"Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

My research interests lie in the synergy among information retrieval, usage mining, and machine learning. The goal of my research is to advance the state of the art in the perception and consumption of the distributed, heterogeneous, and unstructured information on the Web, addressing the application of Web search engines, online communities, and large scale digital libraries. Currently, my research efforts are divided between developing personal or collaborative ranking algorithms and intelligent focused crawlers.

I work with Prof. C. Lee Giles and Prof. Prasenjit Mitra in the Intelligent Systems Research Lab at Penn State. I'm part of the CiteSeer team and contributing to the Next Generation CiteSeer project.

Research and Industrial Experiences

Fall 2007: Research Intern, Machine Learned Ranking Team at Yahoo! Applied Research, Santa Clara, CA.

Summer 2007: Research Intern, Web Search and Data Mining Group at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, Mountain View, CA. Managers: Marc Najork and Roy Levin. Here's my (out-dated) homepage at MSR.

Summer 2005: Research Intern, Text Mining, Search, and Navigation Group at Microsoft Research Redmond, Redmond, WA. Project: Log-based ranking algorithms for Web search. Managers: Silviu Cucerzan and Eric Brill.

U.S. Patent

Re-Ranking Search Results Based on Query Log Statistics. Filed in 2006. Patent No. 20070214131. Blog posts about the filing.

Publications

• Ziming Zhuang and Silviu Cucerzan. Exploiting Semantic Query Context to Improve Search Ranking. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ISCS 2008), Santa Clara, CA, USA, August 2008.


• Yang Song, Ziming Zhuang, Huajing Li, Qiankun Zhao, Jia Li, Wang-chien Lee, and C. Lee Giles. Real-time Automatic Tag Recommendation. In Proceedings of the The 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2008), Singapore, July 2008.


• Ziming Zhuang, Cliff Brunk, and C. Lee Giles. Modeling and Visualizing Geo-Sensitive Queries Based on User Clicks. In Proceedings of The 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2008), Workshop on Location and the Web, Beijing, China, May 2008.


• Jian Huang, Ziming Zhuang, Jia Li, and C. Lee Giles. Collaboration Over Time: Characterizing and Modeling Network Evolution. In Proceedings of The First ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Stanford, CA, February, 2008.


• Yang Sun, Ziming Zhuang, Isaac Councill, and C. Lee Giles. Determining Bias to Search Engines from Robots.txt. In Proceedings of 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2007). Silicon Valley, USA. November, 2007.
  - Media coverage: Associated Press, Science Daily, PCWorld, and PSU Newswire


• Qingzhao Tan, Ziming Zhuang, Prasenjit Mitra, and C. Lee Giles. Efficiently Detecting Webpage Updates Using Samples. In Proceedings of The 17th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE) 2007. Como, Italy. July, 2007.


• Ziming Zhuang, Ergin Elmacioglu, Dongwon Lee, and C. Lee Giles. Measuring Conference Quality by Mining Program Committee Characteristics. In Proceedings of The ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2007. Vancouver, Canada. June, 2007.


• Qingzhao Tan, Ziming Zhuang, Prasenjit Mitra, and C. Lee Giles. A Clustering-based Sampling Approach for Refreshing Search Engine's Database. In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on the Web and Databases (WebDB 2007). Beijing, China. June 2007.


• Qingzhao Tan, Ziming Zhuang, Prasenjit Mitra, and C. Lee Giles. Designing Efficient Sampling Techniques to Detect Webpage Updates. The 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2007). Poster. Banff, Canada. May 2007.


• Yang Sun, Ziming Zhuang, and C. Lee Giles. A Large-Scale Study of Robots.txt. The 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2007). Poster. Banff, Canada. May 2007.


• Isaac Councill, Huajing Li, Levent Bolelli, Yang Song, Ziming Zhuang, Jian Huang, Yang Sun, Ding Zhou, Wang-Chien Lee, Anand Sivasubramaniam, and C. Lee Giles. CiteSeer^X: Next-Gen CiteSeer. The 2nd International Conference on Open Repositories. Poster. San Antonio, TX, USA. January 2007.


• Ziming Zhuang, Silviu Cucerzan. Re-Ranking Search Results Using Query Logs. In Proceedings of the ACM 15th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2006. Arlington, VA, USA. November 2006.


• Ziming Zhuang, Silviu Cucerzan, C. Lee Giles. Network Flow for Collaborative Ranking. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (PKDD) 2006. Berlin, Germany. September 2006. (acceptance rate 8.76%, 60/685) (Google Student Travel Award Winner)


• Dhiraj Joshi, Ritendra Datta, Ziming Zhuang, Walter Weiss, Marc Friedenberg, Jia Li, and James Wang. PARAgrab: A Comprehensive Architecture for Web Image Management and Multimodal Querying. In Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 2006. Demo. Seoul, Korea. September 2006.


• Isaac G. Councill, Huajing Li, Ziming Zhuang, Sandip Debnath, Levent Bolelli, Wang-Chien Lee, Anand Sivasubramaniam, C. Lee Giles. Learning Metadata from the Evidence in an On-Line Citation Matching Scheme. In Proceedings of The ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2006. Chapel Hill, NC, USA. June 2006. (Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award Nominee.)


• Ziming Zhuang, Prasenjit Mitra, and Anuj Jaiswal. Corpus-based Web Services Matchmaking. In Proceedings of The Workshop on Exploring Planning and Scheduling for Web Services, Grid and Autonomic Computing, held in conjunction with The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '05). Pittsburgh, PA, USA. July 2005.

• Ziming Zhuang, Rohit Wagle, and C. Lee Giles. What’s There and What’s Not? Focused Crawling for Missing Documents in Digital Libraries. In Proceedings of The ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2005. Denver, CO, USA. June 2005. (Best Student Paper Award Nominee.) (acceptance rate 21%, 59/270)

• Ziming Zhuang. iHITS: Extending HITS for Personal Interests Profiling. In Proceedings of The 19th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2005), International Workshop on Web and Mobile Information Systems (WAMIS), March 2005.

• Lina Zhou and Ziming Zhuang. Recovering Punctuations in Instant Messages - Towards the Prosody Norm in IM. In Proceedings of The 10th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2004), pp. 3239 - 3247, New York, NY, USA. August 2004.

• Ziming Zhuang, Yuqi Liang, and Long Zhang. Building e-Business Solutions with UDDI and Web Service. International Symposium on Future Software Technology (ISFST 2002), 2002.