Dr. Susan Dumais, principal researcher and manager of the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research, will present a talk at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science (SILS) on Tuesday, March 16, 2010.
The presentation, which is titled, "The Web Changes Everything: Understanding and Supporting People in Dynamic Information Environments" is free and open to the public. It will take place in room 307 of Manning Hall from 2:00 - 3:15 p.m.
Abstract
The Web is a dynamic, ever-changing collection of information, yet most of the tools that we have for interacting with Web content, such as browsers and search engines, focus on a single snapshot of the information. In this talk, Dumais will present descriptive analyses of how Web content changes over time, how people re-visit Web pages over time and how re-visitation patterns are influenced by user intent and changes in content. These results have implications for browser and site design, search algorithms, and crawling. Dumais will describe a new prototype that supports people in understanding how information they interact with changes over time, by highlighting how a Web page has changed since your last visit. Finally, she will describe a new retrieval model that represents and use features about the temporal evolution of web pages to improve ranking and inform crawl policy.
About Susan Dumais
Susan Dumais is a principal researcher and manager of the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research. She has been at Microsoft Research since 1997 and has published widely in the areas of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Her current research focuses on personal information management, user modeling and personalization, novel interfaces for interactive retrieval and implicit measures of user interest and activity. She has worked closely with several Microsoft groups (Bing, Windows Desktop Search, Live Search, SharePoint Portal Server and Office Online Help) on search-related innovations. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, she was at Bellcore and Bell Labs for many years, where she worked on Latent Semantic Indexing (a statistical method for concept-based retrieval), combining search and navigation, individual differences, and organizational impacts of new technology.
Dumais 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. She is past-chair of ACM's Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), and served on the NRC Committee on Computing and Communications Research to Enable Better Use of Information Technology in Digital Government and the NRC Board on Assessment of NIST Programs. She is on the editorial boards of ACM: Transactions on Information Systems, ACM: Transactions on Human Computer Interaction, Human Computer Interaction, Information Processing and Management, Information Retrieval, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, and the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. She is an associate editor for the first and second editions of the Handbook of Applied Cognition, and serves on program committees for several conferences. She was elected to the CHI Academy in 2005, an ACM Fellow in 2006, and received the SIGIR Gerard Salton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009.
Dumais is an adjunct professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, and has been a visiting faculty member at Stevens Institute of Technology, New York University and the University of Chicago.
Additional information is available at:
http://research.microsoft.com/~sdumais
