Weimao Ke

What was your educational and professional background before coming to SILS?

I earned a Bachelor of Engineering from East China University of Science and Technology, worked in the IT industry for six years, and received my Master of Information Science from Indiana University in Bloomington.

How has your career progressed since you graduated SILS?

I joined the faculty of Drexel's iSchool (currently the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University) in 2010 and was recently promoted with tenure to the rank of associate professor.

In your current employment, what are your job duties and responsibilities?

I continue to conduct research on information retrieval, data mining, and large-scale distributed systems. I teach courses related to information and data sciences at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

What projects have gotten you most excited and/or what accomplishments have made you the proudest?

After joining Drexel, I made some progress on a project related to information-theoretic model for information retrieval, from which a paper was nominated for best paper in ACM JCDL 2013. Also I received the outstanding online faculty award at Drexel.

What were some of your best experiences at SILS?

The very open culture for the exchange of ideas and scholarly discussion with world renowned researchers in the field. I very much appreciated the environment in which doctoral students were treated as colleagues and their ideas/research was respected.

How did your time at SILS prepare you for the future?

It prepared me with good understanding of diverse research areas and the skills to present/communicate about your ideas, even to those with very different backgrounds. It also prepared me with the ability to think critically, to question basic assumption, and to innovate on new approaches.

What inspires or motivates you?

Passion for research and curiosity to know more -- this is what I learned from my advisor and professors by their examples at SILS.