Information Interfaces

Description: Understanding of information have time costs for getting at pieces of information, for reading them, analyzing them, understanding them, and producing reports based on them. We're interested in developing new interfaces that reduces the costs of understanding information.

Contextual Computing

Description: The goal of user modeling is to produce highly relevant information ecologies on a per user basis. Leveraging our existing technologies in instrumentation, content analysis, linguistics, and task analysis, we are developing a user-modeling infrastructure that tackles the challenging problems of modeling content consumption as well as sensemaking tasks.

Characterization Studies

Description: We have been interested in using various cognitive models to help characterize user behavior in information environments. One of the principal ways we're doing this is via Information Foraging Theory, which provide an understanding of how strategies and technologies for information seeking, gathering, and consumption are adapted to the flux of information in the environment.

Other Studies

Description: Related studies.

SNIF-ACT

Description: SNIF-ACT (Scent-based Navigation and Information Foraging in the ACT architecture) is a computational cognitive model developed to simulate users as they perform unfamiliar information-seeking tasks on the World Wide Web (WWW). The main goal of developing SNIF-ACT is to provide insights and engineering principles for improving usability. More directly it could provide automated cognitive engineering tools. SNIF-ACT could also serve as the basis for user models embedded in systems and devices to improve interaction, and it could serve as the basis for helping people to learn how to find, make sense of, and use information to improve solutions to significant everyday problems involving health, finance, career, and so on.