Emine Yilmaz

Professor Emine Yilmaz is a distinguished academic at University College London (Department of Computer Science), holding concurrent roles as a Turing Fellow and Amazon Scholar. She leads the Web Intelligence Group at the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence and collaborates with Amazon's Alexa Shopping team as an Amazon Scholar. Her research focuses on information retrieval, natural language processing, and machine learning, with over 150 publications (6,250+ citations, H-index 39). Notable awards include the Karen Sparck Jones Award, Google Faculty Research Award, and Bloomberg Data Science Research Award.

Her work is funded by EU Horizon 2020, EPSRC, and industry partners like Google and Bloomberg. She has served in leadership roles for journals (e.g., Information Retrieval Journal) and conferences (e.g., ACM SIGIR 2024 PC Chair). Recent projects include organizing the TREC Deep Learning Track and co-founding Humanloop, a UCL spinout company.

• Research Interests: Machine learning for search systems, conversational AI, educational technology, and ethical AI.
• Key Contributions: Synthetic test collections (SYNDL), contextual understanding in dialogue systems, and knowledge-enhanced retrieval frameworks.

Her articles emphasize robustness in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), proactive search systems, and bias mitigation in synthetic data. Recent highlights include work on personalization benchmarks (PersonaLens) and trustworthiness in AI systems (TrustRAG).

• Awards: Karen Sparck Jones Award (2021), Google Faculty Research Award (2020), Bloomberg Data Science Award (2019).

She advises over 10 current PhD students and has mentored 9 former students, many now in academia and industry. Her grants span EU, UK, and industry funding, with recent support from Bloomberg’s PhD fellowship program and Google Research Awards.

Labs/Teams: Web Intelligence Group (UCL), co-founder of Humanloop, and key contributor to the TREC Deep Learning initiative.