Information Science PhD student Elizabeth Murnane will be the speaker for this Brown Bag Seminar.

Title: Noticing the Nuance: Designing intelligent systems that can understand semantic, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of our digital footprints

Abstract: With the proliferation of mobile sensing, personal informatics, and Web 2.0 technologies, the amount and kinds of user-centric data are continually and rapidly expanding. Opportunely, these digital traces convey a wealth of signals about individuals' preferences, intentions, and needs. However, current computational techniques are often limited in their ability to interpret the more subtle semantic, affective, and behavioral dimensions of this data. In this talk I will discuss research I've undertaken at Cornell in order to explore how to design systems that are capable of extracting, making sense of, and utilizing such nuanced facets of personal data. I will describe projects that apply these systems in the domains of information retrieval, knowledge sharing, and health & well-being in order to demonstrate how they can help people use and create digital information more effectively and have more personally meaningful interactions with technology.

Bio: Elizabeth is a 3rd year PhD student in Information Science, where her research lies in the areas of HCI, semantic computing, and personalization. Her primary aim is designing intelligent systems that are more attuned to individual users' interests, activities, psychological states, and social dynamics in order to better help people find, use, and create digital information. Elizabeth obtained her S.B. in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT in 2007 and upon graduation went on to co-found an MIT CSAIL spin-off that designs source code visualization tools for software developers. In 2011, she was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and entered the PhD program at Cornell.