Research

Current research interests

• Applied Statistics, Machine Learning

• Modeling data on graphs

Past research experience

• Google search evaluation research (Summer, 2008)

• Undergraduate thesis research (2005-2006)

• NSF SMALL undergraduate math research (Summer, 2004)

• Research Assistant, Williams College Department of Economics (Summer, 2003)

Publications

• Xu, Y., Dyer, J. S. and Owen, A. B. (2009). Empirical stationary correlations for semi-supervised learning on graphs. To appear in Annals of Applied Statistics. (Received the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award)

• Xu, Y. and Mease, D. (2009). Evaluating web search using task completion time. In SIGIR ’09: Proceedings of the 32nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval.

• Kamvar, M., Kellar, M., Patel, R. and Xu, Y. (2009). Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my! A logs-based comparison of search users on different devices. In 18th International World Wide Web conference (WWW).

• Corneli, J., Corwin, I., Hurder, S., Sesum, V., Xu, Y., Adams, E., Davis, D., Lee, M., Visocchi, R.,(2008). Double bubbles in Gaussian space and sphere. Houston Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 34 , No. 1, 2008, page 181-204.

• Klingenberg, B. and Xu, Y. (2007), Simultaneous confidence intervals for margins of multivariate data. In Proceedings of the Conference on Complex Models and Computational Intensive Methods for Estimation and Prediction (S.Co. 2007), Venice, Italy.

• Corwin, I., Homan, N., Hurder, S., Sesum, V., Xu, Y. (2006). Differential geometry of manifolds with density. Rose-Hulman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2006.