Confirmed Attendees

We are pleased to have the following confirmed attendees for the NSF Task-Based Search Systems Workshop in Chapel Hill, NC:

Eugene Agichtein
Emory University, USA

Eugene Agichtein is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Emory University, where he founded and leads the Emory Intelligent Information Access Laboratory (IR Lab). The active projects in IR Lab include mining searcher behavior and interactions data, modeling social content creation and sharing, and applications to medical informatics. Dr. Agichtein obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, and did a Postdoc at Microsoft Research. He has published extensively on web search, information retrieval, and web and data mining. Dr. Agichtein's work has been supported by DARPA, NIH, NSF, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google, and has been recently recognized with the A.P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the ‘Best Paper’ award at the SIGIR 2011 conference.

Jae-wook Ahn
Drexel University, USA

Jae-wook Ahn is working as a data scientist at Drexel University since September 2012. He worked as a post-doctoral CRA-NSF Computing Innovation Fellow at the HCIL (Human-Computer Interaction Lab), University of Maryland at College Park. He got his Ph.D. in Information Science from University of Pittsburgh in 2010 and was a member of PAWS (Personalized Adaptive Web Systems) and TALER (Teaching and Learning Research) Labs. He has worked for various projects on exploratory user interfaces for personalized information retrieval, visualization, and recommendation systems. He also worked on dynamic network visualization of participatory social media for his postdoc project. He is currently working for the Digging into Data and Meaningful Concept Display projects, on analyzing metadata from heterogeneous digital libraries and visualizing concepts in museum search environments.

Jaime Arguello (organizer)
University of North Carolina, USA

Jaime Arguello is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are in information retrieval, with a focus on aggregated search—the task of automatically integrating multiple search engines in a single interface. His research has been published in conferences including SIGIR, CIKM, WWW, ECIR, IIiX, HLT-NAACL, CHI, ICWSM, TREC, and DG.O. Jaime is a recipient of the SIGIR 2009 Best Paper Award and the 2011 ECIR Best Student Paper Award. He teaches courses in Information Retrieval and Text Data Mining. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.

Nick Belkin
Rutgers University, USA

Nick Belkin is Professor II of Information Science at the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. His recent research has focused on personalization of interaction with information, with specific reference to the influence of the task which motivates information seeking on interpretation of searcher behaviors with respect to predicting document usefulness.

Pia Borlund
Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark

Pia Borlund is Professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark, and docent at the School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Finland. Her research focuses on methods for evaluation of systems that support interactive information retrieval (IIR). Her interest in IIR systems evaluation, design and usage brings together three broad areas: interactive information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and information seeking (behaviour). Pia Borlund has conducted research on frameworks and guidelines for performance evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems centered on the context instrument 'simulated work task situation' by involvement of users. Her current research focuses on methodological issues, test design and recommendations for evaluation of user search interaction.

Katriina Byström
University of Boras, Sweden

Katriina Byström of the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås does research on task-based information seeking and retrieval in workplaces and on information architecture. She is an active member of the academic Library and Information Science community and the co-founder and associate editor of the international Journal of Information Architecture. Her latest research projects are: Better Search Engine focusing on work task based search support and Better Web, the development of digital information and communication milieus on the web. Professor Byström chairs the European Network for Workplace Information (ENWI).

Rob Capra (organizer)
University of North Carolina, USA

Robert Capra is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management, and digital information seeking behaviors, tools, and interfaces. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. At Virginia Tech, he was part of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction where he investigated multi-platform interfaces, information re-finding, and interfaces for digital libraries. Prior to Virginia Tech, he worked in corporate research and development, spending five years in the Speech and Language Technologies group at SBC Communications (now merged with AT&T Labs) where he focused on voice user interfaces, speech recognition, and natural language processing.

Ben Carterette
University of Delaware, USA

Ben Carterette is an Assistant Professor of Computer & Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. His research interests include all aspects of information retrieval experimentation, from experimental design to test collection construction to evaluation measures to statistical analysis of experiments, and especially how the needs of users can be better modeled at each stage in a batch-style evaluation. In addition to publishing in venues such as ACM TOIS, SIGIR, CIKM, ECIR, and ICTIR, he has co-coordinated five TREC tracks and co-organized five workshops on IR evaluation.

