Haym Hirsh

Born on what is now L. Ron Hubbard Way, three miles from the Hollywood Sign, Haym Hirsh spent the first quarter-century of his life in California, receiving his BS degree in 1983 from the Mathematics and Computer Science departments at UCLA and his MS in 1985 and PhD in 1989 from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. Unhappy with the weather, he moved to Pittsburgh when he found a way to spend his final year at Stanford at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. The following year he achieved his life-long dream of living in New Jersey by joining the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University. As part of his never-ending spiritual quest, he has also spent time as visiting faculty at Carnegie Mellon University (in their School of Computer Science), MIT (in various combinations of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Laboratory for Computer Science, the Sloan School of Management, and the Center for Collective Intelligence), and NYU (in the Information Systems Department at the Stern School of Business). From 2003 to 2006 he served as Chair of the Rutgers University Computer Science Department, and from 2006 to 2010 he served as Director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. By 2012 he pined so greatly for his lost bureaucratic self-actualization that he was consecrated once again as department chair at Rutgers. When he is not teaching courses, conducting research, attending lots of meetings, or creating meetings that lots of others have to attend, he writes silly biographies with lots of gratuitous pointers to other web pages. (You can also see a more stodgy short bio or a long-winded formal CV.)

NEWS FLASH: I'M MOVING TO CORNELL!

Just when I thought the weather and my bureaucratic self-actualization couldn't get any better, Cornell not only recruited me away from Rutgers but also granted me every academic's grandest dream: a longer title. Starting July 1 I will be Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science and Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell.

Speaking more seriously, it was very hard to leave my academic home of 24 years, which has served my career and my family so well for so long, but there was no way to say no to the increased opportunities Cornell will offer, plus they made our family feel extremely excited about what our life will be like in Ithaca.

More news/details as things develop.

Research Interests

My research has focused on foundations and applications of machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence, especially targeting questions that integrally involve both people and computing. Most recently these interests have turned to collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, human computation, and social computing.

Teaching

Spring 2012: CS 442: Social Computing and Collective Intelligence

Rutgers CS graduate admissions are handled by a central committee that makes decisions for the entire department. Individual faculty do not accept students directly into their research groups. Please consult the department's web page on graduate admissions for further information on how to apply.

As happy as I am to learn about people who are interested in what I do and who would like to conduct graduate research with me, sending me an email will not improve your chances of getting admitted to the Rutgers CS graduate program. Indeed, after more than two decades at Rutgers I have never taken on a student as a result of such email. The same holds true for requests for internships. On the other hand, what does help is getting strong recommendation letters from people who can speak about you with some specificity, especially about skills relevant to conducting research. Unfortunately, given the large number of such messages that I receive I am generally unable to reply to emails of this sort.

If you have already been accepted to our graduate program, or if you are already enrolled, feel free to contact me regarding research opportunities. I also do occasionally take on Rutgers undergraduate interns if they have sufficiently strong academic records, and I would be happy to hear from you if you have such interests. My active research interests are centered on human computation, crowdsourcing, social computing, collective intelligence, and related topics.

Publications

• Google Scholar Page for Haym Hirsh

• Recent papers:
  • Seyda Ertekin, Haym Hirsh, and Cynthia Rudin (2012).
    Selective Sampling of Labelers for Approximating the Crowd.
    Proceedings of the 2012 AAAI Fall Symposium Series.
  • Yolanda Gil and Haym Hirsh (2012).
    Discovery Informatics: AI Opportunities in Scientific Discovery.
    Proceedings of the 2012 AAAI Fall Symposium Series.
  • Seyda Ertekin, Haym Hirsh, and Cynthia Rudin (2012).
    Learning to Predict the Wisdom of Crowds.
    Proceedings of Collective Intelligence 2012.
  • Gingold, Yotam, Etienne Vouga, Eitan Grinspun, and Haym Hirsh (2012).
    Diamonds From the Rough: Improving Drawing, Painting, and Singing via Crowdsourcing.
    Procedings of the 4th Human Computation Workshop.
  • Seyda Ertekin, Haym Hirsh, Cynthia Rudin (2011).
    Approximating the Wisdom of Crowds.
    Proceedings of the NIPS Workshop on Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds.

• Popular papers:
  • Chumki Basu, Haym Hirsh, and William W. Cohen (1998):
    Recommendation as Classification: Using Social and Content-Based Information in Recommendation.
  • Brian D. Davison and Haym Hirsh (1998):
    Predicting Sequences of User Actions.
    Predicting the Future: AI Approaches to Time Series Analysis.
  • Gary M. Weiss and Haym Hirsh (1998):
    Learning to Predict Rare Events in Event Sequences.
  • Ronen Feldman and Haym Hirsh (1996):
    Mining Associations in Text in the Presence of Background Knowledge.
  • William W. Cohen, Alex Borgida, and Haym Hirsh (1992):
    Computing Least Common Subsumers in Description Logics.
  • Haym Hirsh (1992):
    Polynomial-Time Learning with Version Spaces.

