Jeffrey P. Bigham

 

 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

I am interested in understanding how people use the web and in using that knowledge to develop tools to help them use it more efficiently.  I am particularly interested in creating tools the empower blind web users to improve their own web experience because access for this group is generally less efficient and more costly.

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Candidate (Expected Graduation Winter 2009)

University of Washington - Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Advised by Richard Ladner
Conducting user studies designed to explore web accessibility from the perspective of blind users, creating tools to enable blind users to independently improve accessibility and building tools that enable web access from any computer that happens to be available.

Master of Science, June 2005

University of Washington - Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Qualifying Exam Project: Boosting Relation Extraction Recall with Soft Rules
Advised by Oren Etzioni
Used novel “relaxed rules” to boost unsupervised information extraction recall of KnowItAll system.  Developed techniques for performing inference over learned facts and automatically discovering new attributes of identified classes.

Bachelor of Science and Engineering, Computer Science, June 2003

Princeton University
GPA:  3.81, MGPA:  3.94
Thesis Title:  On Using Error-Correcting Codes and Boosting to Learn Multi-Class Classification Problems
Advised by Amit Sahai and Robert Shapire
Investigated the multi-class classification problem, concentrating on methods that use error-correcting codes and boosting.  Developed novel method of rule-based clustering built on top of ECC multi-class boosting.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Intern in Research, Google, Mountain View, CA (Summer 2005)

Mentor: Marius Pasca
Tackled substantial quantitative and qualitative problems with the goal of automatically generating a million correct relational facts from the web beginning with only ten seed facts.  Made improvements to both the scoring metrics used to evaluate facts and to the extraction mechanism used to extract facts.  Developed and implemented a number of efficiency improvements to the extraction system that allowed it to scale linearly and extract over a million facts.

Intern in Research, AT&T Shannon Labs, Florham Park, NJ (Summer 2003)

Advisors: Wen-Ling Hsu and Guy Jacobson
Tasked with improving the automatic classification and routing of email based on subject.  Discovered that the categories currently in use overlapped and were often confused even by human representatives.  Developed tools to identify problems in a supplied categorical hierarchy, suggest improved categories through iterative hierarchy improvement, and produce cool visualizations that illustrate confusion in a hierarchy.

Intern, Microsoft, Redmond, WA (Summer 2002)

Mentor:  Adam Nathan
Developed an application designed to test the Interop area of the .NET Common Language Runtime.  Using my program, logical representations of test cases could be generated either randomly or manually and automatically compiled to an executable for use in automated testing.  Received an evaluation of 4.0/5.0.

REFEREED CONFERENCE PAPERS

1. Bigham, J. P., Prince, C. M. and Ladner, R. E. Engineering a Self-Voicing, Web-Browsing Web Application Supporting Accessibility Anywhere (2008). In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2008). Yorktown Height, New York, 2008. To Appear.
2. Bigham, J. P., Prince, C. M. and Ladner, R. E. WebAnywhere: A Screen Reader On-the-Go (2008). To appear in the Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 08), Beijing, China, 2008.
3. Bigham, J. P., Cavender, A. C., Kaminsky, R. S., Prince, C. M. and Robison, T. S. Transcendence: Enabling a Personal View of the Deep Web (2008). In Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 08), Gran Canaria, Spain, 2008. (Acceptance Rate: 15%)
4. Bigham, J. P., Aller, M., Brudvik, J. T., Leung, J. O., Yazzolino, L. and Ladner, R. E. Inspiring Blind High School Students to Pursue Computer Science with Instant Messenging Chatbots (2008). In Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 08), Portland, OR, 2008. (Acceptance Rate: 31%)
5. Bigham, J. P., Cavender, A. C., Brudvik, J. T., Wobbrock, J. O. and Ladner, R. E.   WebinSitu: A Comparative Analysis of Blind and Sighted Browsing Behavior (2007).  In Proceedings of the The Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS 07). (Acceptance Rate: 31%)
6. Bigham, J. P. and Ladner, R. E. (2007).  Accessmonkey: A Collaborative Scripting Framework for Web Users and Developers.  In Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 07). (Acceptance Rate: 40%)
7. Bigham, J. P. (2007).  Increasing Web Accessibility by Automatically Judging Alternative Text Quality.  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 07). (Short Paper Acceptance Rate: 34%)
8. Bigham, J. P., Kaminsky, R. S., Ladner, R. E., Danielsson, O. M., and Hempton, G. L. (2006).  WebInSight: Making Web Images Accessible. In Proceedings of the International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS 06). (Acceptance Rate: 36%)
9. Pasca, M., Lin, D., Bigham, J. P., Lifchits, A., and Jain, A.  (2006).  Names and Similarities on the Web: Fact Extraction in the Fast Lane. In Proceedings of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics and the Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL 06). (Acceptance Rate: 23%)
10. Pasca, M., Lin, D., Bigham, J. P., Lifchits, A., and Jain, A.  (2006).  Organizing the World Wide Web of Facts - Step One: the One-Million Fact Extraction Challenge.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 06). (Acceptance Rate: 30%)
11. Turney P., Littman, M., Bigham J. P., and Shnayder, V. (2003).  Combining Independent Modules to Solve Multiple-Choice Synonym and Analogy Problems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 03), pages pp. 482-489. (Acceptance Rate: 28%)

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

Tutor, University of Washington (Spring 2005 – )

Operating Systems (CSE 451), Artificial Intelligence (CSE 473)
Held weekly tutoring sessions with 1-3 students.

National Federation of the Blind Youth Slam (8/5/2007 - 8/11/2007)

Led both the development of the computer science track curriculum and the track itself which targeted teaching 15 blind high school students the basics of programming in 4 days.

Teaching Assistant, University of Washington (Fall 2003 – Winter 2006)

Computer Vision (CSE 455), Cyber-terrorism (CSEP 590TU), Machine Organization and Assembly Language Programming (CSE 378), Artificial Intelligence – non-majors (CSE 415), Artificial Intelligence (CSE 473)
Responsibilities included teaching quiz section, refining assignments, grading and supporting students.  Prepared and presented several lectures.

Lab Assistant, Princeton University (Fall 2000-Spring 2003)

Introduction to Computer Science, Algorithms & Data Structures, Programming Systems
Answered student questions on assignments related to the introductory classes offered at Princeton University.

HONORS AND AWARDS

• Honorable Mention, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2004)
• Princeton University Computer Science Service Award (2003)
• Princeton University College of Engineering Dean’s Scholar (1999-2003)

RELATED ACTIVITIES

• Accessible Web Capacity Building Institute, University of Washington DO-IT Program, Participant (11/28/06 - 12/1/06)
• Vertical Mentoring Workshop for the Blind in STEM, Volunteer (7/26/06-7/28/06)
• DO-IT Game of Life Workshop, Volunteer (7/17/06-7/21/06)