Title: Serendipity and Computational Surprise in Information Retrieval
Speaker: Prof. Xi Niu (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Time: September 19th (Wednesday) 10:00—12:00, 2018
Venue: FIT 1-515
Host: Prof. Yiqun Liu
Abstract:
Our natural tendency to be curious is increasingly important now that we are exposed to vast amounts of information. We often cope with this overload by focusing on the familiar: information that matches our expectations. In this presentation, I will talk about our recent project on an interactive serendipitous information discovery framework based on computational models of surprise. This framework delivers information that users were not knowingly looking for, but will be valuable to their unexpressed needs. We hypothesize that users will be surprised when presented with information that violates the expectations predicted by our model of them. This surprise model is balanced by a value component which ensures that the information is relevant to the user. Within this framework we have implemented several surprise models. We have also evaluated these models with a series of user studies.
Short Bio:
Dr. Xi "Sunshine" Niu is a senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Software and Information Systems at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in U.S. She used to be a professor at Indiana University (U.S.). Dr. Niu has obtained her Ph.D. degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (U.S.), her Master's degree in Tsinghua University (China), and Bachelor's degree in Beihang University (北航, China).
Dr. Niu’s research is in the intersection of data and text analytics, knowledge discovery, search behavior, and interactive information retrieval. Her recent projects include text mining for serendipitous recommendation, transaction log analysis of e-commerce websites, and analyzing user-generated contents. She has substantial experience in developing intelligent interactive systems, analyzing online user behavior to generate insights about user experience. She has published many refereed research papers in top journals and conferences. She has won several grants and awards from different sources including NSF (U.S.).