Matthew Lease

Matthew Lease

Professor; Director of Doctoral Studies; Assistant Graduate Advisor


Biography

Matthew Lease received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University and his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Washington. He has received early career awards from the NSF, IMLS, and DARPA. Recent honors include Best Student Paper at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR) and Best Paper at the 2016 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Human Computation and Crowdsourcing conference (HCOMP). Lease is currently helping lead Good Systems, an eight-year, university-wide Grand Challenge Initiative at UT Austin to design AI technologies that maximally benefit society.

Degrees

Ph.D. Computer Science, Brown University, 2010

M.Sc. Computer Science, Brown University, 2004

B.Sc. Computer Science, University of Washington, 1999

Areas Of Specialization

Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
Natural Language Processing
Information Retrieval and Web Search

Recent Publications

Ye Zhang, Matthew Lease, and Byron Wallace. Active Discrimitive Text Representation Learning. In Proceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-17), 2017. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04212

Tyler McDonnell, Matthew Lease, Mucahid Kutlu, and Tamer Elsayed. Why Is That Relevant? Collecting Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments. In Proceedings of the 4th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP), pages 139-148, 2016. Best Paper Award. https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/mcdonnell-hcomp16.pdf

Y. Zhang, M. Mustafizur Rahman, A. Braylan, B. Dang, H.-L. Chang, H. Kim, Q. McNamara, A. Angert, E. Banner, V. Khetan, T. McDonnell, A. Thanh Nguyen, D. Xu, B. C. Wallace, and M. Lease. Neural Information Retrieval: A Literature Review. Technical report, University of Texas at Austin, November 2016. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.06792

Hyun Joon Jung and Matthew Lease. A Discriminative Approach to Predicting Assessor Accuracy. In Proceedings of the 37th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), pages 159-171, 2015. Samsung Human-Tech Paper Award: Silver Prize in Computer Science. https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ml/papers/ecir2015_hjung.pdf

View more in Google Scholar

Recent Awards

  • Samsung Human-Tech Paper Award with Hyunjoon Jung at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR)
  • Best Paper with Tyler McDonnell, Mucahid Kutlu, and Tamer Elsayed at the AAAI HCOMP
  • Best Student Paper with Soumyajit Gupta, Mucahid Kutlu, and Vivek Khetan at the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR)

Recent Courses

YearSemesterCourse NumberCourseSyllabusNotes
2025SpringINF 391D.11The Research Enterprise
2024FallI 304Programming for Informatics
2023FallI 304Programming for Informatics
2022FallI 304Programming for Informatics
2022FallI 304Programming for Informatics
2022SpringINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2021FallI 304Programming for Informatics
2021FallI 304Programming for Informatics
2021SpringI 304Programming for Informatics
2020FallINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2019FallINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2019SpringINF 380EPerspectives on Information
2018FallINF 350EInformation Technology Concepts of Information Retrieval
2018FallINF 384HConcepts of Information Retrieval
2018SpringINF 380EPerspectives on Information
2017FallINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2017SpringINF 380EPerspectives on Information