February 17, 2009Holloway Named Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholar
Second Year Ph.D. Student at UCI’s Bren School One of Ten Recipients
America Holloway, a second year Ph.D. student at UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences has been named a 2009 Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholar. The one-year scholarship sponsored by Microsoft Research recognizes ten female graduate students in the first two years of their study for outstanding achievement in computer science, electrical engineering, or mathematics.
“This award recognizes a select set of outstanding graduate students in the United States, students that show exceptional research and leadership potential,” says Padhraic Smyth, Professor of Computer Science and Holloway’s advisor. “America exemplifies these qualities – she is an exceptionally focused and hard-working student, and I am confident that she will inspire others to follow in her successful path throughout her career.”
Holloway currently conducts research on combining statistical models of text with collections of human knowledge called ontologies (e.g. Wikipedia categories) to perform a variety of tasks. Examples of these tasks include unsupervised summarization of large document sets, mapping documents onto an ontology (i.e. finding a document to concept mapping), and automatically refining an ontology in response to novel textual information.
Before beginning the doctorate program at the Bren School, Holloway taught middle school and high school mathematics, and spent a year in computer science research at Pomona College. Holloway earned her B.A. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Computer Science from Swarthmore College.
As a Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship winner, Holloway will receive a $15,000 scholarship, conference and travel allowance for a conference in her field of study, and an invitation to attend an award ceremony at the Microsoft Research campus in Redmond, Washington, in February 2009.
More about the Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship program.
