Ran Yu, postdoctoral researcher in the Information & Data Retrieval team of WTS department, who recently completed her Ph.D. study (supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefan Dietze), has won the “2019 Chinese government award for outstanding self finance students abroad”.
In the scope of interdisciplinary project SALIENT, her research aims at supporting various learning needs in Web search through learning oriented optimizations of retrieval, ranking, and recommendations. Her Ph.D. thesis, Improving Knowledge Accessibility on the Web - from Knowledge Base Augmentation to Search as Learning, introduces methods for augmenting knowledge graphs using semi-structured Web markup data, and for understanding, modeling and supporting human learning in Web search (the corresponding research field is also addressed as “Search as Learning”) using statistical methods and machine learning techniques. With these works, Ran has strengthened the international research profile of WTS at the intersection of information retrieval, human-computer interaction and knowledge graphs.
The award from the CSC (China Scholarship Council) is awarded to outstanding non-CSC-funded Chinese Ph.D. students who study abroad and is associated with a 6000USD monetary prize. Academic excellence (e.g. publication quality and impact), study performance and other contributions to the academic community have been taken into consideration for the award assessment process. There are 500 winners from all subjects around the world each year. For the 2019 award, among all applicants who study in Germany, 64 were recommended to CSC by the Chinese Embassy in Germany (5 from Computer Science related subjects), and approx. 30 were selected for the award.