Community Design of a Knowledge Graph to Support Interdisciplinary PhD Students

This is the submitted version of the paper, pre-revision.How do PhD students discover the resources and relationships conducive to satisfaction and success in their degree programs? This study proposes a community-grounded, extensible knowledge graph to make explicit and tacit information intuitively discoverable, by capturing and visualizing relationships between people based on their activities and relations to information resources in a particular domain. Students in an interdisciplinary PhD program were engaged through three workshops to provide insights into the dynamics of interactions with others and relevant data categories to be included in the graph data model. Based on these insights we propose a model, serving as a testbed for exploring multiplex graph visualizations and a potential basis of the information system to facilitate information discovery and decision-making. We discovered that some of the tacit knowledge can be explicitly encoded, while the rest of it must stay within the community. The graph-based visualization of the social and knowledge networks can serve as a pointer toward the people having the relevant information, one can reach out to, online or in person

Interface, Fall 2008

As School of Information Sciences faculty and staff prepare for our sixth accreditation by the American Library Association’s Committee on Accreditation (COA), the school has had the opportunity to reflect on a smorgasbord of changes. While this means more administrative work for faculty and staff, the accreditation process also provides a rich period for reflection while data is analyzed, reports run, and the school narrows its focus on our strengths, gaps, successes, and changes—large and small—over the past seven years since the last site visit by ALA’s COA in 2002

FIRE-tutkimusryhmän vaikuttavuus

Tämän tutkielman tarkoituksena on kuvata Finnish Information Retrieval Experts -tutkimusryhmän tutkimuksen vaikuttavuutta. Vaikuttavuutta on arvioitu tutkimalla ryhmän tutkimusjulkaisujen saamia viittauksia ja niiden jakautumista eri vuosille, maantieteellisille alueille sekä tieteellisten aikakauslehtien ja konferenssien mukaan. Tutkimusaineiston muodostivat tutkimusryhmän julkaisut vuosilta 2003–2012 ja niihin kohdistuneet viittaukset. Aineisto kerättiin Scopus- ja Google Scholar -tietokannoista. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin tutkimusryhmän julkaisujen saaneen viittauksia tasaisesti eri vuosina. Tarkasteltaessa viittausten jakautumista eri vuosina ilmestyneille julkaisuille todettiin vuoden 2005 julkaisujen saaneen eniten viittauksia. Tutkimusryhmällä on näkyvyyttä laadukkaissa tieteellisissä lehdissä ja se on saanut monipuolisesti huomiota eri konferenssien julkaisuissa. Tulosten perusteella ryhmä on kansainvälisesti tunnettu ja sen tieteellinen vaikuttavuus on hyvä

'Google Speak': The discursive practices of search in home-education

Learning with technology is increasingly understood to be a social process involving unique and telling discourses. An emerging research agenda has resulted, investigating the links between ‘talk’ and student technological practices but is yet to include home-education. Preliminary evidence exists of a relationship between particular types of ‘talk’ and success with particular online activities, namely online search. This may prove especially pertinent to home-educators who report that their most prolific online activities are those reliant upon search engines like Google. This paper presents select findings from a study into online search and the associated discursive practices among early primary students and their parent-educators in Australia. Data from observations, tests and interviews with five home-educating families were analysed recursively using a system guided by Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis.  Specifically, this paper seeks to investigate: which discursive practices are privileged in these sites during online search; the extent to which these practices contribute to relations of power and the extent to which these practices are found alongside effective online search.  Findings revealed a prevalence of inequitable discursive practices, those that either inhibited the equal conversational power of speakers or which naturalised inequitable power relations more generally. These discursive practices were found alongside ineffective online searches. Notwithstanding, participants continued to speak positively about search engines and their educational power. This rhetoric-reality gap is theorized in the paper as the work of dominant ideologies surrounding technology in education.  Findings can assist the growing number of home-educators and their students to use online search more effectively. Insights regarding links between discursive practice and search practice may also help ensure that discourse helps to maximise the educational benefits associated with online search

Looking for genre: the use of structural features during search tasks with Wikipedia

This paper reports on our task-based observational, logged, questionnaire study and analysis of ocular behavior pertaining to the interaction of structural features of text in Wikipedia using eye tracking. We set natural and realistic tasks searching Wikipedia online focusing on examining which features and strategies (skimming or scanning) were the most important for the participants to complete their tasks. Our research, carried out on a group of 30 participants, highlighted their interactions with the structural areas within Wikipedia articles, the visual cues and features perceived during the searching of the Wiki text. We collected questionnaire and ocular behavior (fixation metrics) data to highlight the ways in which people view the features in the articles. We found that our participants’ extensively interacted with layout features, such as tables, titles, bullet lists, contents lists, information boxes, and references. The eye tracking results showed that participants used the format and layout features and they also highlighted them as important. They were able to navigate to useful information consistently, and they were an effective means of locating relevant information for the completion of their tasks with some success. This work presents results which contribute to the long-term goals of studying the features for genre and theoretical perception research

Graph-Query Suggestions for Knowledge Graph Exploration

We consider the task of exploratory search through graph queries on knowledge graphs. We propose to assist the user by expanding the query with intuitive suggestions to provide a more informative (full) query that can retrieve more detailed and relevant answers. To achieve this result, we propose a model that can bridge graph search paradigms with well-established techniques for information-retrieval. Our approach does not require any additional knowledge from the user and builds on principled language modelling approaches. We empirically show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on a large knowledge graph and how our suggestions are able to help build more complete and informative queries