• Full List of Publications
  • Information Retrieval and Human-Computer Interaction
    • Text Retrieval, Text Classification, and Text Mining
    • Recommender Systems
    • Web Applications
    • Human-Computer Interaction
    • Wireless Information Access
  • Science and Engineering
    • Engineering Design
    • Computational Biology
    • Other Topics
  • Foundations
    • Description Logics
    • Version Spaces
    • Genetic Algorithms
    • Small Disjuncts
    • Learning from Sequential Data
    • Explanation-Based Learning
    • Other Topics
  • Edited Works

Graduate Students

• Sergiu Goschin

Graduated Students (14 PhD Advisees, 39 Descendants)

1. Arunava Banerjee (2001):
   Dissertation: The Phase-Space Dynamics of Systems of Spiking Neurons.
   Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida
   Students
   1. Nicholas Fisher (PhD 2010: "A Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space Model of a Spiking Neuron")
   2. Ami Greenberg (PhD 2008: "State-of-the-Art Protein Secondary-Structure Prediction Using a Novel Two-Stage Alignment and Machine-Learning Method")
   3. Karthik S. Gurumoorthy (PhD 2011: "A Schodinger wave mechanics formalism for the eikonal problem and its associated gradient density computation"): Research Scientist, GE Global Research, Bangalore
   4. Santhosh Kodipaka (PhD 2009: "A Novel Conic Section Classifier with Tractable Geometric Learning Algorithm"): Software Developer, Bing
   5. Ritwik Kumar (PhD 2009: "Relighting, Pose Change and Recognition of Faces"): Research Staff Member, IBM Research-Almaden
   6. Hailong Meng (PhD 2006: "A novel methodology for identifying conserved regulatory modules at the binding site level"): Statistician II, Yale University
   7. Ajit V. Rajwade (PhD 2010: "Probabilistic Approaches to Image Registration and Denoising"): Assistant Professor, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT)
   8. Venkatakrishnan Ramaswamy (PhD 2011: "The Transformational Complexity of Acyclic Networks of Neurons"): Postdoctoral Fellow, Haim Sompolinsky, Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University.
   9. Nathan VanderKraats (PhD 2009: "A novel probabilistic lower bound on mutual information applied to a category-based framework for spike train discrimination"): Postdoctoral Associate, Center for Pharmacogenomics, Washington University School of Medicine
2. Chumki Basu (2002):
   Dissertation: Recommendation as Classification and Recommendation as Matching: Two Information-Centered Approaches to Recommendation
   Current position: Program Manager, IBM Research, Bangalore
3. Brian Davison (2002):
   Dissertation: The Design and Evaluation of Web Prefetching and Caching Techniques
   Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, PA
   Students:
   1. Lan Nie (PhD 2008: "Mining the Hyperlinks of the Web Graph"): Software Engineer, Google
   2. Xiaoguang Qi (PhD 2012: "Web Page Classification and Hierarchy Adaptation"): Software Development Engineer, Bing
   3. Baoning Wu (PhD 2007: "Finding and Fighting Search Engine Spam"): Search Quality Scientist, Snap.com
4. Vipul Kashyap (1997):
   Dissertation: Information Brokering over Heterogeneous Digital Data - A Metadata-based Approach.
   Current position: Senior Medical Informatician, Partners HealthCare System
5. Daniel Kudenko (1998):
   Dissertation: Feature Generation for Sequence Categorization.
   Current position: Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of York, U.K.
   Students:
   1. Heather Barber (PhD 2008: "Generator of Adaptive Dilemma-based Interactive Narratives"): CICS Explorer FV Engineer, IBM - Southampton, UK
   2. Matthew Grounds (PhD 2007: "Scaling-up Reinforcement Learning using Parallelization and Symbolic Planning"): Senior Coder, Headstrong Games
   3. Marek Grzes (PhD 2010: "Improving Exploration in Reinforcement Learning through Domain Knowledge and Parameter Analysis"): Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada
   4. Rania Hodhod (PhD 2010): Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Georgia Tech
   5. Spiros Kapetanakis (PhD 2004: "Independent Learning of Coordination in Cooperative Single-Stage Games"): Senior Developer, Quant Strategy, Exchange-Traded Products, Jefferies International Limited
   6. Zoe Lock (PhD 2005, "Performance and Flexibility of Stereotype-based User Models"): Head of Technology, Technology Strategy Board, UK
   7. Enda Ridge (PhD 2008: "Design of Experiments for the Tuning of Optimisation Algorithms"): Data Insight Services Manager, KPMG UK
   8. Arturo Servin (PhD 2009: "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Intrusion Detection"): CTO, Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry, Uruguay
   9. I-Hsien (Derrick) Ting (PhD 2007: "Closing the KDD loop to Improve Website Design"): Assistant Professor, Chinese Culture University, Taipei, Taiwan
6. David Loewenstern (1999):
   Dissertation: Sequence Classification Learning using Methods Derived from Entropy Estimation.
   Current position: Advisory Software Engineer, IBM Research
7. David Lubinsky (1993):
   Dissertation: Analysis of Bivariate Splits and Consistent Split Criteria in Dichotomous Classification Trees.
   Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa; Founder and Managing Director, OPSI Systems
   Students:
   1. Mohamed Aboulgasem Arteimi (PhD, 2000): Dean, Arab College of Technology; Head, Computer Engineering Department, 7th of April University; President, Libyan Association for AI
8. Sofus Macskassy (2003):
   Dissertation: New Techniques in Information Filtering.
   Current position: Senior Research Scientist, USC Information Sciences Institute
9. Chris Mesterharm (2007):
   Dissertation: Improving On-Line Learning.
   Current Position: Senior Research Scientist, Applied Communication Science (formerly named Telcordia)
10. Steve Norton (1995):
    Dissertation: Classifier Induction from Imperfect Data as Reasoning Under Uncertainty.
    Currenet position: Vice President, Investment Technology Group, Inc.
11. Lorien Pratt (1993):
    Dissertation: Transferring Previously Learned Back-Propagation Neural Networks to New Learning Tasks.
    Current position: CTO, Quatellia
12. Khaled Rasheed (1998):
    Dissertation: GADO: A Genetic Algorithm for Continuous Design Optimization.
    Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia
    Students:
    1. Boseon Beyon (PhD 2009: "Enhancing the Quality of High Dimensional Noisy Data for Classification and Regression Problems")
    2. Bo Qian (PhD 2006: "Intelligent Financial Market Prediction"): Associate Director/Senior Develolper, Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets
    3. Liang Shi (PhD 2008: "Adaptive Surrogate-Assisted Evolution"): Software Development Engineer, Microsoft Corporation
13. Gary Weiss (2003):
    Dissertation: The Effect of Small Disjuncts and Class Distribution on Decision Tree Learning.
    Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Fordham University
14. Sarah Zelikovitz (2002):
    Dissertation: Using Background Knowledge to Improve Text Classification.
    Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, College of Staten Island

