Susan Dumais (born August 11, 1953) is an American computer scientist who is a leader in the field of information retrieval, and has been a significant contributor to Microsoft's search technologies. According to Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the Athena Lecture awards committee, “Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval." In 2025, she was elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

Biography

Susan Dumais is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and Managing Director of the

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Northeast Labs, inclusive of MSR New England, MSR New York and MSR Montreal. Her research at Microsoft has focused on gaze-enhanced interaction, the temporal dynamics of information systems, user modeling and personalization, novel interfaces for interactive retrieval, and search evaluation. She is also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington Information School, where she was the Ph.D. advisor for computer science professor Jeff Huang. Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Dumais was a researcher at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), where she and her colleagues conducted research into what is now called the vocabulary problem in

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

. Their study demonstrated, through a variety of experiments, that different people use different vocabulary to describe the same thing, and that even choosing the "best" term to describe something is not enough for others to find it. One implication of this work is that because the author of a document may use different vocabulary than someone searching for the document, traditional

methods will have limited success. Dumais and the other Bellcore researchers then began investigating ways to build search systems that avoided the vocabulary problem. The result was their invention of

Latent Semantic Indexing Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the d ...

Awards

In 2006, Dumais was inducted as a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

. In 2009, she received the Gerard Salton Award, an information retrieval lifetime achievement award. In 2011, she was inducted to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

for innovation and leadership in organizing, accessing, and interacting with information. In 2014, Dumais received the Athena Lecturer Award for "fundamental contributions to computer science." and the

Tony Kent Strix award The UKeiG Strix award is an annual award for outstanding contributions to the field of information retrieval and is presented in memory of Dr. Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists (IIS), who died in 1997. Tony Kent ma ...

for "sustained contributions that are both innovative and practical" with "significant impact". In 2015, she was inducted into the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

. In 2020 she received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award and inducted into the ACM SIGIR Academy in 2021.

References

External links

Home page at Microsoft Research
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dumais, Susan 2006 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Microsoft employees Microsoft Research people Living people American women computer scientists American computer scientists University of Washington faculty Information retrieval researchers Microsoft technical fellows American women academics 1953 births 21st-century American women scientists 20th-century American women scientists Members of the American Philosophical Society