Yi Zhang is Professor at University of California Santa Cruz. Her research interests include information retrieval, text mining, statistical machine learning, and natural language processing. She has collaborated with start-ups, large corporations and government agencies on related topics. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. and M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University. She is working with SSRC on the Distributed Metadata Management project, focusing on how to use rich key-value metadata to allow users to interactively navigate and search distributed file systems.