Torsten Suel is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering, where he serves as Director of the CSE Ph.D. Program and directs a research group on search engines and web mining technology. He received a Diplom degree from the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, completing his PhD in 1994. Suel joined NYU in fall 1998 following postdoctoral and visiting positions at the NEC Research Institute, UC Berkeley, and Bell Labs. In 2008, he served as Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara, CA, while on leave from NYU.

Suel's research specializations include web search engines, scalable information retrieval, databases, data compression, distributed computation, algorithms, parallel computation, and experimental algorithmics. His work addresses search engine architecture, particularly techniques for improving efficiency of query processing in large engines handling billions of queries per day over trillions of documents. Recent interests encompass the impact of transformers and large language models on future search architectures, spatial databases, sequential algorithms, and efficient communication and computation in computer networks. He has received the NSF Career Award and the Best Paper Award at the WWW Conference in 2005. Key publications comprise "Faster Learned Sparse Retrieval with Block-Max Pruning" (SIGIR 2024), "Navigable Graphs for High-Dimensional Nearest Neighbor Search: Constructions and Limits" (2024), "Faster Learned Sparse Retrieval with Guided Traversal" (SIGIR 2022), "Using Conjunctions for Faster Disjunctive Top-k Queries" (WSDM 2022), "Learning Passage Impacts for Inverted Indexes" (SIGIR 2021), "Faster Top-k Document Retrieval Using Block-Max Indexes" (SIGIR 2011), "Batch Query Processing for Web Search Engines" (WSDM 2011), "Efficient Query Processing in Geographic Web Search Engines" (SIGMOD 2006), and "Optimized Inverted List Assignment in Distributed Search Engine Architectures" (IPDPS 2007). Suel has supervised over twenty PhD students, including Shuai Ding (Facebook), Qingqing Gan (Microsoft), Jinru He (SHAREit), Konstantinos Dimopoulos (Audible), Antonio Mallia (Pinecone), Michal Siedlaczek (IBM), and Juan Rodriguez (IBM), reflecting his substantial influence on advancements in large-scale search and data management technologies.

Professional Email: torsten.suel@nyu.edu