Research Statement

In most general terms, my research interest centers around the process of knowledge dissemination from the expert community to the novice and the design of information organization and representation tools that help facilitate such process. The focal point of my current research is users’ interaction with information sources, specifically how different representational schemes might help users with different types of search tasks. I found such interaction intriguing because it is one of those places where human mind's great ability to learn and adapt manifest itself. At least two underlying dynamics take place during user's interaction with representation/classification schemes: the change of knowledge state, sometimes involves dramatic conceptual change; and the assimilation of the external tool into ther user's "personal information infrastrucutre" (Marchionini) or “functional organ,” to use Vygotsky’s terminology.

My inquiry into information interaction has been grounded on several theoretical perspectives originated from the study of mind and cognition, particularly in areas such as external representation, knowledge representation, learning and scientific reasoning. I’ve been greatly influenced by social-cultural school of psychology and ecological cognition, both of which stress the roles cultural/technical tools play in cognition.

Current Projects

“Browsing in a faceted information space: a longitudinal study of searchers’ interface with novel display tool”
Dissertation: January 2003-present
Advised by Dr. Nicholas J. Belkin

This is a naturalistic, longitudinal study of users’ interaction with a browsable, multi-dimensional MeSH thesaurus when accessing PubMed. I’m interested in seeing how users with real search tasks will interact with a novel display whose affordances are not quite established. A longitudinal study will allow us to investigate whether users will be able to develop a usage pattern that reflects the compatibility between search tasks and tools. Another research question I would like to pursue is the co-evolving of mind and tools, that is, how the assimilation of the representational tool might change the way users constructs their search requests.
See the shortened version of the proposal

“Display of cultural materials online: a study of representational schemes for pictorial information”
Advised by Dr. Marija Dalbello

The migration of the cultural materials on the digital realm raise some interesting theoretical questions about the nature of museum documentation as well as the practical issues of representing and organizing them. Without tokens to be extract for automatic indexing, pictorial information still relies heavily on representation schemes to provide access to the users. More than just access tools, different representation schemes actively participate in the signification process of the cultural images, whose meanings are inherently ambiguous when stripped all the labels. The research attempts to study the “museum effects” a variety of displaying and representational tools evoke in the context of digital museum.
The paper is now under revision for resubmission.

“An investigation of query term elicitation using a faceted query template”


One of the key components in interactive IR theory is the recognition that searcher’s query is only an imperfect representation of the actual information need. Based on the superficial description of searcher’s need, the matching function performed by current IR systems is essentially a matter of approximation. In this study we test a faceted query template as a potential query elicitation technique. We would like to see whether such a template will capture more contextual information and better inference on searcher’s information needs, therefore less user effort and higher satisfaction in the retrieving process.
The initial result has been presented in the poster session of the 2004 ASIST Annual Conference.