Background

Most mainstream information-seeking systems have been designed to support single-user scenarios, because information-seeking and collaboration have traditionally been considered two separate activities. Today, a growing body of research suggests that this categorization of practices as either search or collaboration practices is tenuous. Consequently, several novel systems have been developed to support collaborative information seeking (CIS). With different CIS systems and different types of search activities, it has become important to investigate how activity traces affect different types of search tasks. 

Goals

The objective of this research is to investigate how to better support collaborative searches by visualizing different activity traces of other users, such as queries typed, selected search results. We have a prototype information retrieval system which visualizes different types of activity traces to provide cues to other users. The core activities of this research involve:

• Learning how to empirically evaluate an information retrieval system
• Analysing of quantitative and qualitative experimental methods
• Designing experiments
• Learning qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods
• Reporting findings

How to apply

If you are interested, send an email to the contact person (Kumaripaba Athukorala) and Prof. Giulio Jacucci. 

• Email: firstname.lastname@cs.helsinki.fi
• Your email shall include a study transcript from oodi, CV (containing relevant work/study experience), and a motivation letter.