How to pronounce my names? NILAVRA BHATTACHARYA (Voice Courtesy: Google Translate)
Photo Courtesy: Angie Zhang
I am a final year PhD candidate in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin (Texas iSchool). I am part of the Information eXperience lab (IX Lab), supervised by Professor Jacek Gwizdka.
My research focuses on understanding how people search for, evaluate, and consume information online, and how Information Retrieval systems (e.g. search engines) can be improved to foster learning and knowledge acquisition. This interdisciplinary research area is known as Searching as Learning (SAL), and spans Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR), and Neuro-Information Science, among others.
Our methods include 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.
For a most up-to-date list of my publications, please see my Google Scholar Profile, or my curriculum vitae (CV).
NEWS
2023.05: Successfully passed my PhD dissertation defense with minor revisions. My awesome advisor Jacek Gwizdka nicely summarized my incredible journey of over half-a-decade at the UT Austin School of Information in this 43-sec video 😇: https://youtu.be/8CvWKrpWBjw
2023.04: Attending ACM CHI 2023 conference in Hamburg, Germany, from April 23-28, 2023. My dissertation research was awarded second place in the CHI’23 Student Research Competition.
2023.03: We successfully organized the ACM CHIIR 2023 conference in Austin, TX, from 19 – 23 March, 2023.
2023.01: My dissertation research has been accepted at the CHI’23 Student Research Competition.
2023.01: I am co-organizing the 4th IWILDS workshop at CHIIR 2023 conference in Austin, TX! My brilliant and wonderful co-organizing colleagues are: (1) Dr. Anett Hoppe, from TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science & Technology, Germany, (2) Dr. Ran Yu, from University of Bonn, Germany, and (3) Dr. Jiqun Liu, from University of Oklahoma, USA.
2023.01: Our paper True or false? Cognitive load when reading COVID-19 news headlines: an eye-tracking study is accepted at 2023 ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction Retrieval (CHIIR 2023) at Austin, TX, USA.
2022.10: Awarded the ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship Award 2022 (link to press release)
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:
School of Information, UT Austin
PhD Student
Aug ’17 – May ’23
#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