Sarah K Tyler

I am a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), pursuing my doctorate under Yi Zhang. My primary focus is Personalized Search, particularly as it relates to Recommendation Systems, Sponsored Search, and Social Networks. At UCSC, I am also a member of the Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management (IRKM) Lab and the Proactive Personalized Information Integration and Retrieval (PIIR) Group. I like to think of myself as a Math Geek interested in words and a Word Nerd interested in math.

While in gradschool, I have interned at a few places. In 2010 I will be interning at Yahoo. In 2009 I interned at Microsoft Research (MSR) studying re-finding. Our results were published in WSDM 2010 where we were one of the four finalists for best paper. In 2008 I interned at NEC Labs America studying innovators and laggards. Our work was published in RecSys 2009.

Before gradschool, I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for four years in the area of Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing: primarily in Entity Extraction, Clustering and Classification. I was a key contributor on several projects and held a center wide consulting position. Although many of the techniques I've employed have been knowledge-poor, I've done some research on different ways to model prior knowledge. At LLNL, I co-founded and lead the Text Research Reading Group, a group whose primary focus is to keep abreast with the latest research in language technologies and closely related fields and am a member of the Text Analysis Working Group. I was also an ombudsmen.

In my spare time I often write scripts and applications for my primary website, SKTyler.com. Most notably, I wrote a Writing Sample Analyzer, which predicts reading ease based on Flesch, Fog and Flesch-Kincaid approximations. The Analyzer receives approximately one hundred hits a day, and was donated to the Logan Utah Public Library for their Adult Literacy Group. I also do volunteer website design and development for other organizations when I have time.

Before my interest in text, I interned at BodyMedia with their informatics group. I implemented machine learning techniques, such as cross-validation, and built models to detect different activities based on measurements recorded from an armband. Prior to that I interned at QVC.