Chris Samarinas

CS PhD, CIIR lab, UMass Amherst


I'm a PhD student in Information Retrieval at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at University of Massachusetts Amherst, supervised by Hamed Zamani. I’m currently doing research in conversational search. I'm also the founder of Naget, an upcoming low-fee everything-platform that among other features will introduce personal instruction-based search.

Recently, I interned at Amazon and Adobe, where I worked on generative retrieval and multi-step dense retrieval. Before my PhD journey, I was at Ro5 where I worked on the automated construction of a biomedical knowledge graph for drug discovery, a research assistant at the National University of Singapore where I did research in automated fact-checking and detection of misinformation in social media, at Plural AI where I worked on entity extraction from webpages and semantic search for finance, and at Donaco where I worked on contextual recommendation of charity campaigns.

My goal is to help overcome the limitations of foundation models (efficiency, robustness, limited training resources) with the end goal of improving multimodal content organization & discovery. My recent work is in conversational search, representation learning and ranking for information retrieval, contextual recommendation systems and knowledge base construction from semi-structured text.

If you are interested in collaborating on or investing in next-generation search tech, please contact me here.

Recent News

Publications Google Scholar

Awards

  1. SIGIR Travel Grant, June 2022, for attentding ICTIR in Madrid
  2. Bodossaki Foundation PhD Scholarship, July 2021, 5-year scholarship for PhD studies in Information Retrieval
  3. Bioengineering Hackathon, 1st place, EMB IEEE Student Chapter, April 2018, 1st place for developing DropSense in 48 hours, a platform that monitors and connects elderly with their relatives and paid carers using Wear OS smartwatches
  4. Great Moment for Education Scholarship, Eurobank Ergasias, 2012, scholarship for achieving the highest grade at school at the national university admission exam
  5. National Mathematics Competition, First Prize, Hellenic Mathematical Society, 2009, awarded for competing in the final stage 'Archimedes', top 50 out of 20,000 participants

Recent Experience

Amazon · Applied Scientist Intern July 2024 - Oct 2024

  • Generative retrieval for conversational music search, Alexa Audio Search & Discovery team

Adobe Research · Research Intern June 2022 - Aug 2022

  • Research in multi-step query reformulation for dense retrieval at the Real-time Experiences and Algorithms Lab (REAL)

Ro5 · Machine Learning Consultant Feb 2021 - Aug 2021

  • Biomedical relation extraction from research papers

National University of Singapore · Research Assistant Feb 2020 - Apr 2021

  • Research on latent evidence retrieval for large-scale fact-checking and question answering, published at ICTAI & NAACL
  • Research on fake news detection in social media using social context

Plural AI · Research Engineer Oct 2018 - Jan 2020

  • Developed a novel multi-stage method for extraction and saliency scoring of concepts from corporate websites
  • Owned the whole ML pipeline, from data annotation and website crawling, to productionization and deployment
  • Developed a smart tool for efficient curation of an industrial category graph
  • Developed a scalable semantic search service of companies using a novel topic modeling technique

Donaco · Research Engineer Aug 2018 - Nov 2018

  • Designed a system for contextual recommendation of charity campaigns in news articles
  • Worked on the advertising platform and tried to utilize the real-time user behavior for better ad serving

Foshan.io · Software Consultant Jun 2018 - Jan 2019

  • Responsible for the development of the new version of the historical HotBot metasearch engine

Service

Misc

Last update: 01/02/25