Natasha Noy facts for kids

Natasha Fridman Noy is a research scientist from Russia who now lives in America. She works at Google Research in Mountain View, CA. Her main goal is to make it easier for people to find and use organized information, called "structured data."

Natasha leads the team for Dataset Search. This is a special search engine on the internet that helps people find different collections of information. Before joining Google, Natasha worked at Stanford University. There, she helped create and connect different ways of organizing knowledge. She also helped people work together on these projects. Natasha is also involved with many important publications about how information is organized on the internet.

Education and Early Work

Natasha Noy studied applied mathematics at Moscow State University. She then earned a master's degree in computer science from Boston University. Later, she received her doctorate from Northeastern University. Her studies focused on how to find information in scientific articles. This is like making sure search engines can understand and find what's important in a big science paper.

Career and Research at Stanford

After finishing her studies, Natasha Noy moved to Stanford University. She worked with Mark Musen on a project called Protégé. This is a special computer program that helps people organize information in a structured way.

While at Stanford, Natasha did important work on a tool called Prompt. This tool helps connect different ways of organizing information automatically. Her work on Prompt was recognized with a special award in 2018.

One of her most famous works is the "Ontology 101 tutorial." This was a guide she created to help people learn about organizing information. It became a very popular guide for understanding how the internet can use structured data. Many people have used and downloaded this guide.

Google Dataset Search

In April 2014, Natasha Noy joined Google Research. Google later launched a search engine to help researchers find public information online. This program, called Dataset Search, started on September 5. It was made for "scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anybody else."

Dataset Search is like Google's other special search engines, such as Google Scholar for academic papers. It finds information collections based on how their owners have labeled them. It doesn't read the actual content of the files.

Natasha Noy explained that researchers often had to rely on word-of-mouth to find data. This was especially hard for new researchers. In 2017, Natasha and her Google colleague Dan Brickley suggested a solution. They proposed that owners of information collections should "tag" them using a standard language called Schema.org. Google and other big search engines helped create Schema.org. This helps search engines understand and find existing information collections more easily.

Awards and Honors

Natasha Noy is well-known for her work on the Protégé program and the Prompt tool. For this work, she and Mark Musen received the AAAI Classic Paper award in 2018. This award honors important papers from past conferences.

Natasha was also chosen as an AAAI Fellow in 2020. This is a special honor for experts in artificial intelligence. In 2023, she was also named an ACM Fellow, which is another high honor for people in computing.