Dr. Micheline Beaulieu Colloquium
Dr. Micheline Beaulieu Professor in Information Science
Chair of the Informatics Collaboratory of the Social Sciences
Pro Vice-Chancellor for Academic Planning
University of Sheffield, UK.
Information research over the past fifty years has focused on three distinct perspectives namely: Information
Seeking Behaviour, laboratory based Information Retrieval and the evaluation of information
systems, and Interactive Information Retrieval. Although some effort has been made in IR
evaluation research to accommodate both the user-centric social science paradigm of Interactive Information
Retrieval and the system-centric scientific experimental paradigm of IR, as exemplified by
the Okapi and TREC experiments, it has proven to be very difficult to address let alone resolve the
fundamental tensions between the two approaches. However more recently the concept of
`information interaction in context鈥� has emerged as a possible alternative approach or framework for
bridging the gap between the traditional evaluation divide. In this talk, Professor Beaulieu will explore
what is meant by context in IR evaluation and how the concept is beginning to be
operationalized in empirical studies. The discussion will draw on examples of experimental designs
and settings that are leading the way in taking account of the wider aspects of interaction, cognition,
tasks and users in information retrieval and assess the potential for information interaction in context
to serve as a unifying paradigm for the evaluation of information systems.
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Everyone welcome!