Search behaviour before and after search success

Why do users continue searching after reviewing all relevant documents with which they could have completed a work task? If we knew the answer, then a search system may be able to help users learn about their current search processes, which in turn may enable them to make the whole search process more efficient, leading to greater effectiveness and user satisfaction. This paper is a first step towards solving this problem. Using a previously collected data set, we identified the point of success and hence task completion, and investigated the search behaviour before and after users had accessed all relevant documents for answering assigned tasks. We used a set of search behaviour actions derived from Marchionini's (1995) Information Seeking Process model, and modeled the distribution of these actions throughout the entire search process, comparing actions before and after success could have been attained. Our results suggest that six defined actions, namely user-submitted query, system-suggested query, forward to items, evaluate relevant items, reflect, and answer appeared to change according to the stage of the entire search process. Also, users have notably distinct patterns before and after search success was obtained, but not realised by the user. Not all action were affected; user-submitted query and system-suggested query appeared to be unaffected by time in post-success case and presuccess case, respectively

A Standardised Format for Exchanging User Study Instruments

Increasing re-use in Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) has been an ongoing aim in IIR for a significant amount of time, however progress has been limited and patchy. While re-use of some study aspects can be difficult due to the varied nature of IIR studies, the use of pre- and post-task self-reported measures is widespread and relatively standardised. Nevertheless, re-use of elements in this area is also limited, in part because systems used to implement them are not able to exchange question, instruments, or complete study setups. To address this, this paper presents a standardised, but extendable, format for IIR survey instrument exchange

Categorising Search Sessions: Some Insights from Human Judgments

The session is a common unit of interaction that is used in search log analysis. By analysing sessions, it is possible to identify distinct classes of searcher behaviour that can be used to design search applications that better support groups of users based on their expected behaviours. This paper describes an online card sort experiment to investigate how people distinguish between search sessions (i.e., how they group them) to gain insights into their organising principles and to inform the future use of automated approaches, such as clustering. Results show patterns of user behaviour to be the most common way of grouping sessions

Sheffield Submission to the CHiC Ineractive Task: Exploring Digital Cultural Heritage

The Cultural Heritage in CLEF 2013 (CHiC) interactive task focused on acquiring and analysing interactive information retrieval (IIR)behaviour in a Digital Cultural Heritage collection. The University of Sheffield contributed 120 on-line and 20 in-lab participants to this task. The results of both the on-line and in-lab experiments strongly indicate that when faced with a new, unfamiliar collection and an open-ended task, participants will spend more time using the category hierarchy for exploration, than the search box. However, analysis of the the number of items the on-line participants view in detail and then saved to their workspace indicates that the two access methods fulfil different functions. From this we conclude that the categories are seemingly there to support the development of an initial overview over the collection, while the search is used to locate things in a more focused manner

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Modeling the Information Behaviour of Software Engineers Using a Work-Task Framework

Faced with the rapid proliferation of digital information resources within organizations, employees need targeted search systems in order to be effective in their jobs. The goal of this study is to develop a model of information behaviour within a work-task framework that can be used to inform the design of a workplace information search system. In a two-phase process, we conducted a series of studies using multiple methods to identify workplace characteristics and to understand how they influence the needs, search strategies, and information sources used by software engineers working as services consultants in a large high-tech company