Matthew Lease

Matthew Lease

Professor; Director of Doctoral Studies; Assistant Graduate Advisor


Biography

Matthew Lease received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University and his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Washington. He has received early career awards from the NSF, IMLS, and DARPA. Recent honors include Best Student Paper at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR) and Best Paper at the 2016 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Human Computation and Crowdsourcing conference (HCOMP). Lease is currently helping lead Good Systems, an eight-year, university-wide Grand Challenge Initiative at UT Austin to design AI technologies that maximally benefit society.

Degrees

Ph.D. Computer Science, Brown University, 2010

M.Sc. Computer Science, Brown University, 2004

B.Sc. Computer Science, University of Washington, 1999

Areas Of Specialization

Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
Natural Language Processing
Information Retrieval and Web Search

Recent Awards

  • Inaugural Test of Time Paper Award awarded for papers from 2013-2014, AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP)
  • Most Influential Paper Award, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)
  • Best Student Paper, Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST)
  • the Conference Award Track, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR, 2020)
  • Best Student Paper, European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR)

Recent Courses

YearSemesterCourse NumberCourseSyllabusNotes
2025Spring TermINF 391D.11The Research Enterprise
2024Fall TermI 304Programming for Informatics
2023Fall TermI 304Programming for Informatics
2022Fall TermI 304Programming for Informatics
2022Fall TermI 304Programming for Informatics
2022Spring TermINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2021Fall TermI 304Programming for Informatics
2021Fall TermI 304Programming for Informatics
2021Spring TermI 304Programming for Informatics
2020Fall TermINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2019Fall TermINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2019Spring TermINF 380EPerspectives on Information
2018Fall TermINF 350EInformation Technology Concepts of Information Retrieval
2018Fall TermINF 384HConcepts of Information Retrieval
2018Spring TermINF 380EPerspectives on Information
2017Fall TermINF 385T.03Special Topics in Information Science: Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
2017Spring TermINF 380EPerspectives on Information