ADM+S Student establishes future collaborations with North American colleagues
Author Natalie Campbell
Date 26 August 2024
ADM+S PhD student Kaixin Ji has returned from a research visit to North America, collaborating with peers and industry experts in Maryland, Washington DC, Boston and New York.
Kaixin travelled to SIGIR conference in Washington DC to present her paper ‘Characterizing Information Seeking Processes with Multiple Physiological Signals’, which aims to characterise user emotions and cognitive changes measured by physiological signals during the search process.
This is the first study that explores user behaviours in a search by using the nuanced quantitative analysis of physiological signals.
After SIGIR, Kaixin was invited to visit University of Maryland where she reconnected with Prof Doug Oard who visited ADM+S at RMIT in early 2024, and had the opportunity to present her research to the Maryland IR network.
“Extending on my SIGIR paper, the presentations at Maryland focused on my overall thesis progress, measuring confirmation bias in information seeking with multi-modal physiological sensors,” said Kaixin.
“Because the audiences were not the communities I usually present to, I received many good questions and discussions – especially related to implications – that I haven’t thought of before and was really appreciated.”
Through the networks of colleagues at ADM+S, Kaixin also had the opportunity to visit the Ubiquitous Computing for Health and Well-being (UbiWell) Lab at Northeastern University in Boston, where she was hosted by Dr Varun Mishra, and lucky enough to attend Prof Gregory Abowd’s SIGCHI research lifetime award talk.
This visit prompted discussion around future collaborations, integrating Kaixin’s expertise of information retrieval in a ‘LLM for sensemaking in healthcare’ project, in collaboration with A. Prof Varun Mishra and Akshat Choube.
While in Boston, Kaixin also visited Whoop Inc., a company which specialise in wearable sensors for tracking health, and another connection she made through SIGIR.
“I thought there was no intersection between Information Retrieval and Ubiquitous Computing (for healthcare) communities, and was surprised there is, because of LLM.
“I visited their office in Boston, and we discussed the potential of having them as a collaborator on the UbiWell lab project,” she said.
From a connection made at UbiWell, Kaixin was then invited to visit ADM+S partner organisation Cornell Tech in New York City to further discuss synergies between her work and projects underway at Cornell. These conversations transpired into a new collaboration for ‘Cognitive Bias in Health Insurance LLM Assistant’, with PhD student Dan Adler.
“Apart from making new friends which is always a highlight, being exposed to different communities and different working environments from industry to research, computer science and schools – I gained career and life advice from researchers of different generations.
“More importantly, I learned how Information Retrieval is increasingly integrating with healthcare, and how my research aligns with this trend. These discussions help me rethink the implications of my research and what I want to do in the future.”
This research visit was supported by ADM+S and Google Conference Scholarships.
