Research
iSchool faculty and doctoral students work internationally on projects that have a direct impact on people’s lives and in many cases result in learning that can be used for new projects with Affiliate partners. Doctoral students work under the direction of iSchool faculty to take foundational research in new directions.
Here are a few examples of recent research conducted by iSchool faculty:
- Improving customer service: Andrew J. Ko created Frictionary, a tool for automatically extracting, aggregating, and organizing problems described in technical support forums, enabling real-time analysis of problem frequency and prevalence metrics. Frictionary was applied to 89,760 Firefox support requests from four sources gathered over 10 months, a tool that could be used by Firefox as a tool for prioritizing engineering efforts.
- Better search results: iSchool Ph.D. graduate Jeff Huang, a 2012/13 Facebook fellow who worked with Andrew Ko, has developed technology that captures page level interaction data – as users move their mouse cursor, scroll around on the page and use browser tabs to view multiple search results. The resulting data provides richer implicit feedback to search engines, improving search results for everyone.
- Better health care for patients: Research in the iMed group is motivated by the problems patients face in finding, using, and managing information. Research includes studying patients’ work to understand their problems, developing new types of technology to address those problems, and evaluating the technology with patients.
- Using technology to improve wellness: Wanda Pratt and Sunny Consalvo turn emerging technology into applications that help track the development of children through social media, manage our health information, and encourage physical activity using mobile phones.
- Balancing our lives: David Levy studies the effect information technology has on people’s lives, both personally and organizationally.
- Who owns information?: Adam Moore studies the implications of legal and social changes on the ownership and privacy of information.
- Preservation of information: Joe Janes looks at the challenges of preserving information in the modern world, where we are creating more than we can keep. How do we decide what is important to preserve, and how do we create conditions that make that possible?
- Access to information: Not everyone has equal access to our increasingly digital world. What methods work best for ensuring that we don’t exclude large segments of the human race from the increasingly important portion of our knowledge accessible only online? The TASCHA research group looks at multiple aspects of this problem.