Web search and mining.
He has served as technical advisor to search companies and vice-chair or program committee member for WWW, SIGIR, SIGKDD, IJCAI, AAAI, ICML, NeurIPS, VLDB, ICDE, SODA and other conferences, and guest editor or editorial board member for Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, DMKD and TKDE journals. He has served as program chair for WSDM 2008 and WWW 2010.
His current research interests include integrating, searching, and mining text and graph data models, exploiting types and relations in search, and continuous representations of words, entities, types and relations.