Collaborative Information Seeking Tutorial
Bio:
Chirag Shah is an assistant professor at the Dept. of Library & Information Science (LIS) within the School of Communication & Information (SC&I) at Rutgers University, USA. He received his PhD from the School of Information & Library Science (SILS) at UNC Chapel Hill (advisor: Gary Marchionini). He holds an MTech, Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Madras, India and an MS, Computer Science from UMass Amherst (advisor: W. Bruce Croft).
His research interests include various aspects of interactive information retrieval/seeking, especially in the context of online social networks and collaborations, contextual information mining, and applications of social media services for exploring critical socio-political issues. At Rutgers, he runs a research group on Information Seeking and Behavior (http://www.infoseeking.org/) as well as special interest groups on Collaborative Information Seeking and Social Information Seeking. He has published numerous papers in journals and conferences relating to these topics, and specific to collaborative information seeking (CIS). His co-authored paper for SIGIR 2008 titled “Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Exploratory Search” won the best paper award. He co-organized workshops on CIS at ACM Group 2010 and ASIST 2011 conferences. He has developed Coagmento system, which allows a group of users to search and share information in collaboration. He recently received the Yahoo! Campus Innovation Award for his project titled “Reimagining and Reinvigorating Information Seeking with a Novel Approach to Collaborative Information Seeking”. He also taught a short course on collaborative IR at the Russian Summer School of Information Retrieval (RuSSIR) in St Petersburg in Summer 2011, and a tutorial on CIS at WSDM 2012. His book on Collaborative Information Seeking will be published by Springer by the time SIGIR 2012 takes place in Portland (see http://collab.infoseeking.org/resources/Shah_CIS_Book_Flyer.pdf).
Summary:
The course will introduce the student to theories, methodologies, and tools that focus on information retrieval/seeking in collaboration. The student will have an opportunity to learn about the social aspect of IR with a focus on collaborative information retrieval and seeking (CIR and CIS) situations, systems, and evaluation techniques.
The assumption of information seekers being independent and IR problem being individual has been challenged often in the recent past, with an argument that the next big leap in search and retrieval will come through incorporating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. This course will introduce such works to the students, with an emphasis on understanding models and systems that support collaborative search or browsing. To put CIS in perspective, the course will show the students how various related concepts, such as collaborative information behavior (CIB), co-browsing, co-search, collaborative filtering, can be placed on the dimensions of human-system and explicitness-implicitness along with CIR and CIS for exploration and developmental needs, as well as evaluation purposes. Specifically, the course will (1) outline the research and latest developments in the field of collaborative IR, (2) list the challenges for designing and evaluating collaborative IR systems, and (3) show how traditional single user IR models and systems could be mapped to those for CIS. This will be achieved through introduction to appropriate literature, algorithms and interfaces that facilitate CIS, and methodologies for studying and evaluating them. Thus, the course will offer a balance between theoretical and practical elements of CIS.
The course is intended for those interested in social and collaborative aspects of IR (from both academia and industry), and requires only a general understanding of IR systems and evaluation.