Doug Downey

Doug Downey

ddowney@cs.washington.edu

Allen Center 518
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 543-7119

Application Materials: CV Research Statement Teaching Statement

I'm a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. My research interests include information extraction, machine learning, and data mining. I'm currently excited about using the web to support the automatic construction of large and useful knowledge bases. I'm working on the KnowItAll project, and my advisor is Oren Etzioni.
Before coming to UW I worked for a couple of years as a software engineer at Intel, and before that I received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University. At Case I was advised by Randy Beer and worked in the Dynamics of Adaptive Behavior Research Group.

Publications

Sparse Information Extraction: Unsupervised Language Models to the Rescue. Doug Downey, Stefan Schoenmackers, and Oren Etzioni. (ACL 2007).
Locating Complex Named Entities in Web Text. Doug Downey, Matthew Broadhead, Oren Etzioni. (IJCAI 2007).
Models of Searching and Browsing: Languages, Studies, and Applications. Doug Downey, Susan Dumais, Eric Horvitz. (IJCAI 2007).
Heads and Tails: Studies of Web Search with Common and Rare Queries. Doug Downey, Susan Dumais, Eric Horvitz. (SIGIR 2007, poster).
KnowItNow: Fast, Scalable Information Extraction From the Web. Michael J. Cafarella, Doug Downey, Stephen Soderland, Oren Etzioni. (EMNLP 2005).
A Probabilistic Model of Redundancy in Information Extraction. Doug Downey, Oren Etzioni, Stephen Soderland. (IJCAI 2005).
Unsupervised Named-Entity Extraction from the Web: An Experimental Study. Oren Etzioni, Michael Cafarella, Doug Downey, Ana-Maria Popescu, Tal Shaked, Stephen Soderland, Daniel S. Weld, Alexander Yates. (Artificial Intelligence, 2005).
Learning Text Patterns for Web Information Extraction and Assessment. D. Downey, O. Etzioni, S. Soderland, and D. Weld. (AAAI-2004 Workshop on Adaptive Text Extraction and Mining).
Learning Text Patterns for Web Information Extraction and Assessment (Extended Version) D. Downey, O. Etzioni, S. Soderland, and D. Weld. University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technical Report UW-CSE-04-05-01, May 2004.
Methods for Domain-Independent Information Extraction from the Web: An Experimental Comparison. Oren Etzioni, Michael Cafarella, Doug Downey, Ana-Maria Popescu, Tal Shaked, Stephen Soderland, Daniel S. Weld, Alexander Yates. (AAAI 2004).
Web-scale Information Extraction in KnowItAll. Oren Etzioni, Michael Cafarella, Doug Downey, Stanley Kok, Ana-Maria Popescu, Tal Shaked, Stephen Soderland, Daniel S. Weld, Alexander Yates. (WWW 2004)
Further experiments in the evolution of minimally cognitive behavior: From perceiving affordances to selective attention. Slocum, A.C., Downey, D.C. and Beer, R.D. (2000). In J. Meyer, A. Berthoz, D. Floreano, H. Roitblat and S. Wilson (Eds.), From Animals to Animats 6: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (pp. 430-439). MIT Press.

The picture at the top of this page was created for the panorama project in CSE 576, Spring 2003.

Last Updated 1/03/08.