HCII Ph.D. Thesis Defense: Michael Xieyang Liu
When
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Description
Time and Location:
07/25/2023 - 9:30 am ET / 6:30 am PT
Newell Simon Hall Room 3305
Thesis Committee:
Brad Myers
Niki Kittur
Kenneth Holstein
Daniel Russell
Abstract:
While modern search engines are excellent resources for finding information on the web, in order to put together that information into a useful mental model for learning or making a decision – such as picking a new car or choosing a JavaScript library – people often need to collect information about the options available and the criteria on which to evaluate the options, synthesize such information from various sources into a meaningful structure, and share and justify the results with others. This sensemaking process, often highly iterative and cyclical, puts a significant cognitive burden on users, and often requires them to externalize their evolving mental models rather than keeping everything in their working memory. However, the tools that people use for externalization – such as browser tabs, documents, spreadsheets, or notetaking apps – poorly support the constant shifts between collecting, extracting, organizing, and reorganizing that are needed. Worse yet, even if people do put in the work to externalize and share a summary of their sensemaking outcome (such as creating a list of suitable cars or a table of front-end libraries), it can still be difficult for subsequent users to evaluate whether they can or should trust and reuse that work so that they don’t have to start from scratch.
In this thesis, I aim to bridge the gap between the rapidly evolving mental models in peoples’ heads and the externalization of those models. Specifically, I design and build interactive systems to reduce the costs and increase the benefits of externalization, thereby capturing more of the cognitive work that users engage in while making sense of information in order to help them as well as subsequent people who might benefit from their work.
The series of work introduced in this thesis points to the importance of having tool support that helps users efficiently organize and manage information as they find it in a way that could also be beneficial to others, and therefore bootstrapping the virtuous cycle of people being able to build on each other’s sensemaking results, fostering efficient collaboration and knowledge reuse.
Document:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UvGRVwiNCIce9Qn8YGAmIj69vQ305Tic/view?…