SIS Colloquium

SIS is pleased to welcome Jill Freyne, a Postdoctoral Researcher from the University College Dublin, Ireland, for a School-wide Colloquium on Monday, April 23, 2007.  Dr. Freyne will discuss “Collaborative Web Search:  Exploiting User Activity for User Benefits.”  The lecture will take place from 3:00 to 4:00pm in Room 501 in the IS Building, 135 North Bellefield Avenue.

Dr. Freyne will discuss how search engines continue to struggle with the challenges such as vague queries; impatient users; and an enormous and rapidly expanding collection of unmoderated, heterogeneous documents.  These factors make for an extremely hostile search environment. Conventional approaches to Web search -- those that adopt a traditional, document-centric, information retrieval perspective -- are limited by their refusal to consider the past search behavior of users during future search sessions.

Collaborative Web Search (CWS) seeks to exploit the high degree of natural query repetition and result selection regularity that is prevalent among communities of searchers. CWS reuses the search experiences of community members to promote results that have previously been judged relevant for queries. This facilitates a better response to the type of vague queries that are commonplace in Web searching and allows a generic search engine to adapt to the preferences of communities of individuals.

Dr Jill Freyne is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science in University College Dublin. She received her PhD and BSc degrees from UCD, and worked as part of the I-SPY research project which focuses on personalized, community based Web search.  She has since worked as a Post Doctoral Researcher in the Adaptive Information Cluster in the School of Computer Science and Informatics working in the areas of social support, annotations and digital graffiti.

This colloquium is presented by the Human-Centered Computing Research Interest Group, the Advanced Information Access Group, and the PAWS Lab.