MediaFutures Seminar: Information Seeking Is Much More Than Searching with Alan Smeaton, Professor of Computing at the Dublin City University

Alan Smeaton, a Professor of Computing at the Dublin City University, will give a seminar on January 10th. 

TITLE: Information seeking is much more than searching

WHEN: 10 Januar, 15:15-16:15

WHERE: MediaFutures & Zoom:

Link:  https://uib.zoom.us/j/69616776839?pwd=QWlRSWk1M2RQb0JYUkk1YzkzYmxFQT09

Meeting ID: 696 1677 6839

Password: Dqf1HzTr

ABSTRACT:

Information seeking is an essential, daily activity that billions of us pursue as part of our work and leisure activities. Information seeking is a journey, a conversation between a searcher and an information repository which can have many final destinations, or none.  Searching is one component of information seeking and search or more broadly information retrieval, in its early years has had a focus on known item search or searching around a broad topic. This has been supported and nurtured by our benchmarking activities like TREC, TRECVid, CLEF, FIRE and others and the systems we have developed and that we use in our essential daily information seeking activities reflect this.  In this presentation I reflect on the broader information seeing landscape and on how a twist of good (or bad) timing, has left us with the search tools we use but which do not necessarily deliver the best support for our information seeking.   This broader perspective will then allow us to contextualise the roles that various forms of media search can play in our information seeking journeys. Towards the end of the talk I will cover generative media where instead of searching for media, we create it.

BIO:

Alan Smeaton is Professor of Computing at Dublin City University where he has previously been Head of School and Dean of Faculty. He is an IEEE Fellow, Principal Fellow of Advance HE and an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is the 2022 winner of the ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award for contributions to multimedia computing. Alan’s interests are in human memory and how we forget and remember some things and not others and this involves the use of machine learning and data analytics, and the applications of text, image, and video analysis in areas like learning analytics, personal sensing, and lifelogging.