Title: Human-centered computing: empowering users in complex informational domains
In modern society, whether making life-altering decisions or carrying out everyday tasks, people use online information, engaging in complex informational activities that place high demands on them and the computational systems that they use. Since this is partly due to the deluge of data that users must handle, significant research has been directed at devising automatic mechanisms that can handle large amounts of data. Interestingly, while systems and algorithms continue to improve, people increasingly need to engage with online documents more actively, purposely, and intensively than ever before. The challenge is not just to enable people to handle more data, but empowering them to use this continuously increasing amount of data, performing increasingly more complex informational tasks. This is particularly evident in complex and information-rich domains such as computational journalism, cultural heritage institutions, and assistive technology. In this talk, I discuss how research on human-centered computing is providing answers to the challenge of supporting (and taking advantage of) intense user engagement in complex information-rich domains by combining human insight with machine computation.
Bio
Luis Francisco-Revilla is an assistant professor in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. For over a decade, he has been conducting research on the area of human-centered computing, investigating how to augment the ability of people to use information actively, purposely and intensively. His research agenda is multifaceted and interdisciplinary, as it bridges social, informational, and computational aspects. As a result, Dr. Francisco-Revilla’s research interests expands and integrates work from several research areas including human-computer interaction, digital libraries, hypertext, computer supported cooperative work, information retrieval, and recommender systems. Dr. Francisco-Revilla’s recent projects include work in the domains of computational journalism, cultural heritage institutions, and advanced interfaces and interactions. He is primary investigator in the international collaborative grants Breadcrumbs, REACTION, and ImTV. He is also a Co-PI in the IMLS funded project CDLF. Dr. Francisco-Revilla has published extensively in the top venues in his field including: International Journal on Digital Libraries and ACM /IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).

http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~revilla/