It’s been a bit quiet on iBlog lately and there is a good reason. The lab, along with me, has moved from Rutgers University in NJ to University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. This happened over the end of the summer and the beginning of the fall. Things were so chaotic at the time that we even missed celebrating or noticing 9 years of the lab!
This transition is still in progress. Most of the PhD students are still in NJ, but new students and projects are starting up with the lab in Seattle. Over the course of the next few weeks and months, we will be bringing more updates to our websites and social media channels.
It is a new chapter for us, indeed, but the journey goes on. We are still seekers!
InfoSeekers Publish an Article and an ICTIR Paper Acceptance
First, we must congratulate InfoSeeker, Ruoyuan Gao for having her
paper accepted at ICTIR 2019!
Next, we are excited to share the news that our InfoSeekers, Shawon
Sarkar, Matthew Mitsui, Jiqun Liu and Chirag Shah, have published a new article!
The title of the article is: Implicit information need as explicit problems, help,
and behavioral signals.
ABSTRACT
Information need is one of the most fundamental
aspects of information seeking, which traditionally conceptualizes as the
initiation phase of an individual’s information seeking behavior. However, the
very elusive and inexpressible nature of information need makes it hard to
elicit from the information seeker or to extract through an automated process.
One approach to understanding how a person realizes and expresses information
need is to observe their seeking behaviors, to engage processes with
information retrieval systems, and to focus on situated performative actions.
Using Dervin’s Sense-Making theory and conceptualization of information need
based on existing studies, the work reported here tries to understand and
explore the concept of information need from a fresh methodological perspective
by examining users’ perceived barriers and desired helps in different stages of
information search episodes through the analyses of various implicit and
explicit user search behaviors. In a controlled lab study, each participant
performed three simulated online information search tasks. Participants’
implicit behaviors were collected through search logs, and explicit feedback
was elicited through pre-task and post-task questionnaires. A total of 208 query
segments were logged, along with users’ annotations on perceived problems and
help. Data collected from the study was analyzed by applying both quantitative
and qualitative methods. The findings identified several behaviors – such as
the number of bookmarks, query length, number of the unique queries, time spent
on search results observed in the previous segment, the current segment, and
throughout the session – strongly associated with participants’ perceived
barriers and help needed. The findings also showed that it is possible to build
accurate predictive models to infer perceived problems of articulation of
queries, useless and irrelevant information, and unavailability of information
from users’ previous segment, current segment, and whole session behaviors. The
findings also demonstrated that by combining perceived problem(s) and search
behavioral features, it was possible to infer users’ needed help(s) in search
with a certain level of accuracy (78%).
KEYWORDS
Information need Information searching Interactive IR
We’re excited to share the news that our InfoSeekers, Jiqun Liu and Chirag Shah, have published a new book! The title of the book is Interactive IR User Study Design, Evaluation, and Reporting.
Abstract
Since user study design has been widely applied in search interactions and information retrieval (IR) systems evaluation studies, a deep reflection and meta-evaluation of interactive IR (IIR) user studies is critical for sharpening the instruments of IIR research and improving the reliability and validity of the conclusions drawn from IIR user studies. To this end, we developed a faceted framework for supporting user study design, reporting, and evaluation based on a systematic review of the state-of-the-art IIR research papers recently published in several top IR venues (n=462). Within the framework, we identify three major types of research focuses, extract and summarize facet values from specific cases, and highlight the under-reported user study components which may significantly affect the results of research. Then, we employ the faceted framework in evaluating a series of IIR user studies against their respective research questions and explain the roles and impacts of the underlying connections and “collaborations” among different facet values. Through bridging diverse combinations of facet values with the study design decisions made for addressing research problems, the faceted framework can shed light on IIR user study design, reporting, and evaluation practices and help students and young researchers design and assess their own studies.
Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Interactive Information Retrieval / Methodology: Paper Selection and Coding Scheme / Faceted Framework of IIR User Studies / Evaluating IIR User Studies of Different Types / Implications and Limitations of the Faceted Framework / Conclusion and Future Directions / Appendix / Bibliography / Authors’ Biographies
Jiqun Liu shared his thoughts on
the release of his new book: “Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts,
Retrieval, and Services includes a variety of interesting topics that are
highly relevant to my research. I am thrilled and honored to have my own book
published as part of the Synthesis Lectures book series.”
2019 commencement celebrations have arrived. First, we must extend our enormous congratulations to both Dr. Matthew Mitsui and Dr. Ziad Matni for completing their PhDs!
Dr. Ziad Matni with Professor Chirag Shah.
Dr. Matthew Mitsui with Professor Chirag Shah.
Additionally, we must celebrate InfoSeeker Ruoyuan Gao for passing her qualifying exams this semester! And, InfoSeeker Jiqun Liu won outstanding continuing doctoral student award in the area of Information Science this semester.
Finally, we
would like to acknowledge the great work of our undergraduate InfoSeekers. Divya
Parikh has been working on our social media system SOCRATES. Samantha Lee worked on a project
that assessed the variety of approaches to improve community Q&A platforms
as part of Project SUPER. Ruchi Khatri worked on a
project as part of Project SUPER that investigated which factors affect stress
in human computer interaction, interactive information retrieval, health
search, and interface design. And, Gayeon Yoo is working on a project for our system,
SOCRATES.
