Haym Hirsh

I am currently on leave from Rutgers to serve as Director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation.
My NSF Contact Information.

I am not taking on any new students, interns, postdocs, etc., at this time. Please do not contact me asking to work with me. This note on my webpage is to let you know that unfortunately the answer is no to all such requests.

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. Despite serving as Department Chair for three years, he is now pursuing further bureaucratic edification as Director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. As part of his never-ending spiritual quest, he has also spent time as visiting faculty at the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Fall 1995, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT in Fall 1997, and the Information Systems Department at the Stern School of Business at NYU in Fall 2000 and Spring 2001. When he is not teaching courses or conducting research, he writes silly biographies with lots of gratuitous pointers to other web pages.

Primary Research Interests

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, information retrieval, data mining, human-computer interaction, Web technology and applications, mobile computing and wireless information access

Other Research Interests

Bioinformatics, engineering design, genetic algorithms, knowledge representation

Publications

• 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

• Popular papers:
  • Chumki Basu, Haym Hirsh, and William W. Cohen (AAAI98):
    Recommendation as Classification: Using Social and Content-Based Information in Recommendation.
  • William W. Cohen, Alex Borgida, and Haym Hirsh (AAAI92):
    Computing Least Common Subsumers in Description Logics.
  • Brian D. Davison and Haym Hirsh (AAAI98/ICML98 workshop):
    Predicting Sequences of User Actions.
    Predicting the Future: AI Approaches to Time Series Analysis.
  • Ronen Feldman and Haym Hirsh (KDD96):
    Mining Associations in Text in the Presence of Background Knowledge.
  • Haym Hirsh (AAAI92):
    Polynomial-Time Learning with Version Spaces.
  • Gary M. Weiss and Haym Hirsh (KDD98):
    Learning to Predict Rare Events in Event Sequences.

Graduate Students

• Chris Mesterharm

Graduated Students

• Arunava Banerjee (2001):
  The Phase-Space Dynamics of Systems of Spiking Neurons.
  (Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, University of Florida)
• Chumki Basu (2002):
  Recommendation as Classification and Recommendation as Matching: Two Information-Centered Approaches to Recommendation
  (Currently at: Sarnoff Corporation)
• Brian Davison (2002):
  The Design and Evaluation of Web Prefetching and Caching Techniques
  (Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, PA)
• Vipul Kashyap (1997):
  Information Brokering over Heterogeneous Digital Data - A Metadata-based Approach.
  (Current position: Senior Medical Informatician, Partners HealthCare System)
• Daniel Kudenko (1998):
  Feature Generation for Sequence Categorization.
  (Current position: Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Department of Computer Science, University of York, U.K.)
• David Loewenstern (1999):
  Sequence Classification Learning using Methods Derived from Entropy Estimation.
  (Current position: Advisory Software Engineer, IBM Research)
• David Lubinsky (1993):
  Analysis of Bivariate Splits and Consistent Split Criteria in Dichotomous Classification Trees.
  (Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa; Founder and Leader, Product Design and Marketing, OPSI Systems)
• Sofus Macskassy (2003):
  New Techniques in Information Filtering.
  (Current position: Senior Research Scientist, Fetch Technologies)
• Steve Norton (1995):
  Classifier Induction from Imperfect Data as Reasoning Under Uncertainty.
  (Currently at: PHZ Capital Partners)
• Lorien Pratt (1993):
  Transferring Previously Learned Back-Propagation Neural Networks to New Learning Tasks.
  (Current position: Program Manager, OSS Competitive Strategies Program at Stratecast Partners, a Division of Frost and Sullivan. )
• Khaled Rasheed (1998):
  GADO: A Genetic Algorithm for Continuous Design Optimization.
  (Current position: Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia)
• Gary Weiss (2003):
  The Effect of Small Disjuncts and Class Distribution on Decision Tree Learning.
  (Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Fordham University)
• Sarah Zelikovitz (2002):
  Using Background Knowledge to Improve Text Classification.
  (Current position: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, College of Staten Island)

• My advisor: Bruce Buchanan
  (b. July 7, 1940, St. Louis)
  (Ph.D. Philosophy, Michigan State University, 1966: "Logics of Scientific Discovery")
• Buchanan's advisor: Gerald Massey
  (b. Feb 11, 1934, Wauseon, Ohio)
  (Ph.D. Philosophy, Princeton University, 1964: "The Philosophy of Space ")
• 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'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")
• 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
    
  • 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 from Hans Reichenbach's widow, I had previously listed the second advisor as Emmy Noether. I've recently learned that this did not match up with Reichenbach's dissertation's signature page, which has Max Noether's signature.
• 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)
  • 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
• Hesse's advisor: Karl 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")
• 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")
  
• 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")
    (Advisor unknown)
  • 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")
• 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")
• 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")
• Hausen's advisor: Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen
  (Ph.D. Universitat Leipzig, 1685: "Disputationem Moralem De Divortiis Secundum Jus Naturae")
• Wichmannshausen's advisor: Otto Mencken
  (Ph.D. Universitat Leipzig, 1668: "Thomae Hobbesii Epicureismum historice delineatum sistit")

Other Personal Links

• The family
• My wife, Lisa, has a technical staffing and consulting company, Safari Technical Staffing. Check it out!
• The Wit and Wisdom of Haym Hirsh. (Yes, it's intentional.)
• Haym Hirsh: An Alternative View
• Erdös number: ≤4
  (Paul Erdös to {Ron Gould, Mike Saks, Joel Spencer} to Avrim Blum to Lenny Pitt to Haym Hirsh)
  (also Paul Erdös to Nicholas C. Wormald to Alistair Moffat to Craig Nevill-Manning to Haym Hirsh)
  (My Rutgers colleagues Andras Hajnal, Janos Komlos, Mike Saks, Mario Szegedy, and Endre Szemeredi all have Erdös number 1)

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