CS grad student Elif Yamangil wins Google Fellowship

Elif Yamangil, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded the 2011 Google Fellowship in Natural Language Processing.

Yamangil, who is advised by Stuart Shieber, James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science at SEAS and director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, is particularly interested in statistical machine learning, generative models, grammar induction, and Bayesian posterior inference, as well as novel uses of Web text such as data mining Wikipedia revision histories.

Moreover, she is working with Peter K. Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, on the China Biographical Database (CBDB) Project to build computational methods and tools for data mining biographical information about prominent individuals in Chinese history primarily from the seventh through nineteenth centuries.

Prior to enrolling at SEAS, Yamangil received her B.S. in computer science and engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey.