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.
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.)
Last week our very own Dongho Choi successfully defended his dissertation, “A Study of Information Seeking Behavior: Investigating Exploratory Behavior in Physical & Online Spaces” in front of a demanding panel of fellow scholars.
Dongho’s dissertation investigates individuals’ behaviors during online and physical search tasks to identify their behavioral patterns. He gathered data from 31 participants whose behavior during web search and physical search tasks was collected via eye-tracker, web browser and wearable video recorder. His analysis suggests that individuals have preferred searching strategies that they adopt in different tasks and environments. He found that the behavioral pattern, however, was affected by the task type and the way information is structured in the environments.
Chirag Shah said, “Dongho has been an invaluable member of InfoSeeking Lab over the past four years. He worked on an NSF-funded project for social media, and a Google-funded project for sensor-based information seeking. Time flies, and I can’t believe it’s already time for Dongho to fly away! Congratulations to Dr. Choi for the successful defense of his dissertation. My best wishes to him and his family for the next chapter of their lives.”
It’s been quite a week thus far in the InfoSeeking lab, and it’s only Wednesday!
On Monday, acceptances were released for the ASIST (that’s Association for Information Science and Technology) 2017 conference, held from October 27-November 1 in Washington, D.C. A number papers completed by InfoSeekers were selected! Here’s a brief recap.
Image: http://connect.hsmai.org/washingtondc/home
Yiwei Wang, Jiqun Liu, Soumik Mandal, and Chirag Shah were accepted for their paper, “Search Successes and Failures in Query Segments and Search Tasks: A Field Study.”
Shawon Sarkar, Yiwei Wang, and Chirag Shah had a full paper, “Investigating the Relations of Information Seeking Outcomes to the Selection and Use of Information Sources,” accepted.
Manasa Rath, Chirag Shah, and Diana Floegel were accepted for their paper, “Identifying Reasons Contributing to Question Deletion in Educational Q&A.”
These papers represent a great deal of ongoing hard work carried out by lab members and their director. They are also a testament to how well InfoSeekers collaborate to complete successful projects. So congratulations, Seekers! Stay tuned for more information about ASIST 2017.
Long Le, a long time and much loved member of the InfoSeeking Lab, has successfully defended his dissertation, “Extracting Users in Community Question-Answering in Particular Contexts.” Congratulations, Long!
Long’s work holds particular import for Community Question-Answering (CQA) sites and their users. He was interested in studying the behavior of the users who participate in CQA. Specifically, he strove to understand how different types of users could be identified based on their behaviors concerning a CQA-specific problem. Rather than discuss users and their actions in a general context, Long extracted contextual situations to develop a more granular analysis of user behavior. Users are the main driving force in CQA and understanding them allows us to know the current state of their respective sites.
Obtaining a doctorate is no easy feat, and we’re all incredibly proud of Long and everything he has accomplished. Look out for him in the future–he’ll certainly move forward into big and bright places. Of course, he and his family will also be terribly missed by everyone in the InfoSeeking Lab, but we’re thrilled to count him among our distinguished alumni.
Here at the InfoSeeking Lab, we really try to focus on our students and their accomplishments. With so many dedicated scholars, it’s hard not to.
But student lab members need someone to guide them, and we’re more than fortunate to be led by the indelible Dr. Chirag Shah. Haven’t heard of him? Well, if you’re in the world of information science, it’s only a matter of time until you’ll come across one of his publications. In fact, Dr. Shah was named the 11th most productive Library & Information Science scholar from 2008-2013. Check out his distinction from Library and Information Science.
Keep your eye out–Dr. Shah has published a great deal more (often with current and past lab members!) in the past three years, so we can’t wait to see how he ranks next!
Web 2.0. Social media. Collaborative information seeking. Social information seeking. Information seeking technology. Information seeking failures. Social Q&A. Information seeking behaviors.
What do the above concepts have in common? They represent only some of the relevant and fascinating topics explored by members of the InfoSeeking Lab. Through various research endeavors, conference presentations, and publications, InfoSeekers pave the way for more efficient and effective information seeking practices to come to life. And, if we do say so ourselves, they do quite an excellent job.
So how can you keep track of everything our Seekers are doing? You can visit their individual profiles, our lab’s Accomplishments page, and a list of their current projects. You can also get a retrospective and current updates from our Facebook page. But, for now, here’s a round-up of some exciting events from 2016 conferences that you may have missed.
Lab member Long Le, along with Director Chirag Shah and former InfoSeeker Erik Choi, won best student paper at JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) 2016 in Newark, NJ for “Evaluating the Quality of Education Answers in Community Question-Answering.”
Dongho Choi won the best presentation award at the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) 2016 Doctoral Consortium in Pisa, Italy for “A Study on Information Seeking Behavior Using Physical and Online Explorations.”
Keep checking in to find out what we do next!