How to pronounce my names? NILAVRA BHATTACHARYA (Voice Courtesy: Google Translate)
I am a PhD student in the Information eXperience lab (IX Lab) at The University of Texas at Austin. I am supervised by Dr. Jacek Gwizdka.
I study how people find, evaluate, and consume information online; and how we can improve this overall information experience. 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.
My research interests span Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR), and Neuro-Information Science.
Google Scholar has the most up-to-date list of my publications. You can also find them in my CV.
NEWS
2020.10: Our 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 helping to teach and co-design a new Statistics Course: Quantifying the User Experience under my 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).
The institutions I have called ‘Home’ over the years:
Texas iSchool
PhD Student
Aug ’17 – present
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