Arjen de Vries
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Arjen P. de Vries is a tenured researcher at CWI leading the Information Access research group, and a full professor (0.2 fte) in the area of multimedia data management at the Technical University of Delft. De Vries studies the intersection of information retrieval and databases. In November 2009, De Vries co-founded Spinque, a CWI spin-off that provides integrated access to any type of data, customized for information specialist or end user, to produce effective and transparent search results.

Fernando Diaz
Microsoft Research, USA

Fernando Diaz is a researcher at Microsoft Research New York. His primary research interest is formal information retrieval models. Fernando's research experience includes distributed information retrieval approaches to web search, interactive and faceted retrieval, mining of temporal patterns from news and query logs, cross-lingual information retrieval, graph-based retrieval methods, and synthesizing information from multiple corpora. Fernando received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2008. His work on federation won the best paper awards at the SIGIR 2010 and WSDM 2010 conferences. He is a co-organizer of the Temporal Summarization track and Web track at TREC 2013.

Abdigani Diriye
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Abdigani Diriye is a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He received his PhD from University College London. His PhD studies examined the role search interfaces play during information-seeking, and how we can build more useful and usable search systems. Previously, he has worked in the area of collaborative, social and multimedia search whilst interning at FX Palo Alto Labs, Microsoft Research and the Knowledge Media Institute. Currently, his research focuses on ways we can leverage human- and machine-generated data to support people when searching and sensemaking on the Web.

Susan Dumais
Microsoft Research, USA

Susan Dumais is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, she was at Bellcore and Bell Labs, where she worked on Latent Semantic Indexing (a statistical method for concept-based retrieval), interfaces for combining search and navigation, and organizational impacts of new technology. Her current research focuses on user modeling and personalization, context and information retrieval, temporal dynamics of information, interactive retrieval, and novel evaluation methods. She has worked closely with several Microsoft groups (Bing, Windows Desktop Search, SharePoint Portal Server, and Office Online Help) on search-related innovations. Susan has published more than 200 articles in the fields of information science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science, and holds several patents on novel retrieval algorithms and interfaces. Susan is also an adjunct professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She is Past-Chair of ACM's Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), and serves on several editorial boards, technical program committees, and government panels. She was elected to the CHI Academy in 2005, an ACM Fellow in 2006, received the SIGIR Gerard Salton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2011.

Luanne Freund
University of British Columbia, Canada

Luanne Freund is an Assistant Professor at the iSchool at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2008. Luanne’s research is focused on interactive information retrieval, human information behaviour, and the effects of task and document genre on search. Current projects include the Systematic Review of Imposed Search Tasks (http://ils.unc.edu/searchtasks), which investigates the use of assigned search tasks in experimental studies; E-Informing the Public (http://diigubc.ca/research/egovernment), which is focused on the design of task and genre enhanced search systems to support public access to e-government information; Next Generation Information Access - NGAIA (http://diigubc.ca/ngaia), which is focused on the problem of domain-specific information retrieval, and Access to News Media, which seeks to support information seeking in the online news domain. Her research is funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Graphics, Animation and New Media Network of Centres of Excellence, Canada.

Gene Golovchinsky
FxPAL, USA

Gene Golovchinsky is a Sr. Research Scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc. His research interests include the design of interfaces for interactive information seeking, collaborative search, HCIR, dynamic hypertext, the role of visualization in information retrieval, and pen-based computing.

Jaap Kamps
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Jaap Kamps is associate professor of information retrieval at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests span all facets of information storage and retrieval, a common element is the combination of textual information with additional structure, such as document structure, Web-link structure, and/or contextual information, such as metadata, anchors, tags, or clicks. He leads research projects on retrieval with structured information, and projects with cultural heritage institutions (museums, archives, libraries).

