Silviu Cucerzan

About

I am a researcher in the MSR Redmond lab and the manager of the Knowledge Technologies and Intelligent Experiences group (KTX), which is part of the Language and Intelligent Assistance organization. I joined KTX in spring 2020 after a four-year double rotation in Microsoft product groups. During the rotation, I had the privilege to lead the NLP team in Bing‘s Knowledge Graph group (Satori) for 3½ years and to manage a small NLP team in the FUSE Labs for ½ year.

I joined Microsoft in 2003, after completing my Ph.D. work at the Johns Hopkins University, where I was a member of the Center for Speech and Language Processing. I also received a M.S.E. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins, as well as an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Bucharest. Prior to coming to the United States, I held a junior faculty position in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at University of Bucharest.

Research Interests

Information Extraction from Large Text Collections
Natural Language Processing
Knowledge Representation
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning

Influential Technologies Developed

Contextual Spelling Correction (How do you spell Levenshtein?)
Query Suggestion and Advertisement Smart Matching
Information-centric Browsing and Search (TechFest 2007/TechFair 2007)
Entity Linking (NEMO)
Fact Extraction from Web text and News
Vandalism Detection in Collaboratively-built Collections
InstaFact (Hackathon 2016 winner and Data Types in Excel)

Favorite quote
Samuel Goldwyn: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

Personal interests
Wildlife photography
Lego
Classical music
Jazz
Hiking
Board games
Writing