Who am I Academically?

Who am I academically? I am a second year PhD student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. My advisor is Dr. Jim Jansen. Before coming to IST I did my undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke College were I double majored in Computer Science and History.  At Mount Holyoke I did research on Geospatial Information Retrieval with Dr. Lisa Ballesteros resulting in an undergraduate thesis. This introduced me to doing research. In addition, the summer after my junior year I participated in the SUPERB-IT program at the University of California Berkeley. This was a Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research. Here I did research in Human Computer Interaction. In particular, I looked at cell phones and how they could be used be used for new purposes, such as controlling a presentation. 

Doing undergraduate research and participating in a summer research program introduced me to the idea of doing research and encouraged me to want to continue doing research in topics related in information sciences and technology which led me to come to IST to do my PhD. Continuing my interests in Computer Science and History I also am always interested in hearing about research that links computer science and history together as those are two things I have an interest in.

My primary research interests here at IST include web search and personalization. In particular I am interested in combining the two of them and looking at how personalization can be used for web search. With in this  one particular topic that interests me is how personalization can be done for people whom a system does not have much information about.