Contact

2623 Camino Ramon
San Ramon, CA - 94583.

Research Projects

Social Search and Social Q&A
With the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, people are  increasingly turning to their online social networks to fulfill their information needs. I am interested in the broad area of social search, which is the augmentation of Web search activities through social interactions and feedback from social networks. The research question I'm exploring is "How are people using their online social networks to fulfill their information needs?"

I have conducted two studies of information seeking in online social networks,  The first study analyzed Q&A behavior on Twitter. The other study examined reputation and authority on social Q&A site Quora .

Related publications
Paul, S.A., Hong, L., and Chi, E.H. (2012). Who is Authoritative? Understanding Reputation Mechanisms in Quora. Collective Intelligence (CI 2012). Cambridge, MA.

Dent, K. and Paul, S.A. (2011). Through the Twitter Glass: Detecting Questions in Micro-text. AAAI-11 Workshop on Analyzing Microtext, San Francisco, CA.

Paul, S.A., Hong, L., and Chi, E.H. (2011). Is Twitter a Good Place for Asking Questions? A Characterization Study. Poster at ICWSM 2011, Barcelona, Spain.

Paul, S.A., Hong, L., and Chi, E.H. (2011). What is a Question? Crowdsourcing Tweet Categorization. CHI 2011 workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation, Vancouver, BC.

Collaborative Web Search
People often search Web sites collaboratively for tasks like planning a family vacation or finding health care information. I studied how users make sense of search results found during collaborative Web search tasks with Merrie Morris at Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA.

We studied how groups find, share, and made sense of information using a collaborative Web search tool called SearchTogether. I developed a visualization tool, CoSense, that helps visualize information found during collaborative Web search tasks.

Related publications
Paul, S.A., and Morris, M.R. (2011). Sensemaking in Collaborative Web Search. Human Computer Interaction Special Issue on Sensemaking, 26(1), 38-71.

Paul, S.A., and Morris, M.R. (2009). CoSense: Enhancing Sensemaking for Collaborative Web Search. In Proceedings of CHI 2009, Boston, MA. Best paper nominee

Paul, S.A., and Morris, M.R. (2009). Understanding and Supporting Sensemaking in Collaborative Web Search. CHI 2009 workshop on Sensemaking, Boston, MA.

Understanding and Supporting Collaborative Sensemaking
For my dissertation, I conducted an ethnographic study of collaborative sensemaking among healthcare providers in the emergency department of the Penn State Hershey Medical Center. A challenging aspect of the work of doctors, nurses, and other clinical and non-clinical staff in the emergency department is making sense of dynamic and unfamiliar situations using a variety of information sources. I drew on my ethnographic study to provide insights into how interfaces can be designed to support sensemaking during collaborative information seeking tasks.

Related publications 
Isenberg, P., Fisher, D., Paul, S.A., Morris, M.R., Inkpen, K., Czerwinski, M. (2012). Co-located Collaborative Visual Analytics Around a Tabletop Display. IEEE Transactions on Visualizations and Computer Graphics, 18(5), 689-702.

Paul, S.A. , and Reddy, M. (2010). Understanding Together: Sensemaking in Collaborative Information Seeking. In Proceedings of CSCW 2010, Savannah, GA. Best paper nominee

Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2008). Information and Communication Tools as Aids to Collaborative Sensemaking. CHI 2008 Extended Abstracts, Florence, Italy.

Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2008). Collaborative Sensemaking: A Field-study in an Emergency Department. CHI 2008 workshop on Sensemaking, Florence, Italy.

Paul, S.A. (2008). Supporting Collaborative Sensemaking in the Emergency Department. Poster at iConference 2008, Los Angeles, CA.

Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., and Abraham, J. (2007) Collaborative Sensemaking during Emergency Crisis Response: How do ICTs Help? Poster at GROUP 2007, Sanibel Island, FL.

Collaborative Information Seeking, Information Sharing, and Group Decision-Making
Traditionally, information seeking has been considered an individual acitivity but in recent years, researchers have uncovered the collaborative nature of information seeking in domains ranging from library use to hospital intensive care units. I have studied how groups find, seek, share, and use information, especially in the healthcare domain.

Related publications
Reddy, M., Paul, S.A., Abraham, J., McNeese, M.D., deFlitch, C.J., and Yen, J. (2010). Challenges to Effective Crisis Management: Using Information and Communication Tools to Coordinate Emergency Medical Services and Emergency Department Teams. International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI), 78(4), 259-269. Diana Forsythe award

Zhu, S., Abraham, J., Paul, S.A., Reddy, M., Yen, J., Pfaff, M., and deFlitch, C.J. (2007). R-CAST-MED: Applying Intelligent Agents to Support Emergency Medical Decision Making Teams. 11th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Conference (AIME 2007), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.