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Collaborative Information Seeking
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HCIR
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CMC and Social Media
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Personal Information Management
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Faceted Library Interfaces
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Video Archival
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My Background
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Collaborative Information Seeking and Search Results Management
I co-authored an NSF grant (funded for $464,000) to explore users' needs to organize
and share information found from Web searches and to build systems to help users conduct
searches in collaboration with other people. During 2010-2011, I am managing several students
involved in this project, and have served as the advisor for four other students who worked
previously on this research (including two Master's papers and two undergraduate projects).
As part of this project, I led a team that conducted a study to understand how people organize
and share information found from Web searches and published results of this work in a
2010 ACM SIGCHI paper. We are currently building collaborative Web search and sharing tools
based on design principles derived from our studies and are planning evaluations in 2011 to
examine collaboration using on-line tools in specific settings.
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Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
Much of my research is at the intersection of HCI and IR and I have taken an active role
in conducting and promoting research in this important area. I was the Program Chair for
the Fourth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2010)
and am a member of the ongoing HCIR Workshop Steering Committee (http://hcir.info).
In recent work, I have built systems and studied user interfaces to support exploratory
searches of large document collections. Results of this work, published in the ACM/IEEE
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), highlight the importance of allowing users
to fluidly move between keyword based searching and using facets to refine results of queries.
I incorporated these findings into a new version of our Relation Browser software tool
(built using Java and Apache Lucene) that allows users to conduct searches that integrate
keyword search, facet-based query refinement, and the ability to issue dynamic queries based
on mousing over interface elements. Other systems that I have designed and implemented in this
area include the HCI Browser, a Firefox plug-in to help conduct human-computer interaction studies
of Web tools and interfaces by presenting tasks to participants and logging browser interface events,
and Tag Search, a web search system that incorporates social network tags into search results,
including a re-ranking function.
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Computer-mediated communication and Social Media
Since 2008, more of my research has become connected to social media, computer-mediated
communication (CMC) and on-line social networks (SNS). Based on research started with one
of my undergraduate research students, I recently co-authored a paper published in the
journal Computers in Human Behavior that examines the factors that mediate privacy
behaviors in social network sites such as Facebook. I am currently working with two students
who are examining factors that influence when one communication channel may be used over another,
and why people may choose to "change channels" (e.g. move a conversation from Facebook to email).
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Personal Information Management
Personal information management (PIM) is a research area that focuses on how people collect,
manage, organize, re-access, and re-use personal information. In my dissertation, I explored how
people re-find information previously found on the Web, observing that people carry over strategies
from finding to re-finding, and that key sites (waypoints) play an important role in refinding.
In collaboration with one of my undergraduate research students, I recently conducted a study to
examine how people manage personal digital music collections. We won the 2010 American Society
for Information Science and Technology Best Poster Award for this research and have a full paper
accepted to the 2011 iConference.
I have been active in establishing PIM as an important area of research. For the past four years,
I have been a member of the organizing committee for a series of research workshops on PIM held as
part of ACM SIGIR 2006, ACM SIGCHI 2008, and ASIS&T 2009, and have co-authored two book chapters
on PIM research.
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Faceted Library Interfaces
Many libraries and digital libraries are adding support for advanced interaction and exploration
of their collections by developing faceted interfaces for their on-line catalogs. Faceted search
interfaces present interactive lists of metadata fields to help users refine their searches.
These interfaces are relatively new and there are many open research questions regarding how they
should be designed and how they are being used. In collaboration with colleagues at North Carolina
State University (NCSU) and Catholic University, I am exploring these issues through laboratory studies
and analysis of log data. In a series of laboratory studies, we tracked the eye-movements of participants
while they conducted exploratory searches and published our results at JCDL and HCIR.
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On-Line Video Archival and Digital Video Libraries
I have research interests in digital video libraries, digital library interfaces, and
digital video archival. During the spring of 2011, I am working on a project
to upgrade open-video.org, a major digital
video library hosted at UNC, from a MySQL+PHP architecture to a system developed at UT Austin
using Ruby on Rails. I recently worked on a project at UNC that focused on exploring tools and
techniques to aid in the preservation of on-line digital videos (VidArch). Part of my work on this project
examined contextual information about videos collected from the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.
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Research Background
I have been involved in research since the early 1990s when I was completing my Master's degree
in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis in the School of Engineering and
Applied Science. While there, I worked on developing algorithms for mapping sequences of DNA.
After graduating, I worked in corporate research and development at Southwestern Bell's research
labs (now merged with AT&T Labs), investigating technologies for speech recognition and voice user
interface design. I continued to explore my interest in human-computer interaction during my Ph.D.
research at Virginia Tech in the Department of Computer Science, studying how people find and refind
information on the web, and how tools can help support their needs. I am currently a Post-Doctoral
Fellow and Research Scientist at the School of Information and Library Science at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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