Keynote Speakers

Cassidy Sugimoto (Website)

Professor of Informatics

Indiana University, USA

Biography
Sugimoto researches within the domain of scholarly communication and scientometrics, examining the formal and informal ways in which knowledge producers consume and disseminate scholarship. She has co-edited two volumes and has published 50 journal articles on this topic. Her work has been presented at numerous conferences and has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Sloan Foundation, among other agencies. Sugimoto is actively involved in teaching and service and has been rewarded in these areas with an Indiana University Trustees Teaching award (2014) and a national service award from the Association for Information Science and Technology (2009). Sugimoto has an undergraduate degree in music performance, an M.S. in library science, and a Ph.D. in information and library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Research Areas
Scholarly Communication
Scientometrics and Informetrics
Science Communication
Science Policy
Computing, Culture, and Society

 

Pertti Vakkari (Website)

Professor

Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC)
Tampere University, Finland

Biography
Dr. Pertti Vakkari is a Professor Emeritus of Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Finland. His research interests include information seeking, task-based information searching, fiction searching, methodologies for evaluating interactive information retrieval, and the outcomes of public libraries. His work has appeared in the proceedings of numerous conferences, in edited monographs and journals such as Information Processing & Management and JASIST. He is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Documentation, and Information Processing & Management. Vakkari has been member in several program committees of conferences like ISIC, IIiX , ECIR and TPDL. He received in 2012 ASIS&T SIGUSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Information Behavior.

Research Areas
Information seeking
Task-based information searching
Information use during information search
Evaluation of interactive information retrieval
Fiction searching
Outcomes of public libraries

 

 

Ed H. Chi (Website)
Principal Scientist at Google Brain, Google AI

Biography
Ed H. Chi is a Principal Scientist at Google, leading machine learning research team focusing on neural modeling and recommendation systems in the Google Brain team. He has delivered significant improvements for YouTube, Google Play Store, and other recommenders at Google with 81 product launches in the last 2 years. With 39 patents and over 120 research articles, he is known for research on user behavior in web and social media. Prior to Google, he was the Area Manager and a Principal Scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's Augmented Social Cognition Group, where he led the team in understanding how social systems help groups of people to remember, think and reason.

Ed completed his three degrees (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota. Recognized as an ACM Distinguished Scientist and elected into the CHI Academy, he recently received a 20-year Test of Time award for research in information visualization. He has been featured and quoted in the press, including the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Associated Press. An avid swimmer, photographer and snowboarder in his spare time, he also has a blackbelt in Taekwondo.

Research Areas
Machine Learning
Neural Recommenders
Human-Computer Interaction
Social Computing

 

 

Christopher Soo Guan Khoo (Website)

Associate Professor
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
College of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Biography
Chris Khoo is an associate professor in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information, Division of Information Studies at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he teaches courses in knowledge organization, information architecture, data mining and Web-based information systems. He obtained his PhD at Syracuse University in 1997, his MSc in Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1987, and a BA from Harvard University. He has also worked for several years as a science reference librarian, cataloger and online information searcher at the National University of Singapore Libraries. His main research interests are in knowledge organization, ontologies, automatic sentiment categorization, human categorization behavior, natural language processing, information extraction, multidocument summarization, and clinical decision support systems.

Research Areas
Digital intelligence (WKWSCI Academic Research Cluster funding)
Automatic multidocument summarization of research articles
Autmatic extraction of treatment information from a medical database
Automatic sentiment analysis of multiple Web genres
Human categorization behaviour
Integrated clinical decision support system for wound care management
Knowledge organization of websites, portals & learning object repositories