Featured Researcher - Bo Pang
“I have a strange optimism about technology,” says Yahoo! Research scientist Bo Pang. “I don’t think technology will overtake us. But I wouldn’t have predicted the Web as it is today 10 years ago.” As philosophical as she is scientific, Bo views change as something positive, but believes that people aren’t necessarily happier now than they were 100 years ago because of technological advancement. “We’re not superior to people in the past. Expectations were just different then.”
Bo joined Yahoo! Research in the summer of 2006 hoping to contribute to change. Her research focus is on natural language processing and machine learning, and her projects address how systems process text, which could unleash new methods of search that currently require users to find the right keywords to get the results they want. “I believe that a deeper understanding of text can bring better comprehension to humans, and therefore, better interaction between humans and computers,” Bo says. She believes that there are conceptually simple methods that can enable progress in that direction, but it will take a long time before a system is developed in which people interact with their computers as though they were interacting with another person. Bo hasn’t always known this to be her professional niche. As a child, Bo says she was “one of those girls who always played with dolls.” She describes herself as mostly introverted since childhood; an independent movie buff who once took a personality test that confirmed her self-psychoanalysis.
Born and raised in Beijing, Bo went from playing with dolls to playing with computers when she attended Tsinghua University as an undergrad. Her interest was in computer vision – she was fascinated with human perception of images – and the way computers understand pictures of the world as humans do. She was accepted to Cornell University for graduate school, where she concentrated on artificial intelligence and eventually discovered her love of natural language processing. She also completed her PhD there. She minored in cognitive studies, an interdisciplinary field that draws from computer science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and neurobiology. Her research interest became clear to her when she took a seminar on statistical methods and models for natural language processing, which provided her with a partial answer to the “nature versus nurture” debate on artificial intelligence - ignited in her cognitive studies program – on how much can be learned from data.
Today, Bo enjoys working with her colleagues at one of the most visited Internet destinations in the world. She says, “The best things about working for Yahoo! are the diversity of people here, the fact that I work with real-world data, and the opportunities to work with people outside of my research area.” What’s her biggest accomplishment in life so far? Bo says, “I don’t think that way. I think I’m more interested in the process than the end result.” But she admits that seeing a highly utilized product or service to which she contributed with her research would bring her immense gratification.
