AMiner-mini: A People Search Engine for University

We present a distributed academic search and mining system? AMiner-mini. The system offers intra- and inter- university level academic search and mining services. It integrates academic data from multiple sources and performs disambiguation for people names, which is a fundamental issue for searching people. We employ a two-phases approach that formalizes the disambiguation problem into a HMRF framework, which significantly improves the disambiguation performance. Based on the disambiguation results, AMiner-mini offers a people search function, which returns experts (or related researchers) for a given query by the user. The user can also choose different metrics to rank the search results and explore the results from different dimensions. The system is designed in a distributed structure. It can be deployed in a university as a stand-alone system for finding the right people who are working on a research topic. Multiple distributed systems can be also connected via Web services and perform search or mining in an asynchronous way and return the combination results. We have deployed the system in Tsinghua University and feedback from university academic users shows that the system worked well and achieved its primary objective.