Please join the UBC iSchool community in welcoming George Buchanan of City University London for a lunch-hour Colloquium, co-sponsored with the UBC Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC).

Dr. Buchanan will discuss “Finding Information: The Effects of Collaboration and Place” on Wednesday, November 21, 12 noon-1 p.m. in the Dodson Room, on the third floor of UBC’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.

When seeking information, either within a document or in a large collection of materials, the contexts of collaboration and place have a strong influence on user performance. While those studying human behaviour have noted these factors, there is at present only a limited understanding of how to provide features that exploit these contexts in computer-based information discovery systems. In this seminar, I will report on a series of projects that have uncovered how each factor can be leveraged in new interactions between people and technology, and indicate how the interplay between social and location contexts can provide opportunities neither can on their own.

George Buchanan is a Reader in the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City University London. His main areas of research encompass information seeking and mobile technologies. His work has received a series of best-paper awards, and he is currently Research Chair of the British Computer Society Special Interest Group (SIG) on Interaction.