[Asis-l] Rutgers LIS Faculty Belkin & Shah Win Google Research Award

[Marie Radford]

Colleagues,

I'm delighted to announce that Rutgers LIS Distinguished Professor
Nicholas Belkin & Assistant Professor Chirag Shah have been awarded a
$53,000 Google Research Award. Their study is titled “Automatic
Identification of Information Searcher Intentions During an Information
Seeking Session.” Belkin, as primary investigator, and Shah, as
co-investigator, will be supervising Ph.D. student Michael Cole.

The study will examine how to automatically determine what a person
engaging in information seeking on the Web intends to accomplish at any one
time during his or her information seeking episode based on his or her
behavior. Belkin and his colleagues will look at the relationship between
low-level behaviors such as eye fixations, mouse movements and scrolling,
and high-level intentions, such as trying to learn about a topic,
determining whether a document or webpage is going to be use, or trying to
understand how to best use the search engine.

They will begin their work in September and expect to complete the study by
May 2014.

Marie L. Radford, Chair, Department of Library and Information Science
School of Communication & Information
Rutgers University