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Congratulations to Dr. Choi!

Congratulations to Dr. Choi!

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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 Choi, center, after defending his dissertation, flanked by Vivek Singh and Chirag Shah.

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.”

We Have a (New) Doctor in the House!

We Have a (New) Doctor in the House!

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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.