Rob Capra
Professor, UNC School of Library and Information Science
Expertise
Human-computer interaction, personal information management, digital information seeking behaviors, tools, and interfaces.
Education
BS, MS (Computer Science), Washington University
PhD (Computer Science), Virginia Tech
Biography
Dr. Robert Capra is a Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS). His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management, and interactive information systems. In his research, he studies how people search for information in different contexts and develops innovative tools to support users’ search needs.
Dr. Capra holds a PhD in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and MS and BS 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.
In 2016, Dr. Capra received an NSF CAREER Award to support a project titled “Knowledge Representation and Re-Use for Exploratory and Collaborative Search.” In 2017, he and SILS Associate Professor Jaime Arguello were awarded an NSF grant worth nearly $500,000 to develop and evaluate systems that will automatically display relevant search trails as a form of search assistance to users.