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A Summer of Productive Fun for InfoSeekers

A Summer of Productive Fun for InfoSeekers

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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!

InfoSeekers Are Key to Success of the Third Annual CHIIR Conference

InfoSeekers Are Key to Success of the Third Annual CHIIR Conference

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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.

Great Moments from 2017: Snapshot

Great Moments from 2017: Snapshot

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On this, the 18th day of 2018, let’s take one last look at some of the great moments of 2017.

In 2017, InfoSeekers attended classes, did their homework, performed experiments, compiled results, had meetings, collaborated on papers and posters, traveled to conferences, made presentations, and socialized.

Mostly they pushed themselves to do things that haven’t been done before, zeroing in on ways to innovate efficiencies in information science.

Stay tuned for how this A-Team will top that in Twenty-eighteen.