Omar Alonso

(he/him/his)

Part-Time Lecturer

  • Information retrieval
  • PhD in Computer Science, University of California, Davis
  • MS in Computer Science, Virginia Tech
  • MS in Computer Science, University of Chile — Chile
  • Diploma in Computer Science, UNICEN— Argentina

Omar Alonso is a part-time lecturer at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. He earned his doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Davis. His main research areas include information retrieval, search quality evaluation, and knowledge graphs. He teaches the course CS 6200: Information Retrieval. Another area of research for Alonso is label quality and the practice of designing and implementing hybrid human-machine systems, topics that he covered in his book, “The Practice of Crowdsourcing.”

Currently, Alonso is a senior manager of applied science at Amazon. In the past, he was a principal data scientist lead at Microsoft in San Jose, where he worked on the intersection of social media, temporal information, knowledge graphs, and human computation. He is the co-organizer of DESIRES, a new information retrieval conference with a focus on system implementation and experimental design. Additionally, Alonso was co-chair of the crowdsourcing and human computation track for WWW 2019 and WWW 2021.