Pack your bags, we are going to Beijing!

As many of you know we have been thinking about a major life change, moving to Beijing to work for MS Research Asia. Well we have decided to take the plunge and will be relocating in July. I will be traveling to Beijing a few times between now and then to get started.

I will be the Group Program Manager for a new group in Beijing called the Search Technology Center (STC), this group will be a full product development group working on MSN Search related products and features. We will be closely aligned with the MS Research Asia groups that are doing core research in natural language processing, information retrieval & classification and Internet-scale search. We are still working out the specific details of which projects we will focus on, but likely it will involve owning Chinese language search, work on mobile search (which is much more popular in Asia then in North America) and some new object extraction technology.

Object extraction is a technique that enables a search engine to infer structure from unstructured data. For example, on the Internet there is a lot of product information, but there is no well defined structure to the data, so it is difficult to automatically determine which information is the price, which is the title, the description, etc. The object extraction technology is designed to use statistical classification to automatically identify these facets and store them in a database, enable richer and more accurate search over that data.

You can see this in action at: http://shopping.msn.com. This is a very exciting area in search and one where there is a ton of additional work to make this a more pervasive way of searching over semi-structured web data.

I will be using this space to talk more about the move and the new work I will be doing at STC so stay tuned.