Kazem Taghva received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1980. Prior to joining UNLV, he served as the chair of the Computer Science Department at New Mexico Tech. His research includes Information Retrieval (IR), Machine Learning (ML), and Database Systems (DBMS). Taghva 's work in IR is focused on retrieval from noisy text (OCR). His work in ML covers Named Entity Recognition including proper nouns, addresses, and acronyms. His work in DBMS deals with dependency theory. He was supported by Department of Energy for 25 years to construct the largest government database of documents for legal discovery (Licensing Support Network). He has advised and/or co-advised over 100 theses and dissertations including V.C. Sreedhar (IBM, Yorktown), Marc-Allen Cartright (Google), and Sivakumar Ramamurthy (VP for Intel Capital).