Profile of the Month

Catherine Baudin is a Principal Research Scientist at eBay Research Labs (ERL), the technology and research arm of eBay. Catherine ’s expertise is in text mining/knowledge discovery, semantic indexing for vertical search, log analysis and user studies. At ERL, she mainly conducts research and designs tools to detect fraud patterns on eBay. She has also developed methods for query analysis and built systems for topic and sentiment extraction in text sources such as blogs and user forums. In her work she has proven that combining domain knowledge with user interaction goes a long way toward effective data mining in a not-so-structured ecommerce space like eBay.

Catherine has over 15 years of research and industry experience. Prior to joining eBay, she was the CTO of Kaidara Inc. where she designed tools to structure and analyze customer data for the automotive, retail and pharmaceutical industry. Prior to that, Catherine worked at the PriceWaterhouseCoopers technology center in R&D for five years and was a principal investigator at the NASA Ames Research Center for six. At PWC she used text mining to classify, extract and monitor information from the web and for the company’s knowledge management system. At NASA, she worked in a multi-disciplinary team with scientists, engineers and the Stanford Center for Design Research to develop information access tools that could learn from their interaction with users.

Catherine has a PhD in computer science from Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris, France. Teaching LOGO programming to fifth graders as a graduate student introduced her to Artificial Intelligence. This led her to become a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab, where she was attracted to the lab's experimental approach to research. Catherine enjoys good coffee, painting and Chinese qi gong. She was born in France to Russian and Sicilian immigrants and lives in Palo Alto with her husband and two sons.

Past Profiles