Research page

My research interests lie in understanding human information behaviour and discovering how computer-based tools can assist with the information tasks people perform in their daily lives. My Ph.D work, under the supervision of Dr. Ian Ruthven at the University of Strathclyde, was concerned with Personal Information Management (PIM); investigating how people manage and re-find digital information objects such as personal images, email messages, and web pages. More specifically, the work examined the role of human memory in PIM and how PIM tools can be designed to support human memory. Previous work has shown the role of memory in PIM to be non-trivial and that existing PIM tools place burden on the memory of the user. The central hypothesis of my doctoral work was that the creation of tools that support rather than restrict human recall requires a greater understanding of peoples' memory for information; what they tend to remember and forget; and what kind of support helps them remember more.

Inspired by the approaches taken in the fields of cognitive psychology and information science, I performed a series of studies investigating memory in different contexts. The findings informed the design of novel PIM prototypes, which were evaluated to reveal the usefulness of incorporating memory in the design of PIM tools, to learn about what people remember about their information, how they use these memories to re-find, and how interfaces can be designed to support these memories. Another contribution of the work was the methodology employed to evaluate the prototypes. Evaluating PIM interfaces is notoriously difficult and represents one of the main challenges in the field. I developed and published an experimental method that, while not solving the problem completely, allows researchers to perform controlled PIM evaluations. Further, by promoting a common methodology, my work offers increased scope for researchers to share and compare their findings.

My thesis can be downloaded here.

Research Links

• My Departmental Homepage

Publications

2008

• Elsweiler, D. "Supporting Human Memory in Personal Information Management" Dissertation Abstract in SIGIR FORUM 42 (1) pp75-76. June 2008
• Elsweiler, D. "Personal Information Management. By W. Jones and J. Teevan. University of Washington Press." Information Processing and Management. 44 (3). 2008. pp. 1393-1396. (pdf version)
• Elsweiler, D., Baillie, M., and Ruthven, I. "Exploring Memory in Email Re-finding." ACM TOIS CFP special issue on Keeping, Re-finding, and Sharing Personal Information. vol. (to appear). 2008

2007

• Elsweiler, D., Ruthven, I., and Jones, C. "Towards Memory Supporting Personal Information Management Tools." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 58 (7). 2007. pp. 924-946. (pdf version).
• Elsweiler, D., Ruthven, I., "Towards Task-based Personal Information Management evaluations." Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '07). 2007. (pdf version)
• I. Ruthven, M. Baillie, and D. Elsweiler "The relative effects of knowledge, interest and confidence in assessing relevance." Journal of Documentation. 63 (4). 2007. pp. 482 - 504 (pdf version)
• D. Elsweiler "The Cognitive Viewpoint with respect to studying PIM", Technical report, The University of Strathclyde 2007. (pdf version)

2006

• Elsweiler, D., Ruthven, I., and Ma, L. "Considering Human Memory in PIM". SIGIR 2006 Workshop on Personal Information Management, August 10-11, 2006, Seattle, Washington (pdf version) (poster)

2005

• Baillie, M., Elsweiler, D., Nicol, E., Ruthven, I., Sweeney, S., Yakici, M., Crestani, F., and Landoni, M., 2005, University of Strathclyde: The i-lab group's first big day out at TREC HARD, TExt Retrieval Conference
• Elsweiler, D., Ruthven, I., Jones, C. [2005] "Dealing with Fragmented Recollection of Context in Information Management". Proc. Context-Based Information Retrieval Workshop, Context '05.

2004

• Mohamed, R., Ferguson, J. D. , Mac Cormick, A. and Elsweiler, D., "Developing Bulletin Board Visulaisations", Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities 2004, pp. 11-18 (PDF version)
  
• Mohamed, R., Ferguson, J. D. , Elsweiler, D., Mac Cormick, A., Wilson, J. and Weir, G., "BulB - Visualising Bulletin Board Activity", 6th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Porto, April 14-17, 2004 (PDF version)
• Elsweiler, D., Proceedings of the Glasgow-Strathclyde Information Retrieval Workshop, Glasgow, UK (October 2004)(PDF version)

Awards

• The Euan Minto Prize for Best Student Academic Paper for 2005 (Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde)
• Mac Robertson Travel Scholarship (University of Strathclyde / University of Glasgow 2004)
• Best Presentation Award at Glasgow – Strathclyde Information Retrieval Workshop (October 2004)

Invited Talks

• GIST research group, University of Glasgow. 10th March, 2006
• Royal School of Library & Information Science, Copenhagen branch, December 2004
• Tapir Research Group, Royal School of Library & Information Science, Copenhagen branch, December 2004
• Royal School of Library & Information Science, Aalborg branch, November 2004

Roles and Responsibilities

• Student representative on the Research Council of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde

Media Interviews

• Interview for Danish Broadcasting Corporation Technology Programme Harddisken, February 2006. (Listen Here)

I have acted as a pc member or referee for the following conferences and journals.

Journals

• Information Processing and Management (IPM) 2005-
• The Journal of Information Retrieval (JIR) 2005-

Conferences

• 2008
  • IIiX Information Interaction in Context (2008)
  • ECIR 2008 European Conference on Information Retrieval
  • PIM 2008 CHI 2008 Workshop, April 5-6, 2008, Florence, Italy
• 2007
  • HCI 2007 - BCS conference on Human Computer Interaction 2007
• 2006
  • IIIX - Information Interaction in Context (2006)