Teaching

It is both excit­ing and reward­ing to pur­sue knowl­edge not only through research but also through apply­ing research in prac­ti­cal set­tings and through teach­ing, shar­ing, and advis­ing. Teach­ing and super­vis­ing stu­dents are valu­able learn­ing processes for the stu­dents as well as for myself and I have been doing so ever since I started in acad­e­mia. Teach­ing is indeed very rewarding.

I have taught numer­ous courses, rang­ing from infor­ma­tion retrieval and sta­tis­ti­cal lan­guage mod­el­ing to data min­ing and research meth­ods. In these courses I have taught var­i­ous top­ics at var­i­ous lev­els, includ­ing the MSc, BSc, and under­grad level. I have even taught at a high school, teach­ing young­sters the basics of com­puter sci­ence and prepar­ing them for col­lege, uni­ver­sity, and beyond. They are likely to become the stu­dents and edu­ca­tors of the future, which makes teach­ing them now even more rewarding.

The themes of my teach­ing include intro­duc­tion to the main algo­rithms and meth­ods being used in infor­ma­tion retrieval, their appli­ca­tions in the set­ting of web retrieval, mod­els and algo­rithms for retriev­ing web infor­ma­tion, with a spe­cial focus on “the unit of retrieval” (return­ing doc­u­ment parts, answers, enti­ties, etc instead of doc­u­ments) and “user gen­er­ated con­tent” (blogs, email, dis­cus­sion forums, com­ments, com­mu­nity question/answer pairs, etc), the impor­tance of eval­u­a­tion, as well as recent devel­op­ments. I have advised sev­eral under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and PhD stu­dents through reg­u­lar meet­ings and coop­er­a­tions. I’m also a big fan of project-based teach­ing, where teams of stu­dents jointly work on an assign­ment or project. I have super­vised sev­eral of such teams and found that the group dynam­ics and team play can yield very reward­ing results, often greater than the sum of its parts.

Tuto­ri­als

I have taught PhD-level tuto­ri­als on infor­ma­tion retrieval at inter­na­tional con­fer­ences and sum­mer schools, explain­ing the use of sta­tis­ti­cal lan­guage mod­els in infor­ma­tion retrieval with an empha­sis on the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples and frame­work, empir­i­cally effec­tive mod­els, as well as lan­guage mod­els devel­oped for a broad range of retrieval tasks, both tra­di­tional and non-traditional, includ­ing semi-structured doc­u­ment retrieval, expert find­ing, ques­tion answer­ing, cross-language IR, blog retrieval, and topic detec­tion and track­ing. To me, the con­tact with other researchers in the field is the most valu­able aspect of inter­na­tional teaching.

Pro­fes­sional Attitude

I have recently fin­ished an inten­sive teach­ing course that cov­ers: the design and pro­vi­sion of teach­ing, sup­port­ing the learn­ing process, orga­niz­ing edu­ca­tion and qual­ity con­trol, and fos­ter­ing a pro­fes­sional atti­tude. Dur­ing this course I dis­cov­ered active teach­ing meth­ods like peer instruc­tion and fast feed­back. I have exper­i­mented with these tech­niques in class and I find it amaz­ing how effec­tive these are to ener­gize stu­dents and to revi­tal­ize the class­room. A pro­fes­sional atti­tude towards edu­ca­tion is nec­es­sary to improve upon teach­ing and men­tor­ing skills and I con­sider my open atti­tude towards inno­va­tions inside the class­room an impor­tant teach­ing asset.