Congratulations
again to all of our InfoSeekers and their hard work this year!
As we close out the fall semester and rapidly approach the end of 2018, we must pause to reflect on everything we accomplished this year in the InfoSeeking Lab. We had two students successfully defend their dissertations; six students passed their qualifying exams; and, two students defended their dissertation proposals. The InfoSeeking Lab hosted the 2018 CHIIR conference, as well as attended the ASIS&T 2018 and CSCW 2018 conferences. There were over a half a dozen publications and some of our InfoSeekers were recognized for their contributions to research in information science. Of course, we also made time to run in the Big Chill and socialize as a group. Here’s to a great year of hard work and a hunger to top it all in 2019!
In September we had two InfoSkeeing Lab successfully defend their dissertations!
On September 7th, our very own Zaid Matni successfully defended his dissertation, “The Influence of Network Structures and Information Seeking Uncertainty on Information Seeking Behavior” in front of a demanding panel of fellow scholars, marking our 6th PhD Graduate of the lab.
Zaid Matni, right, after defending his dissertation, with Professor Chirag Shah.
Zaid’s dissertation explores quantifiable behavioral dynamics of individuals who are seeking information using different social network structures over time. His study utilized a custom-built Web-based tool that simulates an information-seeking scenario via various network structures and had participants utilize it to achieve a stated goal of collecting answers to questions from others in their network. The tool allows a finite amount of interactions, thus limiting the participants’ engagements to a defined set of allowable actions. His dissertation contributed to the theories of information seeking in social network environments, as well as to social network theory as it pertains to human information behavior. Additionally, it served as another method to study human behavior through the lens of social networks by providing them with a sophisticated computer-mediated platform to collect log-based data of human behavior in simulated networked environments.
Matt Mitsui became our 7th PhD Graduate of the lab on September 20th! He successfully defended his dissertation, “Adopting a Graphical Perspective in Interactive Information Retrieval Research” in front of a demanding panel of fellow scholars.
Matt Mitsui, right, after defending his dissertation, with Professor Chirag Shah.
Matt’s dissertation demonstrates that task characteristics, user characteristics, and behaviors should be empirically studied as a network of dependencies. It expands empirical work using graphical modeling, which can uniquely capture phenomena such as mediation and conditional independence. His research empirically shows when knowledge about behavior and certain task characteristics can be used to learn about other aspects of the task. Additionally, it shows how task and user characteristics simultaneously affect behavior while potentially affecting each other. Specifically applying path analysis and Bayesian structure learning, results are shown to agree well with past literature and to also extend our understanding of the information seeking process.
Congratulations to Dr. Matni and Dr. Mitsui; we wish you the best of luck in the next chapter of your lives!
SIGIR 2018: Who, What, Where, When, and What Happened?
This year’s ACM SIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference took place July 8-12 in Ann Arbor on the beautiful campus of the University of Michigan.
The golden hour on the campus of U. Michigan.
SIGIR 2018 logo
The 41stannual conference featured a rich assortment of tutorials, a doctoral consortium, conference keynotes, technical tracks and workshops, many papers, and mealtime special events.
Some of our favorite InfoSeekers attended and had responsibilities. Souvick Ghosh was the new SIGIR Student Liaison for the Americas region. He and Soumik Mandal were also student volunteers. As Student Liaison, Vic’s goal was to welcome the students “in the corners” into the community so that no one is left behind. As Student Affairs Chair Laura Dietz put it, they are to encourage students to “Come, talk to us!”, which is also their motto.
Soumik was responsible for maintaining the smooth operation of a few sessions including “Women in IR,” a session that focused on challenges faced by women in information retrieval, computer science and related research communities.
Matt Mitsui and Jiqun Liu presented a short paper, “How Much is Too Much? Whole Session vs. First Query Behaviors in Task Type Prediction.” And, Chirag Shah’s book on Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd (2017) was on display at the Springer table.
Left to right: Souvick Ghosh, Salton Award winner Professor Kal Jarvelin, and Jiqun Liu. (Chirag Shah is photobombing!)
“The conference is a wonderful opportunity to meet researchers whom we cite and read about, and the industry partners. The social events and coffee sessions were perfect to meet our academic inspirations and role models,” Vic said.
Next year: Paris! And, drumroll please, Chirag will be a general co-chair for the SIGIR 2021 conference.
Heartiest congratulations go to Dr. Dongho Choi and Dr. Long Le for completing their PhDs in Information Science and Computer Science, respectively. And equally ecstatic congratulations to Ms. Shawon Sarkar and Mr. Jiho An for completing their Masters in Information degrees.
Shawon Sarkar with Professor Chirag Shah.
Dr. Dongho Choi with Professor Chirag Shah.
Dr. Long Le with Professor Chirag Shah.
InfoSeekers gathered for a reunion lunch around graduation celebrations.
