Web Expert Named To E-Business Research Center Post
September 27, 2000
University Park, Pa.–C. Lee Giles, an expert in World Wide Web issues with Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has been selected as the associate director for research of the University’s eBusiness Research Center (eBRC).

Dr. Giles, who holds the David Reese Professorship in IST and is a professor of computer science and engineering, is well known for recent papers in the prestigious journals Science and Nature estimating the size of the web and its content, and showing that current Web search engines only index a fraction of it. Prior to joining Penn State this year, Giles was a senior research scientist with NEC Research Institute and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and Princeton..

The eBusiness Research Center, under the leadership of Dr. Nirmal Pal, is jointly sponsored by IST and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business Administration. Founded in 1999, the center explores the business strategies and practices of organizations operating in the on-line environment.

Giles will help shape eBRC’s future research agenda, coordinate faculty resources, identify potential funding sources, and help plan academic workshops, seminars, and other research-oriented activities.

His research on the World Wide Web was widely reported by the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, MSNBC, and the New York Times. Giles has helped spearhead the development of various Web search techniques and tools. One such tool is a metasearch engine, called Inquirus (inquirus.com), which dramatically improves the effectiveness and precision of Web searches. Another is Researchindex (researchindex.com), an autonomous citation-indexing tool which has over 300,000 papers online and is the world’s largest free resource of papers in computer and information science.

For further information, contact:
Charles C. DuBois, Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology
(814) 865-4458, , or visit http://www.ist.psu.edu