Browsed by
Tag: Ten-Year Anniversary

InfoSeeking’s 10th Birthday

InfoSeeking’s 10th Birthday

Comments 0 Comment

Looking back

In the fall of 2010, we started as a reading group for people who would come together to read papers on topics of information seeking/retrieval/behavior every week. The group was called “Information seeking and behavior group”. Dr. Chirag Shah has been leading the group from the beginning. 

Quickly the reading group became a research group as students and faculty started identifying projects that interested them and pulled resources to design studies and experiments.

In that same fall, as the group started getting traction and attracting more students, resources, and funding, we became InfoSeeking Lab.

In the beginning, the lab focused on issues of information seeking/retrieval and social media. As new members and interests were added, the lab explored many more areas, including wearable sensors, collaborative work, online communities, and conversational systems.

The methods for research also evolved from user studies to large-scale log analysis, and from ethnographic approaches to deep learning models.

Our achievements

We have been pushing forward the knowledge in information seeking/retrieval and other related topics in the Information and Data Sciences field for 10 years. 

Throughout those years, the lab has received more than 4 million dollars in grants and gifts from federal and state agencies as well as private organizations. 

So far, the lab has produced 13 excellent PhD students and countless undergraduate and master students to drive new ideas and innovations into the Data Sciences field. Our alumni have gone to major universities around the world and reputable companies like Dropbox, eBay, Google, Sony, and TD Bank.

Some of the lab’s early works laid the foundation for collaborative and social work by people from all walks of life. One of the outcomes was a system called Coagmento, which was extensively tested with and deployed in classrooms. When it was used in a NY-based highschool, the teachers, for the first time, found that they could gain valuable insights into their students’ work and help them in ways not possible before using our system.

We have been at the forefront of developing new methodologies, tools, and solutions. We were one of the first to use the escape room as a method to understand how people seek information and solve problems.

We have been and are going to continue contributing to the community. The lab worked closely with the United Nations Data Analytics group to address several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As a result of the collaboration, the lab launched Science for Social Good (S4SG). All of our works build into SDGs’ goals.

We have also worked with several private foundations and startups over the years to solve real-world problems. One example is our collaboration with Brainly, a startup from Poland that focused on educational Q&A. With them, we worked on problems of assessing the quality of the content as well as detecting users with certain characteristics, such as those exhibiting struggle. The solutions to these problems are extremely useful in education.

Looking back at the last 10 years and how glorious they have been, we are confident that the next decade will be even more amazing.

Celebrating Ten Years of Coagmento!

Celebrating Ten Years of Coagmento!

Comments 0 Comment

A wedding for which the planning was facilitated by Coagmento.

Coagmento was initially developed by Chirag Shah, in 2007, as a research project for his PhD dissertation. When Dr. Shah brought Coagmento to Rutgers University, it was further developed by his PhD student Roberto Gonzalez-Ibanez, followed by several other undergraduate and graduate students at Rutgers. Over the decade, many iterations of Coagmento have been released in Beta and public versions, as it continues to be tested and used and some bugs worked out. In 2013, Coagmento Collaboratory was released and later that year the first full version, Coagmento 1.0, was released. In 2016, Coagmento 2.0 was released, and later this year Coagmento 3.0 will be released with the aim to be even more user friendly.

What exactly is Coagmento and what does it do? Coagmento is a Web-based, open-source tool for information seeking that facilitates the collecting of information and collaborating on projects in teams. It helps the user at every step by recording visited Websites, bookmarking pages, and collecting pictures or snippets of text or source information. All along a live chat feature allows team members to confer from remote locations over multiple sessions. At the back-end, Coagmento is comprised of two major components: (1) Node.js, which creates a server-side notification framework and “push notifications,” and (2) is coded in Laravel, a Model-View-Controller PHP framework that supports several SQL databases. Since version 2.0, Coagmento has been available through GitHub as an open-source tool.

Coagmento 1.0 in action.

On the serious side, Coagmento can allow collaborators to work on challenging informational tasks. For example, it could help siblings gather information about their parent’s illness so they can be proactive in making decisions. In a classroom setting, Coagmento has been deployed for dozens of students to up to several hundred to facilitate collaboration. Keeping track of disparate pieces of information means that when the student/researcher sits down to write a report or create a presentation, the information is saved in a workspace where it can be put it together.

Coagmento 2.0 in action.

On the lighter side, Dr. Shah said, “When my wife Lori and I were planning our wedding, we used Coagmento to keep track of places in the North Carolina mountains for location consideration so we could make a decision with all the pieces in front of us.” He continued, “But, it’s come a long way since then as not only a tool but also a platform for supporting and studying individual and collaborative information seeking.”

Here’s a toast to the next ten years as Coagmento continues to evolve in usefulness and application to many of life’s information challenges.