Helping People Find Information Better

When: 
Thursday, April 28, 2005 - 7:00pm
Room: 
56-114
Lecturer(s): 
Jaime Teevan, MIT CSAIL
Jaime Teevan

Every day computer users retrieve information from among dozens of incoming emails, hundreds of files on their personal computers, and billions of Web pages. In order to help people search through this deluge of information better, we need not just better technology, but also a better understanding of what people's information needs are. In this talk, I will present several studies of user information seeking behavior and discuss how the results of these studies have informed the development of a next generation search tool.

Lecturer Biography: 

Jaime Teevan is a doctoral candidate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research focuses on helping people re-find information in dynamic information environments. She has published in the areas of HCI, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning. She received an SM ('01) from MIT for research on learning probabilistic information retrieval models, and a BS in Computer Science from Yale University.