Harper to discuss document skimming

David J. Harper, an internationally recognized scholar in information retrieval, will give a seminar on interfaces and information retrieval at the School of Information and Library Science Oct. 19.

Harper, who is a professor at The Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, will discuss “Query-Based Document Skimming: A User-Centered Evaluation of Relevance Profiling” from 9:30 to 11 a.m. in 304 Manning Hall. He will discuss ProfileSkim, a tool that assists users by identifying the most relevant parts of documents given their search query.

Harper has made significant contributions throughout the course of his career to the field of information retrieval. He is director of the Smart Web Technologies Centre (SmartWeb). SmartWeb undertakes research and development in intelligent web technologies and the application of these technologies in e-learning, e-health, e-government and e-business. Harper's research interests include user interfaces and information seeking environments, distributed information retrieval systems and automatic text classification. He has published more than 40 refereed papers in the fields of information retrieval and database systems.

For more information, contact Dr. Diane Kelly at dianek@ils.unc.edu.