"Information has no value unless you can find it."

James French
Research Associate Professor

Department of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Virginia
151 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4740

Phone: (434) 982-2213
Fax: (434) 982-2214
Email: french@cs.virginia.edu
Office: 228C Olsson Hall, UVa

Home page of James French

Areas of Interest

Data mining, information retrieval, digital libraries, and scientific database management

Biographical Sketch

ames French received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, at the University of Virginia in 1982. After several years in industry, he returned to the University of Virginia in 1987 as Senior Scientist in the Institute for Parallel Computation and became a research Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 1990. He served as General Chair of the International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, and on the program committees of numerous other leading conferences and symposia. He also served as an NSF Program Director. He has directed several graduate students, and is the co-author or editor of six books and over 65 papers and book chapters.

Research

rench's chief research interests are in the areas of data mining, distributed information retrieval and digital libraries. In the area of digital library technology, Professor French collaborated with researchers at several other universities on the development and deployment of NCSTRL, the Networked Computer Science Technical Reports Library. Professor French has directed a DARPA sponsored project on Personalized Information Environments (PIE) which are user-centric information seeking environments that can be widely deployed over the Internet to provide customized search and current awareness services. Professor French directed a NASA sponsored project (EVOC) that investigated novel search strategies to facilitate finding Earth science data.

Selected Publications

Comparing the Performance of Collection Selection Algorithms, A. L. Powell and J. C. French, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Volume 21 , Issue 4, October 2003, pp. 412-456.

Using Clustering Strategies for Creating Authority Files, J. C. French, A. L. Powell and E. Schulman, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 51, no. 8, June 2000, pp. 774-786.

Personalized Information Environments: An Architecture for Customizable Access to Distributed Digital Libraries, J. French and C. L. Viles, D-Lib Magazine, vol. 5, no. 6, June 1999.
A Classification Approach to Boolean Query Reformulation, Journal of the American Journal of Information Science, Vol. 48, No. 8, August 1997, pp. 694-706.

Ensuring Retrieval Effectiveness in Distributed Digital Libraries, J. C. French and C. L. Viles, Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, vol. 7, no. 1, March 1996, pp. 61-73.

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