2018 – I Seek, Therefore I Am

A Summer of Productive Fun for InfoSeekers

September 3, 2018 Liz Smith Comments 0 Comment

Activities included travel, classes, lab meetings and socializing!

Where does one begin to describe the summer of 2018? Chirag summed it up when he said, “We had a fantastic, fun, and productive summer. I think even having lab meetings every week throughout the summer is an achievement. We learned a lot from each other and had fun doing so. InfoSeekers have won awards, presented papers, and traveled to different corners of the world. Even our alumni have done some wonderful things.”

InfoSeekers line up for an end-of-summer group photo.

The following captures just the highlights of InfoSeekers at work and play, keeping things interesting as they moved their studies forward.

Manasa Rath went to summer school in Los Angeles, and her team rated runner-up status for an award for a project for “Summer Methods Course on Computational Social Sciences.” Before attending the course, Manasa had scored full funding for her travels, accommodation and other support. (Only 11 percent of those who apply for this support receive it.) While there, she met other graduate students from the U.S. and Europe who were learning about automated textual analysis. Her team’s project concerned using word embeddings to measure ethnic stereotypes from various news corpora, including NPR (National Public Radio) and The New York Times.

Meanwhile, Souvick Ghosh did a ten-week internship as part of the LEADS-4-NDP (National Digital Platform) Fellowship Program. Each intern in the program worked with different industry partners focusing on data science problems. Vic collaborated with OCLC Research to cluster publisher names using MARC records. (OCLC is the global library cooperative that provides shared technology services; MARC stands for Machine-Readable Catalog and has provided the national standard for the description of items for the digital catalog for libraries since 1971.) In their internship work they attempted to cluster instances of MARC records that contain different information such as the title of a book, the author, the publisher, ISBN number, etc. The idea was to cluster the instances of same publisher entities, exploring different hashing and machine-learning approaches, additionally evaluating the relative importance of various features for classifying entities.

InfoSeekers continued lab meetings throughout the summer.

In other updates, Jiqun Liu and Shawon Sarkar started the recruitment phase for a study on people’s search experience and preferred supports in information seeking, the purpose of which is to improve Web search. So far, four people have completed the study. Recruitment and running the study will likely continue through mid-October.

InfoSeeking Lab Director and all-around inspired leader Chirag Shah did his share of travel this summer including a visit to Ryerson University in Toronto, where he gave a talk about data and algorithmic biases. (See his August 6 blog.) But the real fun was being able to finish his goal of making it to all 50 of the states in the U.S.

Please be sure to scroll all the way down to see the fun capper snapshot!

Diana Soltani presenting her summer research on Coagmento with a poster and a demo.

Never let it be said that InfoSeekers are anti-social. Lunch out helps punctuate the end of a great summer.

Alaska was the final frontier for Chirag’s quest to visit all 50 U.S. states. Here are Chirag and Lori Shah in a kayak in the mountains in White Pass, which is actually in the Canadian Yukon territories if you want to get picky. (Did you know that the kayak comes to us from the native peoples of Alaska, Canada and Greenland?)

By the way, have a wonderful fall semester, InfoSeekers, and a very Happy Birthday to Chirag!

SIGIR 2018: Who, What, Where, When, and What Happened?

July 18, 2018 Liz Smith Comments 0 Comment

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.

The 41^stannual 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.

InfoSeekers Convene for Graduation Celebrations

May 24, 2018 Liz Smith Comments 0 Comment

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.

InfoSeekers gathered for a reunion lunch around graduation celebrations.

Practicum Presentations, Poster Style

April 26, 2018 Liz Smith Comments 0 Comment

On April 25, as the spring semester was in its intense final days, six InfoSeekers presented practicum posters to their colleagues and Professor Chirag Shah, who had advised them on the projects. Here are representative photos of each doctoral student presenter with the title of their practicum. (Be sure to scroll all the way to the bottom.)

Jiqun Liu presented, “Exploring the Effects of Search Task and User Characteristics on Information Seeking Intentions in Query Segments.”

Souvick Ghosh presented, “Exploring the Ideal Depth of Neural Network in Question Deletion Prediction.”

Shannon Tomlinson presented, “Preliminary Results of a Study Comparing Typed and Voice Searches by Sighted and Visually Impaired People.”

Manasa Rath presented, “Content-Based Approach to Evaluate Question Quality in Educational Q&A.”

Soumik Mandal presented, “Predicting Intervention Effect on Users’ Search Behavior.”

Jonathan Pulliza presented, “Corpus Reproducibility and Expansion through Modular Text Transformations.”

InfoSeekers Are Key to Success of the Third Annual CHIIR Conference

March 22, 2018 Liz Smith Comments 0 Comment

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.”