Abstract
Many digital resources, like the Web, are dynamic and ever-changing collections of information. However, most of the tools that have been developed for interacting with Web content, such as browsers and search engines, focus on a single static snapshot of the information. In this talk, I will present analyses of how Web content changes over time, how people re-visit Web pages over time, and how re-visitation patterns are influenced by changes in user intent and content. These results have implications for many aspects of information retrieval and management including crawling, ranking and information extraction algorithms, result presentation, and evaluation. I will describe a prototype system that supports people in understanding how the information they interact with changes over time, and a new retrieval model that incorporates features about the temporal evolution of content to improve core ranking. Finally, I conclude with an overview of some general challenges that need to be addressed to fully incorporate temporal dynamics into information retrieval systems.
Biography
Susan Dumais is a Principal Researcher and manager of the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research. She has been at Microsoft Research since 1997 and has published widely in the areas of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Her current research focuses on personal information management, user modeling and personalization, novel interfaces for interactive retrieval, and implicit measures of user interest and activity. She has worked closely with several Microsoft groups (Bing, Windows Desktop Search, Live Search, SharePoint Portal Server, and Office Online Help) on search-related innovations. Prior to joining Microsoft Research, she was at Bellcore and Bell Labs for many years, where she worked on Latent Semantic Indexing (a well-known statistical method for concept-based retrieval), combining search and navigation, individual differences, and organizational impacts of new technology.Susan has published more than 200 articles in the fields of information science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science, and holds several patents on novel retrieval algorithms and interfaces. She is Past-Chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), and served on the NRC Committee on Computing and Communications Research to Enable Better Use of Information Technology in Digital Government, and the NRC Board on Assessment of NIST Programs. She is on the editorial boards of ACM: Transactions on Information Systems, ACM: Transactions on Human Computer Interaction, Human Computer Interaction, Information Processing and Management, Information Retrieval, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, and the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. She is an associate editor for the first and second editions of the Handbook of Applied Cognition, and serves on program committees for several conferences. She was elected to the CHI Academy in 2005, an ACM Fellow in 2006, and received the SIGIR Gerard Salton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. Susan is an adjunct professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, and has been a visiting faculty member at Stevens Institute of Technology, New York University, and the University of Chicago.