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InfoSeekers Rock ASIS&T 80th Annual Meeting

InfoSeekers Rock ASIS&T 80th Annual Meeting

Rutgers University InfoSeeking students and professors were a significant presence at the ASIS&T conference at the Crystal City Hyatt in Washington DC, Oct. 28-Nov. 1. Here are the highlights.

On Oct. 28, Rebecca Reynolds from Rutgers, led a pre-conference SIG/INFOLEARN workshop with Soo Young Rieh, University of Michigan, called “Information and Learning Sciences Research as an Integral Scholarly Nexus.”

On Oct. 29, an all-Rutgers student and professor Community Informatics paper presentation was made by Manasa Rath, Chirag Shah and Diana Floegel: “Identifying the Reasons Contributing to Question Deletion in Educational Q&A.” Pictured at left is Manasa Rath taking questions.

On Monday, Oct.  30, an all-Rutgers Information Retrieval paper presentation on a field study was made by Yiwei Wang, Jiqun Liu, Soumik Mandal, and our fearless leader Chirag Shah, on “Search Successes and Failures in Query Segments and Search Tasks.”  Pictured: Yiwei Wang introducing the paper.

Later, on Oct. 30, Kaitlin Costello from Rutgers served on a panel session concerning “Health Information Behavior Research with Marginalized Populations,” along with Blake Hawkins, University of British Columbia, Tiffany Veinot, University of Michigan, Amelia Gibson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Devon Greyson, British Columbia Children’s Hospital.

InfoSeeker posters were presented by Jonathan Pulliza, Souvick Ghosh, JiHo An, and Roberto González Ibáñez.  Below to the right is Jonathan Pulliza presenting his poster on “Investigating the Efficacy of Sentence Filtering in Predicting Analysts Ratings Following a 10-K Filing.”

Immediately below (left) is Souvick Ghosh presenting his and Chirag Shah’s poster on “Information Seeking in Learning-Oriented Search.”

What’s a hard day’s work at ASIS&T without a chance to relax, reflect and socialize? InfoSeekers, pictured at table, never miss an opportunity for good food and conversation.
Oct. 31 was the day for Chirag Shah and Vivek Singh, from Rutgers, to serve on a panel called “From Sensors to Sense-Making: Opportunities and Challenges for Information Science.” Also on the panel were Cathal Gurrin, Dublin City University; Jacek Gwizdka, University of Texas at Austin; and Hideo Joho, University of Tsukuba.

That evening (Halloween), Chirag Shah chaired SIG/CON, where Jonathan Pulliza presented a research talk with a twist!

On Nov. 1, the final morning of ASIS&T 2017, Rutgers Ph.D. student Manasa Rath moderated the panel discussion, “Learnsourcing: Is it Working or Failing, and Where to Go from Here?” Presenters and participants were Chirag Shah from Rutgers; Oleksandr Zakharchuk from Brainly Inc.; Rich Gazan from the University of Hawaii; Sanghee Oh from Chungnam National University in South Korea; and Mega Subramaniam from the University of Maryland.

Also on Nov. 1, Shawon Sarkar, Yiwei Wang and Chirag Shah presented the paper, “Investigating Relations of Information Seeking Outcomes to the Selection and Use of Information Sources.”

Pictured right is Shawon Sarkar presenting her paper.

 

 

 

 

Last but most definitely not least, we must recognize Yiwei Wang for the New Leader Award that she was given at ASIS&T. After considering applications from seven countries, the ASIS&T Leadership Program Selection Committee granted a New Leader Award to Yiwei Wang, a Ph.D. candidate in Information Science at Rutgers. Eight students received the award. Congratulation, Yiwei!

Yiwei Wang Wins New Leader Award at ASIS&T

Yiwei Wang Wins New Leader Award at ASIS&T

After considering applications from seven countries, the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Leadership Program Selection Committee granted a New Leader Award to Yiwei Wang (pictured right), a Ph.D. candidate in Information Science at Rutgers, at the annual meeting in Washington, D.C. this week. Eight students received the award.

The award is given to students who are considered likely to contribute to ASIS&T. It is a financial grant that helps defray the travel costs to two consecutive ASIS&T meetings. As an awardee, Yiwei has been assigned a mentor, Dr. Beth St. Jean from the University of Maryland.

Yiwei will volunteer for the Special Interest Group of Information Needs, Seeking and Use (SIGUSE). She will continue her role as treasurer for the New Jersey Chapter of ASIS&T.
And, Yiwei will be expected to complete several leadership exploration tasks including writing about her experiences, lessons and goals related to her involvement with ASIS&T.

Congratulations, Yiwei!

Congratulations to Dr. Choi!

