C. Lee Giles

Timeline

1. 1986

   Neural network funding at AFOSR

   In 1986, while at AFOSR in Washington DC, he establishes the first neural network funding in 20 years.

2. 1997

   Co-creating CiteSeer

   In 1997 he co-creates CiteSeer, an automated citation indexing system, with Steve Lawrence and Kurt Bollacker. He also receives the IEEE Fellow award for contributions to theory and practice of neural networks.

3. 1998–1999

   Estimating the size of the Web

   He coauthors a 1998 paper in Science on the size and search engine coverage of the Web. A follow-up paper in Nature in 1999 finds that no engine indexes more than about 16% of the web.

4. 2000

   Named David Reese Professor

   In 2000 he leaves NEC Research Institute to become the David Reese Professor at the School of Information Sciences and Technology.

5. 2003–2008

   CiteSeer moves to Penn State

   In 2003 he moves the CiteSeer equipment to Penn State. In 2008 the system is updated as CiteSeerX.

6. 2018

   The IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award

   In 2018 he receives the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society's Neural Networks Pioneer Award, recognizing his early neural network work and the creation of CiteSeerX.

7. June 2024

   Retiring from teaching

   In June 2024 he retires from teaching at Penn State and continues research and graduate advising. CDO Magazine selects him for its Outstanding Academic Leaders in Data List 2024.

8. Since 2024

   Professor emeritus at Penn State

   He is professor emeritus in the College of Information Sciences and Technology. In 2025 he gives a keynote, "Web crawlers, spiders and bots for focused crawls," at the ACM Web Science Conference.