Congratulations to Oana Tifrea-­Marciuska for winning a prestigious Google Europe Fellowship in Social Search, which is one of only 13 Google European Doctoral Fellowships awarded to doctoral students in Europe in 2013.

Her doctoral research under the supervision of Thomas Lukasiewicz is focusing on personalized search on the Social Web. Personalized search aims at adapting search results based on the tastes, interests, and needs of the user. In the proposed research, she wants to explore the idea of integrating Web search and social networks, both for an improved personalized Web search and for personalized search on the Social Web. In particular, towards building user profiles for personalization, she wants to explore formalisms and algorithms for mining, representing, and managing user preferences, and for using them in personalized search on the Social Web. She also wants to consider the modeling of relevant background knowledge via ontologies, which then allows for personalized semantic search on the Social Web. Technically, she wants to combine ideas from preference handling in AI and databases, semantic search on the Web, and search in social networks. As a closely related topic, she also wants to investigate the use of the results targeted above in personalized computational advertising on the Social Web.

Further information on the Google Doctoral Fellowship Program is available here.