Brian D. Davison

Brian D. Davison is director of Lehigh's undergraduate minor in data science and teaches courses on data science, web search engines, and data mining, among others. He heads the Web Understanding, Modeling, and Evaluation (WUME) laboratory, and serves as editor-in-chief of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) journal Transactions on the Web. He was program co-chair for the ACM SIGIR 2018 conference, is currently chair of the ACM Web Search and Data Mining conference steering committee, and spent his most recent sabbatical with the Core Data Science group at Facebook.  His research includes search, mining, recommendation and classification problems in text, on datasets, on the Web and in social networks.

Davison is an NSF Faculty Early CAREER award winner and one of twelve Microsoft Live Labs "Accelerating Search" award recipients. Dr. Davison's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Microsoft, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems. As a graduate student, he led development in the Rutgers DiscoWeb search engine project which was later spun out as an internet startup called Teoma (and was subsequently purchased by Ask Jeeves.)