1. My advisor: Bruce Buchanan
   (b. July 7, 1940, St. Louis)
   (Ph.D. Philosophy, Michigan State University, 1966: "Logics of Scientific Discovery")
2. Buchanan's advisor: Gerald Massey
   (b. Feb 11, 1934, Wauseon, Ohio)
   (Ph.D. Philosophy, Princeton University, 1964: "The Philosophy of Space ")
3. Massey's advisor: Carl Gustav Hempel
   (b. Jan. 8, 1905, Oranienburg, Germany; d. 1997, Princeton, NJ)
   (Philosophy, Berlin, 1934: "Beitrage zur logischen analyse des wahrscheinlichkeitsbegriffs")
   (Hempel worked with Reichenbach until Reichenbach was forced to leave Germany in 1933; his final year at Erlangen was spent under the supervision of Wolfgang Kohler and Nicolai Hartmann. Hempel also studied mathematics with David Hilbert, logic with John von Neumann, and Physics with Max Planck.)
4. Hempel's advisor: Hans Reichenbach
   (b. Sept. 26, 1891, Hamburg, Germany; d. April 9, 1953, Los Angeles, CA)
   (Philosophy, Erlangen, 1915: "Der Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit fur die mathematische Darstellung der Wirklichkeit")
5. Reichenbach's two advisors:
   
   • Paul Hensel
     (Dr. phil., Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, 1885: "Uber die Beziehung des reinen Ich bei Fichte zur Einheit der Apperception bei Kant")
     Please email me if you know anything about him
     New!!! Footnote 61 on page 57 of the book "Die deutsche Universitdtsphilosophie in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich" by Christian Tilitzki, 2001, says that Hensel's advisor was Alois Riehl. I know little about Riehl other than he gave Ludwig Mies van der Rohe his first building job, the Riehl House. Please let me know if you are aware of Riehl's academic ancestors.
   • Max Noether
     (b. September 24, 1844, Mannheim, Baden, Germany; d. December 13, 1921, Erlangen, Germany)
     (Dr. phil. Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg, 1868)
     Based on information I received from Hans Reichenbach's widow, I had previously listed the second advisor as Emmy Noether. I subsequently learned that this did not match up with Reichenbach's dissertation's signature page, which has Max Noether's signature. This is consistent with Emmy Noether being Reichenbach's advisor but not having the standing to be acknowledged formally as advisor because she was female, but I have not been able to find evidence of this as yet. If it was indeed Emmy Noether, instead of Max Noether's two advisors we would next be at Paul Gordan, and then to the same "grand-advisor" as Max Noether, Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.
6. Noether's two advisors:
   
