Yan Qu
Location: (Washington, DC)
Personal Research Web Page: http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~yanqu/
Keywords: Sensemaking and learning, Collaborative sensemaking, Human computer interaction, Social computing, Information system design, Information behavior
Posted on: Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Broad Research Area: HCI / CSCW, Information Systems / Information Science, Social Computing / Social Informatics
Research Interests:
My research mainly concerns the question: How can we help people make sense of collected information and create corresponding knowledge representations both individually and collaboratively? Especially, how can we help the creation of knowledge structures to formalize understanding and enable further decision-making and action? Answers to these questions at the individual level can shed light on the design of advanced information systems which facilitate users’ learning or investigative tasks: patients learn about treatments, researchers survey existing works on a topic, etc. Answers to these questions at the group or community level can lead to new designs of collaborative systems or mechanisms that will ultimately reduce the cost of knowledge production, thus enhancing the societal knowledge accumulation and sharing.
Several ongoing projects are:
1. Designing and implementing a web-based light-weight sensemaking workspace that facilitates literature search and comprehension.
2. Adopting social computing mechanisms to build ontology and related knowledge structures that support sensemaking of large amount unstructured information.
3. Studying the collaborative sensemaking process in social media
4. Community-based emergency response systems