Congratulations to Dr. Choi!

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.”

Where in the World is Chirag Shah?

Where in the World is Chirag Shah?

Summertime can mean many things in the world of academia, and this season found our director, Dr. Chirag Shah, taking his work on an international tour. After being named a Rutgers New Brunswick Chancellor’s Scholar, receiving an NIH grant for over $1.4 million, and publishing a new book on Social Information Seeking, Dr. Shah’s 2017 has already been a great success. Check out where he’s been recently to present research!

First up, Dr. Shah served as a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, where he presented a talk on “Information Fostering.”

Next, he went to Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea, and gave a talk on “Social Information Seeking.”

From there, Dr. Shah taught about “Social and Collaborative Search” at the Asian Summer School on Information Access, 2017. 

FINALLY, and currently, Dr. Shah has come full circle by attending the annual SIGIR conference back in Tokyo.

We’re certainly proud of our director and thrilled that work pursued by the InfoSeeking Lab is making a global impact.

Exciting ASISTance for the Lab

Exciting ASISTance for the Lab

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.

We Have a (New) Doctor in the House!

We Have a (New) Doctor in the House!

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.

 

Journals: Not Just for Feelings

Journals: Not Just for Feelings

A big congratulations to InfoSeeking’s own Jiqun Liu, a first-year doctoral student whose paper, “Towards a Unified Model of Human Information Behavior: An Equilibrium Perspective,” was accepted by the prestigious Journal of Documentation!

So what is the Journal of Documentation, anyway? A collection of people’s diaries? Not quite. In InfoSeeking-land (and academia, more generally) we strive to have our work accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals, or those serial publications that’s submissions are reviewed by respected members of a certain field. And when it comes to information science, the Journal of Documentation is about as good as it gets. It’s one of the longest-running information science publications and boasts a particular focus on theories and concepts.

Out of the many submissions sent to this journal, Jiqun’s was selected. How? Well, first he had to do his research. With this paper, Jiqun aimed to build a unified model of human information behavior (HIB) for integrating classical constructs and reformulating the structure of HIB theory. Sounds simple, right? HA. Essentially, Jiqun used a complex theory, known as the “equilibrium perspective,” to construct a new framework for HIB. And with this new framework, other scholars–perhaps even some InfoSeekers and Jiqun himself!–will be able to explore HIB from new, exciting perspectives. This is an intriguing possibility in information science, and the Journal of Documentation‘s reviewers agreed, because they accepted Jiqun’s paper!

This is a tangible example of how InfoSeekers innovate and shape the wider information science field. Keep an eye out for Jiqun’s article, which will be formally published in August.

Announcing…. Social Information Seeking, the Book!

Announcing…. Social Information Seeking, the Book!

Are you a researcher or graduate student looking for an introduction to a new field in information science, or a developer or system designer interested in building interactive information retrieval systems or social/community-driven interfaces? Do you simply have a passion for hot topics in information science? Then have we got a surprise for you!

 

InfoSeeking’s fearless leader, Dr. Chirag Shah, has authored Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd, a new book that summarizes his work on social information seeking (SIS), and at the same time serves as an introduction to the topic.

What is “social information seeking,” you may ask? It is a relatively new area of study concerned with the seeking and acquiring of information from social spaces on the Internet. It involves studying situations, motivations, and methods involved in seeking and sharing of information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Twitter, as well as building systems for supporting such activities.

Want to find out more or preorder your copy? Visit Amazon or the Springer site!

 

Happy infoseeking!

 

Annnnnnd We’re Back! Happy 2017.

Annnnnnd We’re Back! Happy 2017.

Hello hello hello!

Happy New Year from the InfoSeeking Lab, and apologies for the gap in posts–we spent some time basking in winter break.

What do lab members do over break, you may wonder? To no one’s surprise, we manage to have some fun and do some work over the four-week gap. Here’s an idea of what lab members have been up to:

On the fun side, we visited with family and friends. Members traveled to North Carolina, Tennessee…even Disney World! And of course we spent time together, as well. Here’s a shot from the end-of-semester luncheon courtesy of our resident photographer, Souvick:

Image may contain: 4 people, people sitting, table and indoor

 

Once we reigned in 2017, we resumed some work. Students submitting to the 2017 CHIIR conference and various journals have been busy finalizing their papers, while others traveled to conferences happening this month. We’re all particularly jealous of Matt, who went out to Hawaii!

If you want to see just how spectacular 2016 was for Team InfoSeeking, check out our Facebook page! We’re in the middle of a #17for17 countdown, which will lead us right into our spring semester. Break certainly flew by, but we’re all excited to get back to work and answer some more burning questions about information seeking behavior.