3/9/2010
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University of Illinois computer science professor Karrie Karahalios has received a Sloan Foundation Fellowship award for her work into human-computer interaction, specifically in social computing.
Karahalios’s work primarily investigates sociable systems for mediated communication. Her current research includes projects on assistive and adaptive technologies, visualization to understand conversational dynamics, and understanding tie strength in social networks.
“Karrie’s work in the area of social interaction has some really incredible real-world implications, and is making great advances to her field. She’s not just pioneering methods and technologies in HCI, but is also pioneering how people actually should do HCI research,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and head of the computer science department. “We are proud that her work has been honored with such a prestigious award.”
Karahalios has received renown for her recent work to create speech visualization tools to assist children with autistic spectrum disorders. Her work has aided children with ASD to learn how to vocalize and to have more normal conversational patterns of speech. She and her students are currently expanding their work in that realm to create tools to help family members better empathize with the communication struggles that their loved ones face each day.
Originally conceived as an art project, her work in this area has taken on a variety of forms, and is now informing new works into visualization tools to better understand conversational dynamics, and to find ways to archive spoken word.
“I would never have anticipated the path that this work has taken,” said Karahalios.
Given that history, it seems only natural that the next evolution of Karahalios’s work is to study the sometimes strange paths that information flow can take. She and her team are preparing now to start new projects to better understand how tie-strength might affect information flow through social networks.
“In a certain sense, sociologists really got lucky when the Internet was invented, because now they have all sorts of new ways to study their field,” remarked Karahalios. “What we as computer scientists have now is not only a wealth of data through the Internet, but also great inspiration from sociologists to learn more about how we interact using computing and technologies.”
Building on work to model and predict tie-strength that recently earned PhD student Eric Gilbert a Best Paper award at CHI, the premier conference on human-computer interaction, Karahalios and her team will be studying so-called “small world” problems in the context of social networks, using tie-strength to understand how people transmit information.
The work has a variety of practical implications, from emergency and disaster response to questions of social influence. A better understanding of how information flows through social networks might also have journalistic, economic and market implications.
The group has recently launched a tool called WeMeddle for Twitter. The tool is based on their early work into tie-strength, and creates automated lists for you based on the ties within your social network. The WeMeddle lists enable social media users to better focus their time checking status updates and tweets. The site also includes a client that allows users to explore their stream of tweets using “social zooming”, an approach to search via connection strength."
Another nascent project in Karahalios’ lab is a new form of search tools – taking contextual search to a whole new level. Inspired by research for Alzheimer’s patients, Karahalios and her team have just launched a project to help people find files or other artifacts on their computer based on what they remember doing at the time they last saw or worked with the file. The tool runs in the background of your computer, capturing thousands of movements and screen actions, so it can bring up the context of what you were doing or working on in any point in time – in a sense, a high tech way of retracing your steps to find your lost keys.
“For example, if you remember that you were listening to Green Day, had YouTube up, and were working on an Excel sheet, you could type those cues into the tool, and it would retrieve instances of your computer screen based on those factors,” explained Karahalios.
Karahalios credits her PhD students and her research team for the cutting-edge nature of her work. “The students in the Social Spaces Group are not afraid to tackle the difficult problems and are very creative in their approaches to potential solutions. I am proud to work with them.“
The Sloan Fellowship awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. The Sloan Fellowship awards are highly competitive, involving nominations from the very best scientists of this generation from the United States and Canada. A total of 118 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. 15 awards were made in the Computer Science field this year.
“The Sloan Research Fellowships support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work,” says Paul L. Joskow, the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.