Smyth receives Google award

Padhraic Smyth, professor of computer science at UC Irvine, has been awarded a $60,000 Google Research Award to support his work on statistical text mining of large document collections using parallel computing. Using existing algorithms, it can take several months of computer time to analyze the 16 million documents on a single computer, but Smyth and his group have recently developed new techniques that can reduce analysis time to about one day. The award will enable Smyth and his research group to focus on developing newer and faster text mining algorithms, which have potential applications in areas like Web searches and digital libraries.