Diane Kelly (organizer)
University of North Carolina, USA

Diane Kelly is an Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests are in interactive information search and retrieval, information search behavior and evaluation methods and metrics. Her research has been published in several conferences and journals including ACM SIGIR, ACM CHI, CIKM, IIiX, JCDL, Transactions on Information Systems, Information Processing and Management, JASIST, IEEE Computer and CACM. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on research design, interactive information retrieval and foundations of information science. She has served on the UNC Behavioral Institutional Review Board (IRB) since 2005. She received a Ph.D. in Information Science and a Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science from Rutgers University and an undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Alabama.

Bill Kules
Catholic University of America, USA

Bill Kules is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Administration in the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at The Catholic University of America. His research interests include faceted search tools to support complex information seeking tasks like exploratory search, and online teaching/learning environments to support engagement and enjoyment. Dr. Kules was a co-organizer of the workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR), an annual meeting of researchers and practitioners whose work spans the fields of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. He was also an organizer of the 2005 Workshop on Exploratory Search Interfaces, a guest editor for the April 2006 CACM Special Section on Supporting Exploratory Search, and is a guest co-editor for a special issue (in press) on HCIR for the journal Information Processing & Management. Before joining SLIS Dr. Kules spent 20 years designing and implementing information systems for a variety of applications, including wireless telephony, customer service, banking, and a multimedia web sites. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland.

Birger Larsen
Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark

Birger Larsen (born 1974) is Associate Professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen, Denmark since 2006. From 2010 he is leader of the ‘Information Systems and Interaction Design’ research group. He has a passion for research that involves the activities, processes and experiences arising in the meeting between users, information, and information systems in a given context - with the goal of optimising these to empower users in their task and problem solving. His main research interests include Information Retrieval (IR), structured documents in IR, XML IR and user interaction, domain specific search, understanding user intents and exploiting context in IR, as well as Informetrics/Bibliometrics, citation analysis and quantitative research evaluation.

Christina Lioma
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Christina Lioma is an Assistant Professor and Freja research fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research focuses on the computational processing of language, mainly in the areas of information retrieval and computational linguistics.

Jingjing Liu
University of South Carolina, USA

Jingjing Liu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in Information Science from Rutgers University in 2010. Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of information systems that support information seeking and use, and the accomplishment of work tasks and search tasks of various types. Her recent projects deal with personalization of information retrieval, examining people’s search behaviors in various types of tasks and predicting document usefulness based on user behaviors, understanding and predicting search task difficulty, understanding users’ knowledge change in the search process, and exploring the factors that affect people’s information task performance. In her research, Jingjing has been gaining and using rich experience and expertise in task type control, design, and analysis of the effects of task types on various aspects of information retrieval. She has published in journals such as Information Processing and Management and Journal of Documentation, as well as conference proceedings such as ACM SIGIR and CIKM.

Gary Marchionini
University of North Carolina, USA

Gary Marchionini is Dean and Cary C. Boshamer Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina. He teaches courses in human-information interaction, interface design and testing, and digital libraries. He founded the Interaction Design Laboratory at SILS. He has led projects (NSF funded) on user interfaces for video retrieval, statistical tables, and multi-session and collaborative search. He has more than 200 publications over his career.

Catherine Smith
Kent State University, USA

Catherine L. Smith is an assistant professor at the Kent State University School of Library and Information Science. She studies how people use interactive search systems, using theories from cognitive psychology in exploring and explaining search behavior. Her current research activities focus on search expertise and how expertise is gained in formal instruction. In a second research area, she studies the effects of semantic priming in search interaction. Cathy’s work is motivated by the idea that advanced systems should help people learn how to search when information needs are unfamiliar, uncommon, or complex.

Mark Smucker
University of Waterloo, Canada

Mark Smucker is an assistant professor in the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo, and is cross appointed with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. Mark's research interests include the design, analysis, and evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems. Mark's recent work has focused on making information retrieval evaluation more predictive of actual human search performance. Mark has been a co-organizer of two TREC tracks, and he co-organized a SIGIR 2010 workshop on the evaluation of retrieval systems via the simulation of interaction. He is a recipient of the SIGIR Best Paper award (2012) as well a recipient of the University of Waterloo, Faculty of Engineering's Teaching Excellence Award (2012). Mark earned his computer science PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2008. Prior to his PhD, Mark worked for seven years in industry on projects ranging from recommendation systems to the study of internet advertising behavior.