   • Ludwig Otto Hesse
     (b. April 22, 1811, Kvnigsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia); d. August 4, 1874, Munich, Germany)
     (Dr. phil. Universitat Kvnigsberg 1840: "De octo punctis intersectionis trium superficium secundi ordinis")
   • Gustav Robert Kirchhoff
     (b. March 12, 1824, Kvnigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia); d. October 17, 1887, Berlin, Germany)
     (Dr. phil. Universitat Konigsberg 1847: "De criteriis quibus cognoscatur an aequatio quinti gradus irreductibilis algebraice resolvi posset / De parallaxi stellae Argelandriae")
     Kirchhoff's advisor was also Otto Hesse
7. Hesse's advisor: Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
   (b. December 10, 1804, Potsdam, Prussia; d. February 18, 1851, Berlin, Germany)
   (Ph.D. Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, 1825: "Disquisitiones Analyticae de Fractionibus Simplicibus")
8. Jacobi's advisor: Enno Heeren Dirksen
   (Ph.D. Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, 1820: "Historiae progressuum instrumentorum mensurae angulorum accuratiori interserventium inde a Tob. Meyeri temporibus ad umbratione non de artificio multiplicationis")
   
9. His two advisors:
   
   • Friedrich Anton Justus Thibaut
     (b. January 4, 1772, Hameln, Hanover; d. March 28, 1840, Heidelberg)
     (Dr. phil. Christian-Albrechts-Universitat zu Kiel, 1796: "De genuina iuris personarum et rerum indole, veroque huius divisionis pretio")
     Thibaut's advisors were Abraham Gotthelf Kaestner (listed below) and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whose advisor was also Kaestner.
   • Johann Tobias Meyer d.J.
     (b. February 17, 1723, Marbach, Wurttemberg, Germany; d. February 20, 1762, Gottingen, Germany)
     (Ph.D. Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, 1773: "Tetragonometriae specimen I")
10. Meyer's advisor: Abraham Gotthelf Kaestner
    (b. Sept 27, 1719, Leipzig, Germany; d. June 20, 1800, in Gottingen, Germany)
    (Ph.D. Universitat Leipzig, 1739: "Theoria radicum in aequationibus")
11. Kaestner's advisor: Christian A. Hausen
    (b. 1693, d. 1743)
    (Dr. phil. Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg 1713: "De corpore scissuris figurisque non cruetando ductu")
12. To go further back you should continue with Hausen's entry at the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which goes back to Copernicus and into the 1300s.

Other Personal Links

• The Wit and Wisdom of Haym Hirsh. (Yes, it's intentional.)
• The wisdom of Dilbert:
  • Cloud computing
  • The Singularity
  • Data privacy
• Photographic evidence:
  • Haym Hirsh in Photomosaic
  • Haym Hirsh Goes to Washington
  • The family in November 2011
  • The family in February 2007
• Amazon's CAPTCHA's commentary on the Mechanical Turk usage agreement
• Jay played "Little Hex" in Nate the Great at the Circle Players.
• My wife, Lisa, has a technical staffing and consulting company, Safari Technical Staffing. Check it out!
• 1984: The oldest presence I could find of myself on the Internet. (Since it's not clear from the link, it is from the (Rubik's) Cube Lover's email list.)
• 1994: The oldest Web page I could find that I had authored.
• Erdös number: ≤3
  (Paul Erdös to Frank Hsu to Gary Weiss to Haym Hirsh)
  (My Rutgers colleagues Andras Hajnal, Janos Komlos, Mike Saks, Mario Szegedy, and Endre Szemeredi all have Erdös number 1)
• Bacon number:
  • 2: It's a bit of a stretch: My childhood home appeared (in the distance) in an episode of Chips, and I was in the house at the time it was filmed. Erik Estrada was in Chips, and he was in "We Married Margo" with Kevin Bacon.
  • 4: Also a stretch, but no houses are involved: I was on a panel at MIT with David Ferrucci (IBM), which you can find on YouTube. He was on Jeopardy! with Alex Trebek. Trebek was in the Charlie's Angels movie with Sam Rockwell. Rockwell was in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon.

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