Overview
Howard R. Turtle’s research interests include design and implementation of retrieval systems, operating system support for large databases, formal models for retrieval of complex objects, text representation techniques, automatic classification, text and data mining, and automated inference techniques.
A nationally known scholar in search engine technologies, Turtle is building on the strong research base already established by CNLP, and his skill set complements the center’s existing strengths: large-scale statistical techniques, moving ideas from research into commercial products, and research that has a direct positive impact on users.
In the field of information retrieval, Turtle developed a formal retrieval model based on Bayesian Inference Networks that formed the basis of the highly reputed University of Massachusetts’ INQUERY Information Retrieval (IR) System and of West Publishing’s natural language search product. Recently, he was actively involved in the development of Indri, an open source search engine based on language models and inference network operators, hosted on Source Forge.
Turtle’s recent professional work has been in technical consulting, primarily dealing with information retrieval system design and evaluation, text classification and mining, technology assessment, and intellectual property protection. His applied research projects have focused on faceted retrieval, geographic retrieval, range retrieval for typed data, and improved update and access concurrency.
Prior to his position at West, Turtle was chief scientist at Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), where he held corporate-wide responsibility for technology assessment, spear-headed activities of the full research programming staff, managed and conducted internal technical audits, and led the redesign of the entire OCLC system. Before that, Turtle was a research scientist at Battelle Labs, where he designed and implemented software for their information retrieval system, free text search capability, online questionnaire facility, and participated in telecommunications consulting projects for corporate clients.
He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in English and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin.