I am currently a fifth-year PhD student under supervisor of Dr. Luke Zhang, at College of Information Science & Technology, Penn State University. My scientific pursuit is in the field of (HCI), with a primary focus on using cutting edge technology to help people better understand and communicate spatial information. I have investigated human navigation behavior, geo-collaboration in emergency management, and spatial sensemaking in mobile context and actively share my findings on peer reviewed journal and conference papers. My dissertation focuses on theoretical analysis, design and technical implementation, and the experimental evaluation of a mobile system to help people make sense of the novel environment by integrating multiple social media resources, like Facebook, Foursquare, Panoramio, and Wikipedia.
Wu, A., Zhang, X. (2011). Location-based Information Fusion for Mobile Navigation. Proc. of Ubicomp'11, 593-594. PDF
Wu, A. DiMicco, J.M., Millen, D. R. (2010). Detecting Professional versus Personal Closeness Using an Enterprise Social Network Site. Proc. of CHI'10, 1955-1964. PDF
Wu, A., Zhang, W., Zhang, X. (2009). Evaluation of Wayfinding Aids in Virtual Environment. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 25(1), 1-21. PDF
Wu, A., Zhang, X., Convertino, G., Ganoe, C., Carroll, J. M. (2009). CIVIL: Support Geocollaboration with Information Visualization. Proc. of Group'09, 273-276. PDF
Wu, A., Zhang, X., Convertino, G., Carroll, J. M. (2009). Supporting Synchronous Sensemaking in Geo-Collaboration. Sensemaking workshop at ACM CHI'09. PDF
Wu, A., Zhang, X. (2009). Identifying Proper Scales on Digital Maps for In-vehicle Navigation Systems. Proc. of HCII'09 in LNCS (vol.5616), 262-270. PDF
For a complete list of publications, see my Resume
Proximity Explorer is a mobile application that integrates multiple online information resources (e.g. Facebook, Foursquare, Panoramio, Wikipedia, Google Maps) to support place sensemaking. more...
Dissertation work: System development (Android, PHP, MySQL) | User experience research (interview, survey, field evaluation, log analysis)
Morning Report is a mobile application that integrates business information from different sources (e.g. mail, calendar, tasks, connections) and highlight the important items. more...
Work@IBM: User experience research (interview, survey, lab-study, post-study interview)
This work investigates the temporal sensitivity of geotagged photo sharing in scenarios that vary in social space and motivation. more...
Research@Penn State:
Understanding users (in-depth survey and response coding)
CIVIL is a web-based system prototype developed to support geo-collaboration in emergency management. A multi-view, role-based design is adopted to help team members analyze geo-spatial information, share and integrate critical information, and monitor individual activities. more...
Research@Penn State: System development (Flex, MySQL) | User experience research (focus group, lab evaluation, data analysis)
This work resolves the ambiguity of place name in textual documents. Given a word (e.g. Washington) appears in an articale, we want to know whether it is a person (e.g. the president)or a place (WA state or DC area). I developed a hybrid geocoding computational algorithm SPOT (Sensing Places Out of Text). more...
Work@PARC: novel algorithm development (Java) and large scale online evaluation (Flex, SPSS)
This work presents the essential idea of viewing navigation in physical environment as a sensemaking process and proposed the a framwork of place sensemaking. A detailed analysis decomposes navigation based on the key components of this framework showing that learning a new environment can be understood as a sensemaking process, which provides direction to the new designs of mobile navigation applications. more...
Research@Penn State:
Theory development
This work compares several wayfinding aids in virtual reality to investigate their efficiency, effectiveness, and users' satisfaction in assisting wayfinding tasks in novel environment. more...
Master thesis:
3D Modeling (Vega, Creator, 3ds Max) | user experience research (lab study, data analysis)
Current commercial mobile navigation systems often use a predetermined scale selection schema without considering differences in spatial complexity of locations. To identify what map scales people may need and what spatial features make relevant maps stand out, we conducted an experiment on subjective map selection in a route planning task between two cities in the United States. more...
The Tie Strength Prediction project uses people's profiles and behaviors on social network sites to predict people's personal and professional relationship closeness within IBM.Parameters extracted from logs and databases were used as predictors and surveyed closeness rating served as ground truth in a multi-linear regression model.
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