Research

1. Understanding and supporting collaborative sensemaking
I am fascinated by how people make sense of the large amounts of information they encounter in their personal and professional lives, of the situations they face in their work, and of their social interactions. Often, this process of sensemaking (Weick, 1995; Russell, 1993) requires pooling of information from various sources, as well as interacting with others.

I am specifically interested in sensemaking in collaborative work.
While sensemaking has been discussed at the individual level in the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), information science, and education, there is little understanding of sensemaking at the group level. Most models of sensemaking have modeled it as part of individual information seeking activities. Drawing on literature in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), HCI, organizational science, and information sciences, I explore how sensemaking takes place in collaborative work and how technology can be designed to support the same. I am specifically interested in sensemaking as part of collaborative information seeking.

For my dissertation, I have been conducting an ethnographic study of collaborative sensemaking among healthcare providers in the Emergency Department of the Penn State Hershey Medical Center since Jan 2007. A challenging aspect of the work of doctors, nurses, and other clinical and non-clinical staff in the emergency department is making sense of dynamic and unfamiliar situations using a variety of information sources. I plan to draw on my ethnographic study to provide insights into how interfaces can be designed to support sensemaking during collaborative information seeking tasks. I am interested in applying these insights to the design of collaborative and social Web search tools.

Related publications -
[C.5] Paul, S.A., and Reddy, M. (Accepted). Understanding Together: Sensemaking in Collaborative Information Seeking. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2010). [Acceptance rate 20%].

Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2008). Information and Communication Tools as Aids to Collaborative Sensemaking. In Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008) Extended Abstracts, Florence, Italy. [Acceptance rate  ~38%]

Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2008). Collaborative Sensemaking: A Field-study in an Emergency Department. Position paper presented at the Sensemaking workshop at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008), Florence, Italy. [Acceptance rate 50%]

Paul, S.A. (2008). Supporting Collaborative Sensemaking in the Emergency Department. Poster presented at the Third Annual iConference 2008, Los Angeles, CA.

Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., and Abraham, J. (2007) Collaborative Sensemaking during Emergency Crisis Response: How do ICTs Help? Poster presented at the Proceedings of the 2007 ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP 2007), Sanibel Island, FL.

Cited papers -
Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.

Russell, D.M., Stefik, M.J. Pirolli, P., Card, S.K. (1993). The Cost Structure of Sensemaking. In Proc. CHI 1993, ACM Press, 269-276.

2. Collaborative information seeking, inter-group information flows, and group decision-making
Traditionally, information seeking has been considered an individual acitivity and most information seeking models focus on the individual information seeker, as do most information retrieval tools like Web browsers. In recent years, researchers (Twidale et. al., 1997; Hansen and Jarvelin, 2005; Reddy et al. 2007) have uncovered the collaborative nature of information seeking in domains ranging from library use to hospital intensive care units.

However, there is still a lack of understanding of how people come together to find and use information and how effective interfaces can be designed to support them. One my research interests is in understanding how technology can be used to support coordination between groups engaged in information-intensive work, with a specific focus on improving information flows and decision-making. I have been focusing on how groups find, seek, share, and use information in two domains. The first is among healthcare providers engaged in emergency care where I study the information needs of emergency care providers and how they collaborate to find information to fulfil these needs. The other is in the domain of collaborative Web search (see section (3) below).

Related publications -
Reddy, M., Paul, S.A., Abraham, J., McNeese, M.D., deFlitch, C.J., and Yen, J. (In Press). Challenges to Effective Crisis Management: Using Information and Communication Tools to Coordinate Emergency Medical Services and Emergency Department Teams. To appear in the International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI)
.

Zhu, S., Abraham, J., Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., Yen, J., Pfaff, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2007). R-CAST-MED: Applying Intelligent Agents to Support Emergency Medical Decision Making Teams. Proceedings of the 11th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Conference (AIME 2007), Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [Acceptance rate ~20%]


Cited papers -
Twidale, M., Nichols, D. and Paice, C. (1997). Browsing is a Collaborative Process. Information Processing and Management, 33(6), 761-783.

Hansen, P., and Jarvelin, K. (2005). Collaborative Information Retrieval in an Information-intensive Domain. Information Processing and Management, 41, 1101-1119.

Reddy, M.C. and Jansen, B.J. (2008). A Model for Understanding Collaborative Information Behavior in Context: A Study of Two Healthcare Teams. Information Processing and Management, 44, 256-273.

3. Collaborative and Social Web Search

While most Web browsers are designed to support individuals searching for information, people often search Web sites collaboratively for tasks like planning a family vacation or finding health care information (Morris, 2008). With the recent explosion of Web 2.0 technologies, there has been a lot of interest in collaborative Web search tools. Such tools support both implicit collaboration (where the system returns search results based on data obtained from other users, e.g. recommender systems) and explicit collaboration (where people explicitly come together to find information for a joint task). These tools differ in the level of mediation provided; some tools mediate only at the UI level (e.g. SearchTogether by Morris and Horvitz, 2007) while others mediate algorithmically (e.g. Cerchiamo by Pickens, et al., 2008 combines relevance feedback from multiple people to rank documents). (For a taxonomy of collaborative search tools see  Golovchinsky et al., 2008).

'Social' Web search is inspired by the success of the 'wisdom of the crowds' approach of sites like Wikipedia, Digg, and Delicious. The idea here is that other users (friends or other people searching on the same topics) can be a useful resource is helping a user identify relevant search results. Social search tools range from those that let strangers rank a user's search results (e.g. Wikiasearch) to those that leverage the user's trusted circle of friends (e.g. Peerspective).

I am intersted in developing models/tools that succesfully leverage either social networks or the expertise of others performing the same task (such as planning a vacation) or having the same information need (such as looking for cancer treatment options). I'm also interested in examining users' search behavior when using social and collaborative search tools. I am interested in examining how the models of social search behavior are different from those of individual search behavior and when and how do users interact with each other during social search. I am also studying how users make sense of search results found during collaborative  and social Web search
as part of an internship project with Merrie Morris at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA. In our project, we studied how groups find, share, and made sense of information using a collaborative Web search tool called SearchTogether.

Related publications -

Paul, S.A., and Morris, M.R. (Submitted). Sensemaking in Collaborative Web Search.

Paul, S.A., and Morris, M.R. (2009). CoSense: Enhancing Sensemaking for Collaborative Web Search. To appear in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), Boston, MA. [Acceptance rate 24%]. Nominated for best paper award.

Paul, S.A., and Morris, M.R. (2009). Understanding and Supporting Sensemaking in Collaborative Web Search. To be presented at the Sensemaking workshop at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009), Boston, MA. [Acceptance rate 66%]. .

Cited papers -
Morris, M.R. (2008). A Survey of Collaborative Web Search Practices. In Proc of CHI 2008, ACM Press, 1657-1660.

Morris, M.R. and Horvitz, E. (2007). SearchTogether: An Interface for Collaborative Web Search. In Proc of UIST 2007, ACM Press, 3-12.

Pickens, J. Golovchinsky, G., Shah, C., Qvarfordt, P., and Back, M. (2008). Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Exploratory Search. Proc of SIGIR 2008, ACM Press, 315-322.

Golovchinsky, G., Pickens, J., and Back, M. (2008). A Taxonomy of Collaboration in Online Information Seeking. Presented at the 1st International Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval held at JCDL 2008.

Other interesting papers -
Evans, B.M. and Chi, E.H. (2008). Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search. Proc of CSCW 2008.


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Pennsylvania State University
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