How to pronounce my names? NILAVRA BHATTACHARYA (Voice Courtesy: Google Translate)
I am a PhD student in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin (Texas iSchool). I am part of the Information eXperience lab (IX Lab), and supervised by Dr. Jacek Gwizdka.
I study how people find, evaluate, and consume information online, and how Information Retrieval systems (e.g. search engines) can be augmented to foster human-learning and knowledge-acquisition. This interdisciplinary research direction is known as Searching as Learning (SAL), and spans Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR), and Neuro-Information Science, among others.
I use eye-tracking, EEG, and GSR (which fall under the umbrella of Neuro-Physiological methods) to observe people’s behaviour as they interact with online information. These bio-signals help us to understand, model, and predict various aspects of human information-behaviour, such as relevance-judgement, knowledge-gain, and mental workload. My broader vision is to use these bio-signals as real-time, implicit-feedback mechanisms for next-generation interactive computing systems.
Google Scholar has the most up-to-date list of my publications. You can also find them in my CV.
NEWS
2022.06 – 10: Summer Internship at ABB Corporate Research Center Ladenburg, Germany, on Explainable AI (XAI) for Industrial Use Cases.
2022.04: Awarded the DAAD RISE Professional 2022 Scholarship for a second time, to pursue a summer research internship in Germany.
2022.04: Received the David Bruton Graduate Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School.
2022.03: Virtually presented our CHIIR 2022 paper titled The Effects of Interactive AI Design on User Behavior: An Eye-tracking Study of Fact-checking COVID-19 Claims. Link to Dataset | Link to ACM DL.
2022.01: I started conducting a four-month longitudinal study on Search as Learning, for my dissertation research, titled — LongSAL: A Longitudinal Study on Searching as Learning.
2021.11: I successfully defended my dissertation proposal, titled: A Longitudinal Study to Understand University Students’ Searching as a Learning Process.
2021.08: I gave an invited talk at the ACM SIGCHI Mumbai Chapter Meeting, titled Interactive Information Retrieval, showcasing our work on relevance judgement and Search as Learning.
2021.07: Successfully conducted our CHI 2021 Workshop titled HCI4SouthAsia: From the Margins to the Centre, which was postponed due to the unprecedented second wave of COVID-19 pandemic in South Asia.
2021.07: My first-ever blog post: Record User Interactions on your Webpages: A tutorial, is now on Medium.
2021.07: ACM SIGIR 2021 Conference: Virtually presented our demo paper, YASBIL: Yet Another Search Behaviour (and) Interaction Logger (GitHub Link).
2021.06: Google Scholar says my Scholar profile reached 100 citations! 😇😇
2021.05: Our CHI’21 Workshop: From the Margins to the Centre is postponed due to the unprecedented second wave of COVID-19 pandemic in South Asian countries.
2021.03: ACM CHIIR 2021 Conference: Virtually presented my doctoral consortium paper: A Longitudinal Study to Understand Learning During Search.
2021.01: On behalf of HCI4SouthAsia, we are organizing the e-Seminar: AI for the Next Billion, with support from SIGCHI.
2020.12: My dissertation research proposal: A Longitudinal Study to Understand Learning During Search, is accepted at the ACM CHIIR 2021 Doctoral Consortium.
2020.12: Our workshop proposal on From the Margins to the Centre: Defining New Mission and Vision for HCI Research in South Asia is accepted at ACM CHI 2021.
2020.10: Our ACM CSCW 2020 paper Vision Skills Needed to Answer Visual Questions received an honourable mention award.
2020.09: I successfully passed the three-stage Doctoral Qualifying Procedure at the Texas iSchool.
2020.09: I am co-designing and co-teaching a new Statistics Course: Quantifying User Experience with my doctoral advisor, Dr. Jacek Gwizdka.
2020.08: Our short paper titled Visualizing and Quantifying Vocabulary Learning During Search is accepted at the Visualizing and Quantifying Vocabulary Learning During Search (IWILDS), co-located with ACM CIKM 2020.
2020.08: Virtually presented our CHIIR 2020 paper on combining eye-tracking, computer vision, and information relevance.
2020.08: Our paper titled Vision Skills Needed to Answer Visual Questions is accepted at 2020 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), now online due to COVID-19. Honourable Mention Award.
2020.07: Our paper titled Captioning Images for a Real Use Case is accepted at 2020 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2020), now online due to COVID-19.
2020.04: Our paper Towards Real-time Webpage Relevance Prediction Using Convex Hull Based Eyetracking Features is accepted at 2020 ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA-ETWEB 2020) at Stuttgart, Germany (meeting cancelled due to COVID-19).
2019.12: My photograph of the Casa Milà in Barcelona is selected for UT Austin’s “2020 Texas Global Calendar” (UT News report).
2019.12: Our paper Relevance Prediction from Eye-movements Using Semi-interpretable Convolutional Neural Networks is accepted at 2020 ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction Retrieval (CHIIR 2020) at Vancouver, Canada (meeting cancelled due to COVID-19).
2019.07: Our paper titled Why Does a Visual Question Have Different Answers? is accepted at 2019 IEEE Internation Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2019) at Seoul, Korea.
2019.03: Our paper Analyzing Gaze Transition Behavior Using Bayesian Mixed Effects Markov Models is accepted at 2019 ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2019) at Denver, Colorado, USA. Best Short Paper Award.
2018.12: My photograph of the Gullfoss waterfall in Iceland is selected for UT Austin International Office’s 2019 calendar (UT International Office Facebook Video).
2018.11: Our paper Measuring Learning During Search: Differences in Interactions, Eye-Gaze, and Semantic Similarity to Expert Knowledge is accepted at 2019 ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction Retrieval (CHIIR 2019) at Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
2018.05 – 08: Summer internship in Berlin, Germany at QuoData GmbH (DAAD RISE Professional Praktikant).
2018.04: Our paper Relating Eye-Tracking Measures With Changes In Knowledge on Search Tasks is accepted at 2018 ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2018) at Warsaw, Poland.
2018.03: Awarded the DAAD RISE Professional 2018 Scholarship.
2017.12: Our paper is accepted at 52nd Annual Convention of Computer Society of India (CSI 2017). Best Paper Runner-Up Award.
2017.08: I joined the doctoral program at the School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin.
The institutions I have called ‘Home’ over the years:
Texas iSchool
PhD Student
Aug ’17 – present
#WhatStartsHere Changes The World.
IT Dept., CESC Limited
Software Engineer
Aug ’15 – Jul ’17
(India’s first power utility. Registered in 1897 in London)
IIEST Shibpur
BE (Comp. Sci. & Tech.)
Jul ’11 – May ’15
(arguably India’s second oldest engineering college)
M. H. Memorial School
ICSE (Std X), ISC (Std XII)
Apr ’99 – Mar ’11