InfoSeekers Are Key to Success of the Third Annual CHIIR Conference
Three cheers to InfoSeeking Lab Director Chirag Shah and several other InfoSeekers who helped organize and host a successful CHIIR conference.
On March 11, some 130 researchers from 25 countries in North America, Europe and Australia descended on New Brunswick for five days of workshops, presentations, tutorials, networking and fun.
CHIIR stands for the Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, which is sponsored by the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), in cooperation with (SIGCHI). The international conference represents a merger of two successful past events: the Information Interaction in Context (IIiX) conference and the Human Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) symposium, which have run since 2006 and 2007, respectively.
The events took place at the SC&I building on the College Avenue campus of Rutgers and at The Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick. This year’s keynote speakers were Pertti Vakkari from Finland’s University of Tampere and Susan Dumais from Microsoft. Dr. Vakkari spoke about “Information Search Processes in Complex Tasks,” focusing on key areas in information retrieval, such as how the effect of information search would depend on task outcome. Dr. Dumais’s talk, entitled, “Better Together: Interdisciplinary Perspective on Information Retrieval,” reflected on her work in Information Retrieval and Human-Computer Interaction and provided some predictions on the future of search on the Web.
The major areas of study discussed at CHIIR 2018 included user-centered aspects of information interaction and information retrieval focusing on aspects of human involvement in search activities, and information seeking and use in context.
InfoSeeking Lab Director Chirag Shah said, “I’m very proud of InfoSeekers for representing our lab at this international conference – not just with their scholarly contributions (papers, posters, demos, doctoral consortium), but also in helping organize this event.”
Susan Dumais of Microsoft taking questions following her keynote address.
There were 22 full papers, two dozen short papers (posters), five demos, 10 doctoral dissertation proposals, four tutorials, and two workshops.
Most attendees participated in sessions on full papers, short papers, demonstrations, and the doctoral consortium.
InfoSeekers at the welcome reception at Zimmerli Art Museum. InfoSeekers contributed four full papers, some short papers, a couple of demos, and a doctoral consortium presentation.
Nick Belkin, Pertti Vakkari and Souvick Ghosh at the Welcome Reception at the Zimmerli Art Museum on the Rutgers campus, which featured the exhibition “Set in Stone: Lithography in Paris, 1815-1900.”
The banquet dinner was held at Ria Mar, a Portuguese restaurant in New Brunswick. A highlight was seeing Chirag warm up the dance floor. (Did you know he’s a trained ballroom dancer?!)
This year’s conference was sponsored by Siemens, Rutgers SC&I, Google, and Microsoft.
A snap of the student get-together at the Hub City Brewhouse in New Brunswick.
CHIIR 2019 will be held in Glasgow, Scotland. Looking forward to 2020, the conference will be in Vancouver, Canada, and in 2021, Canberra, Australia.
Photo credits: Souvick Ghosh, Matt Mitsui, Chirag Shah.
A wedding for which the planning was facilitated by Coagmento.
Coagmento was initially developed by Chirag Shah, in 2007, as a research project for his PhD dissertation. When Dr. Shah brought Coagmento to Rutgers University, it was further developed by his PhD student Roberto Gonzalez-Ibanez, followed by several other undergraduate and graduate students at Rutgers. Over the decade, many iterations of Coagmento have been released in Beta and public versions, as it continues to be tested and used and some bugs worked out. In 2013, Coagmento Collaboratory was released and later that year the first full version, Coagmento 1.0, was released. In 2016, Coagmento 2.0 was released, and later this year Coagmento 3.0 will be released with the aim to be even more user friendly.
What exactly is Coagmento and what does it do? Coagmento is a Web-based, open-source tool for information seeking that facilitates the collecting of information and collaborating on projects in teams. It helps the user at every step by recording visited Websites, bookmarking pages, and collecting pictures or snippets of text or source information. All along a live chat feature allows team members to confer from remote locations over multiple sessions. At the back-end, Coagmento is comprised of two major components: (1) Node.js, which creates a server-side notification framework and “push notifications,” and (2) is coded in Laravel, a Model-View-Controller PHP framework that supports several SQL databases. Since version 2.0, Coagmento has been available through GitHub as an open-source tool.
Coagmento 1.0 in action.
On the serious side, Coagmento can allow collaborators to work on challenging informational tasks. For example, it could help siblings gather information about their parent’s illness so they can be proactive in making decisions. In a classroom setting, Coagmento has been deployed for dozens of students to up to several hundred to facilitate collaboration. Keeping track of disparate pieces of information means that when the student/researcher sits down to write a report or create a presentation, the information is saved in a workspace where it can be put it together.
Coagmento 2.0 in action.
On the lighter side, Dr. Shah said, “When my wife Lori and I were planning our wedding, we used Coagmento to keep track of places in the North Carolina mountains for location consideration so we could make a decision with all the pieces in front of us.” He continued, “But, it’s come a long way since then as not only a tool but also a platform for supporting and studying individual and collaborative information seeking.”
Here’s a toast to the next ten years as Coagmento continues to evolve in usefulness and application to many of life’s information challenges.
