By now, personal information management has become an Internet buzzword. But Teevan pioneered the field as a graduate student working with David Karger, a professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "She literally almost single-handedly created this whole area," says Eric Horvitz, a principal researcher who manages teams pursuing advances in search and retrieval at Microsoft Research.
She began by studying how people search the Internet. They use such different strategies, she found, that a one-size-fits-all search engine can never satisfy everyone. So Teevan started building tools that sort Internet search results according to a user's personal data, previous searches, and browsing history.
Software designed by Michael Backes, a professor in the information security and cryptography group at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, can prove in less than a second whether an Internet protocol is truly secure.
As a graduate student at the University of Washington, Jeffrey Bigham created WebAnywhere, a free screen reader that can be used with practically any Web browser on any operating system--no special software required. Users start at webanywhere.cs.washington.edu; from there, they can use keyboard commands to navigate to any Web page.
Lists of numbers often don't mean as much as charts, graphs, and interactive graphics that can reveal unexpected trends. To help people make them, Jeff Heer, an assistant professor of computer science, led a project that created easy-to-use open-source visualization software called Protovis.
When Vik Singh, only seven months out of college and five months into his first job, talked the company into giving away not just the search results but much of the data essential to its relevance formula, such as any tags that identify place names or people. His efforts led to the creation of BOSS (for "Build your Own Search Service"), an application programming interface that lets developers take Yahoo search results and manipulate them to provide services tailored to users' needs, in some cases by considering personal data that a website has collected.
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