I am a post-doctoral researcher in the Computer Science department of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. I recently completed my PhD from the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My general research interests span information retrieval and human-computer interaction.
Currently I work on the PuppyIR project, trying to help make children's web search a little bit better. I've explored ideas such as providing fun media results for search queries, approaches to automatically find child-oriented pages on the web, and detecting controversial elements among topics and queries.
My thesis was about helping users re-find their own lost documents by using their previous activity with the documents as a memory trigger. Have you ever lost a document because you can't remember its name or any exact keywords it contained? If so, you probably remember other activity-based attributes, such as when you last used it (to prepare for a paper submission), how you used it (heavily before the deadline, rarely afterwords), and what documents you used alongside it. In my thesis, I explored ways to support the application of users' memories of these forms of activity in re-finding/retrieval tasks. Confluence traces user activity in the filesystem; SeeTrieve extends this with activity in the GUI; and Passages is a more sophisticated combination of these layers.