Hamed Zamani

Hamed Zamani is an Associate Professor at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). He joined UMass Amherst in 2020 after working as a researcher at Microsoft. His research focuses on designing and evaluating statistical and machine learning models for information access systems, including search engines, recommender systems, and question answering.

Education:

• PhD in Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• MS in Computer Engineering, University of Tehran
• BS in Computer Engineering, University of Tehran

Zamani's current research explores neural information retrieval, conversational search, and retrieval-enhanced machine learning. He develops efficient neural models for core IR tasks and emerging areas like conversational information seeking. His work bridges information retrieval with large language models to enhance capabilities in understanding complex queries and generating relevant responses.

His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on retrieval-augmented generation, personalized information access, and efficient neural ranking models. There's a clear trend toward integrating large language models with information retrieval systems, optimizing multi-agent frameworks, and developing evaluation metrics for generative AI applications in search contexts.

Scientific Awards:

• NSF CAREER Award
• ACM SIGIR Early Career Excellence in Research & Community Engagement Awards (2023)
• UMass CICS Outstanding Dissertation Award
• Paper awards at SIGIR (2022, 2023, 2024), CIKM (2020), ICTIR (2019)
• Microsoft Research Award (AI and New Future of Work program)
• Amazon Research Award (Optimization of Retrieval-Enhanced ML Models)

Zamani actively advises PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, with his students receiving prestigious awards including NSF Graduate Research Fellowships and SIGIR Best Paper awards. He leads the CIIR Talk Series, hosting IR researchers to share recent findings. His Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge team was selected for two consecutive years, advancing task-oriented dialogue systems.

He directs research at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), where he oversees projects in neural retrieval models, conversational AI, and retrieval-augmented generation. The center serves as a hub for developing next-generation information access systems with industry and academic collaborators.