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, interactive information retrieval, and how people learn while doing searches. 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.

Dr. Capra has been PI/co-PI on a series of grants from the National Science Foundation and the NCSU Laboratory for Analytic Science. He received an NSF CAREER Award to support a project titled “Knowledge Representation and Re-Use for Exploratory and Collaborative Search.”

Dr. Capra is active in the ACM SIGIR and CHIIR research communities, serves on the editorial board of JASIST, and currently serves as the Program Coordinator of the PhD Program at SILS.