Rate My Professor Lee Giles

C. Lee Giles is a prominent computer scientist whose groundbreaking research in information retrieval, digital libraries, machine learning, and neural networks has had a lasting impact on academia. He earned his undergraduate degrees from Rhodes College and the University of Tennessee, pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan, and received both his MS in 1977 and PhD in 1981 in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona, with advisor Harrison H. Barrett. Giles's career encompasses faculty appointments in computer science or electrical engineering departments at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, University of Pisa, University of Trento, and University of Maryland College Park. He also held research positions at NEC Research Institute (now NEC Labs America), Air Force Research Laboratory, and United States Naval Research Laboratory. For 24 years at Pennsylvania State University until his retirement in June 2024, he served as the David Reese Professor of Information Sciences and Technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Graduate Faculty Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Courtesy Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems, Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory, and Interim Associate Dean of Research. He is currently Faculty Emeritus.

Giles pioneered CiteSeer in 1997, the world's first freely available automatic citation indexing system and academic search engine/digital library focused on computer and information science, co-created with Steve Lawrence and Kurt Bollacker; this project evolved into CiteSeerX launched in 2008, which indexes over 10 million scholarly articles. He further developed BizSeer for business and economics literature, ChemXSeer—a chemistry search engine and data portal in collaboration with Penn State colleagues Prasenjit Mitra, Karl Mueller, Barbara Garrison, and James Kubicki—AckSeer for automatic acknowledgment indexing, BotSeer for robots.txt files, and RefSeerX for context-aware citation recommendations, alongside the open-source SeerSuite toolkit. Seminal publications include "Searching the World Wide Web" (Science, 1998, with S. Lawrence), which provided the first estimates of the public web's size and search engine coverage, and early papers on recurrent neural networks, including neural network pushdown automata, laying groundwork for deep learning; his over 500 publications appear in Nature, Science, and PNAS among others, yielding an h-index of 118 and over 60,000 citations (Google Scholar). Giles mentored 40 PhD students, taught graduate deep learning and search engines courses, reestablished neural network funding at AFOSR in 1986 after a 20-year hiatus, and aided DARPA's program. Honors encompass ACM Fellow (2006), IEEE Fellow, INNS Fellow and Gabor Award, 2018 IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award, and 2018 NFAIS Miles Conrad Award; he has contributed as an expert witness for firms representing Google and Yahoo.