Sarah K Tyler

I am a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), pursuing my doctorate under Yi Zhang. My primary focus is Personalized Search, particularly as it relates to Social Networks. At UCSC I am also a member of the Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management (IRKM) Lab and the Proactive Personalized Information Integration and Retrieval (PIIR) Group. You can think of me as either a Math Geek interested in words, or a Word Nerd interested in math.

Previously, I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for four years in the area of Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing: primarily in Entity Extraction, Clustering and Classification. I was a key contributor on several projects and held a center wide consulting position. Although many of the techniques I've employed have been knowledge-poor, I've done some research on different ways to model prior knowledge. At LLNL, I co-founded and lead the Text Research Reading Group, a group whose primary focus is to keep abreast with the latest research in language technologies and closely related fields and am a member of the Text Analysis Working Group. I was also an ombudsmen.

In my spare time I often write scripts and applications for my primary website, SKTyler.com. Most notably, I wrote a Writing Sample Analyzer, which predicts reading ease based on Flesch, Fog and Flesch-Kincaid approximations. The Analyzer receives approximately one hundred hits a day, and was donated to the Logan Utah Public Library for their Adult Literacy Group. I also do volunteer website design and development for other organizations when I have time. I keep hoping to dabble in Hidden Web Information Retrieval and Federated Search, but haven't spent nearly as much time on these topics as I would have liked.

Before my interest in text, I interned at BodyMedia with their informatics group. I implemented machine learning techniques, such as cross-validation, and built models to detect different activities based on measurements recorded from an armband. Prior to that I interned at QVC.