The School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, the iSchool at University of British Columbia, is pleased to welcome Rob Capra, Assistant Professor, School of Information Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as the next speaker in our 2013-14 Colloquium Series.  He is speaking Wednesday, October 2nd, from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM on the topic of “Augmenting Web Search Surrogates With Images: Does It Help to Add Images To Web Search Results?”.

The talk will be given in the Dodson Room in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC.  Registration is not necessary and the talk is open to all interested members of the community.

Abstract of the Talk: While images are commonly used in search results for vertical domains such as shopping and news, web search results remain primarily text-based.  In this talk, I present results of two large-scale user studies to examine the effects of augmenting text-based result surrogates with images extracted from the underlying webpage.  In short, I will address the question of, “Does it help to add images to web search results?”  We evaluated effectiveness and efficiency at both the individual surrogate level and at the results page level, and also consider the goodness of the image in terms of representing the underlying page content.  Results of these studies show tradeoffs in the use of images in web search surrogates, and highlight particular situations where they can provide benefits.

Biography of the Speaker: Dr. Robert Capra is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management, and digital information seeking behaviors, tools, and interfaces.  He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis.  At Virginia Tech, he was part of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction where he investigated multi-platform interfaces, information re-finding, and interfaces for digital libraries.  Prior to Virginia Tech, he worked in corporate research and development, spending five years in the Speech and Language Technologies group at SBC Communications (now merged with AT&T Labs) where he focused on voice user interfaces, speech recognition, and natural language processing.