Simone Stumpf
City University London, UK

Simone Stumpf received a PhD in Computer Science in 2001 and a BSc in Computer Science with Cognitive Science in 1996, both from University College London. She joined City University London in 2009 and currently holds a Senior Lecturer position. Previously, she conducted research at Oregon State University and University College London. Her research centres on end-user interactions with intelligent systems and personal information management systems. She is a member of the End Users Shaping Effective Software (EUSES) consortium, an international collaboration to develop and investigate technologies that support end-users to directly influence software behaviour. Dr Stumpf also has professional experience as a User Experience Architect.

Jaime Teevan
Microsoft Research, USA

Jaime Teevan is a Senior Researcher in the Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She studies how people use digital information, particularly as related to their social and temporal context, and builds tools to help better support these information interactions. Jaime was named a Technology Review (TR35) 2009 Young Innovator for her research on personalized search. She co-authored the first book on collaborative Web search, and was Chair of the Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) 2012 conference. Jaime also edited a book on Personal Information Management (PIM), edited a special issue of Communications of the ACM on the topic, and organized workshops on PIM and query log analysis. She has published numerous technical papers, including several best papers, and received a Ph.D. and S.M. from MIT and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.

Elaine Toms
Sheffield University, UK

Elaine Toms is Professor of Information Science, and Head of the Information Retrieval Research Group, Information School, University of Sheffield, UK. Her research focuses on how people interact with information systems, including interacting with the content and with the tools to support use; and how to evaluate such systems in a user-centred way. Her current interest lies in the topic of this workshop: how to create more task-specific search tools and widgets to aid the process, and the integration of search into systems that support tasks.

Pertti Vakkari
University of Tampere, Finland

Pertti Vakkari is professor of Information Studies at the School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Finland. He has been involved in collaborative European research projects. Vakkari has been a member in several program committees of conferences in information studies like ISIC, IIiX and ECIR. He is a member of the editorial board of journals “Journal of Documentation” and “Information Processing & Management”. Vakkari’s research interests include task-based information searching and use, the use of digital libraries, the evaluation of information search systems, fiction retrieval, and perceived outcomes of public libraries. His publications include several monographs and readers and over 100 articles. He has received ASIS&T SIGUSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Information Behavior.

Ryen White
Microsoft Research, USA

Ryen White is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests lie in understanding search interaction and in developing tools to help people search more effectively. He received his Ph.D. in Interactive Information Retrieval from the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, in 2004. Ryen has published over 150 conference papers and journal articles in Web search, log analysis, and user studies of search systems. He has received six best-paper awards, including two at the ACM SIGIR conference (2007, 2010), one at the ACM SIGCHI conference (2011), and one in JASIST (2010). His doctoral research received the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation Award for the best Computer Science Ph.D. dissertation in the United Kingdom in 2004/2005. Ryen has co-organized numerous workshops on information seeking, in particular exploratory search, including an NSF-sponsored invitational workshop, and has guest co-edited special issues in these areas for a variety of outlets, including Communications of the ACM and IEEE Computer. Since 2008, he has co-organized the annual HCIR Symposium. Ryen has served as area chair for many top conferences such as SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, and CIKM, and currently serves on the editorial board of ACM TOIS, ACM TWEB, and the Information Retrieval Journal. In addition to academic impact, his research has been shipped in many Microsoft products, including Bing, Xbox, Internet Explorer, and Lync.

Barbara Wildemuth
University of North Carolina, USA

Barbara Wildemuth is Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on people’s use of information and information technologies. In particular, her studies have included investigations of medical students’ searching of online databases, law students’ use of a Web-based database of legal resources, and the effects of different interface designs on the effectiveness of database use. Her most recent work includes a methodological study of the search tasks assigned in interactive information retrieval experiments, being conducted in collaboration with Luanne Freund (UBC) and Elaine Toms (Sheffield). Her recent book, “Applications of Social Research Methods to Questions in Information and Library Science,” has been adopted as a text in a number of ILS schools in the United States and abroad. Her teaching responsibilities include courses in various aspects of research methods, human information interactions, and information ethics.