Telefonica Research

Data Mining and User Modeling Group

Biography

Heath Hohwald is a Technology Expert at Telefonica Research in Madrid, Spain. Prior to joining Telefonica, Heath worked as an engineer for Google in the Search Quality team in Mountain View, California where he helped design and implement projects that improved the quality of web search. Prior to working at Google, Heath was a member of the Search Relevance team at Amazon.com, where he helped create a new system for optimally merging search results from all of Amazon's different product lines. Heath has also worked for Vodafone and BlackRock Financial Management.

Heath has extensive experience in the field of information retrieval, and in particular in designing and implementing algorithms capable of learning from very large data sets and later supporting large user traffic. Heath's interests lie in the use of advanced techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to solve real problems. Currently he is researching new ways of constructing and mining large social networks. Heath holds a BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University (1998) and a Masters degree in Computer Science from UCLA (2003), where his work led to technical publications in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Research Interests

• Structure and Dynamics of Large Networks
• Data Mining  / Machine Learning
  
• Natural Language Processing
• Distributed Computing
  
• Information Retrieval

Publications

 "User Modeling for Telecommunication Applications: Experiences and Practical Implications ", with Enrique Frías-Martínez and Nuria Oliver, 18th Intl. Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP), Hawaii, June 2010. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com .

"ARBUD: A Reusable Architecture for Building User Models from Massive Datasets ", with Enrique Frías-Martínez and Nuria Oliver, Telefonica Research Technical Report, March, 2010.

"Introducing Causality and Traceability in Word-of-Mouth Algorithms ", with Enrique Frías-Martínez,  Manuel Cebrián, and Nuria Oliver, Workshop on Information in Networks (WIN), September 25-26, NYU, New York City, 2009.

"Inferring Unobservable Inter-community Links in Large Social Networks ", with Manuel Cebrián, Arturo Canales, Rubén Lara, and Nuria Oliver, International Symposium on Social Intelligence and Networking (SIN09).

"How did you get to know that? A Traceable Word-of-Mouth Algorithm ", with Manuel Cebrián, Enrique Frías-Martínez, and Nuria Oliver, International Symposium on Social Intelligence and Networking (SIN09).

"Frontier search", with Richard E. Korf, Weixiong Zhang, and Ignacio Thayer. Journal of the ACM 52(5): 715-748 (2005).

"Comparing Best-First Search and Dynamic Programming for Optimal Multiple Sequence Alignment", with Ignacio Thayer, and Richard E. Korf, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence(IJCAI) 2003: 1239-1245.