Research

UW team takes second place in Microsoft search challenge

Information School Assistant Professor Jevin West’s Eigenfactor team took home second place in Microsoft’s WSDM Cup, a worldwide challenge to assess the importance of scholarly articles.

The competition, run by Microsoft Research in partnership with the 9th ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), gave researchers access to data from Microsoft’s Bing search engine and its academic graph. The graph is a continuously growing collection of millions of pieces of information about scientific publications, authors, institutions, journals, conferences, and fields of study.

The goal of the WSDM Cup was to provide the best static rank values for each publication in the Microsoft Academic Graph.

“People are really excited that Microsoft was willing to share this data with the research community,” West told Microsoft Research. “We’re really grateful Microsoft engaged with the research community on this important problem of finding better ways of searching scientific content. I hope we can continue seeing these collaborations between industry and the research community.”

The challenge attracted 80 teams from 34 institutions across 13 countries to compete over a two-month period. The top eight teams from the first stage in the competition were invited to compete this week in San Francisco, where a team from Taiwan edged out West’s University of Washington team for top honors.

Read more about the WSDM Cup on the Microsoft Research blog.