Women in Computing Research: the Hopper Colloquium
London Hopper 2004 at Queen Mary University of London
20 December 2004
We would like to invite you to attend the London Hopper Colloquium to be held at Queen Mary University of London on the 20 December 2004. The aim of the colloquium is to provide a forum for women computer science researchers in London and the South East of England to come together to exchange ideas, form new collaborations, and more simply, become aware of the network of women conducting research across London and the South East of England. The colloquium includes speakers who are well established in their research careers and those embarking upon Ph.D. studies. Talks are at aimed at Masters level up and will show the exciting research carried out by women, at all stages of their career, and from diverse backgrounds.
DRAFT PROGRAMME
10.30 - 10.50 Registration & Coffee
10.50 - 11.00 Welcome and Introduction
Ursula Martin, Professor of Computer Science and Director of Research
Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London
Director of Women@CL project
Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
11.00 - 12. 50 Morning Session: Finding
11.00 - 11.40 Accessing XML documents: the INEX evaluation campaign
Mounia Lalmas,
Reader in Information Retrieval
Department of Computer Science,
Queen Mary University of London
11.40 - 12.10 Supporting Information Seeking Behaviour in Online Distance Learning
Sandra Tury, PhD Student
Department of Computer Science,
Queen Mary University of London
Information Systems Manager
Richmond University
12.10 - 12.50 A Cognitive Approach for Personalised Hypermedia Environments
Sherry Y. Chen, Lecturer
Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University
12.50 - 2.00 Lunch: Foyer of Skeel
2.00 - 2.40 Panel session: Standing Out
2.40 - 4.00 Afternoon session: Understanding
2.40 - 3.20 Can Machines Reason like Humans in Mathematics?
Mateja Jamnik, Lecturer and EPSRC Advanced Fellow
Computer Laboratory,
University of Cambridge
3.20 - 4.00 Layout in Natural Language Processing: The Case for Document Structure
Donia Scott, Professor and Head of Institute
Information Technology Research Institute, University of Brighton
REGISTRATION
The event is free, but places are limited. Please contact Fiona Billingsley to register by 10 December 2004.
ORGANISERS
Mounia Lalmas, Queen Mary University of London (Co-chair)
Ursula Martin, Queen Mary University of London and University of Cambridge (Co-chair)
Gabriella Kazai, Queen Mary University of London (Publicity)
Sue White, Queen Mary University of London (Local organisation)
VENUE
The colloquium will be held at the People's Palace, Lecture Theatre PP1, at Queen Mary University of London on the Mile End Campus. Directions on how to reach the Mile End Campus can be found at http://www.qmul.ac.uk/contact/directions.shtml, and a map of the Mile End Campus can be found at http://www.qmul.ac.uk/contact/mileend.shtml. The People's Palace is in building number 33 on the map.
FUNDING
Funding is available for travel to the London Hopper 2004 Colloquium for postgraduate students who without it, could not afford to attend. Please contact Fiona.Billingsley@cl.cam.ac.uk for details.
WOMEN@CL
This is a project of women@CL, which provides local, national and international activities for women
engaged in computing research and academic leadership. We are here because computing research is an
important and exciting, and computer scientists can change the world and get rich too. We support women
in computing research, with a focus on interdisciplinary research, leadership and enterprise,
through a programme of career development activities which will include regional and national workshops,
mentoring and networking.
women@CL is made possible with support from EPSRC,
Microsoft Research, Intel Cambridge Research, CMI, the University of
Cambridge, Newnham College Cambridge and Queen Mary University of
London.
For more details see www.cl.cam.ac.uk/women or
contact our adminstrator, Fiona Billingsley, Fiona.Billingsley@cl.cam.ac.uk>.
THE HOPPER COLLOQUIUM
The model for the colloquium is the Grace Hopper Biannual Conference in the USA, which encourages professional networks of women in computer science. These American meetings are held as a tribute to Admiral Grace Murray Hopper - pioneer of computer business language COBOL - who inspired many young US Naval computing students during her heyday and still continues to inspire many computer scientists around the world many years after her death.
Abstracts and Biographies
Accessing XML documents: the INEX evaluation campaign
Abstract: The widespread use of the extensible Markup Language (XML), especially the increasing use of XML in scientific data repositories, Digital Libraries and on the Web, has brought about an explosion in the development of XML tools, including systems to store and access XML content. These systems follow a more focused retrieval paradigm from traditional information retrieval (IR): instead of retrieving whole documents, they aim at retrieving document components that fulfill the user’s query. As the number of XML retrieval systems increases, so is the need to assess their benefit to the user. The aspect most commonly under investigation is retrieval effectiveness, i.e. the system’s ability to retrieve in response to a user query as many relevant documents and as few non-relevant documents as possible. The predominant approach to evaluate retrieval effectiveness is with the use of test collections usually consisting of a set of documents, queries, and relevance assessments. The INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX) was set up at the beginning of 2002 with the aim to establish an infrastructure and provide means, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of content-oriented retrieval of XML documents. This talk provides an overview of the INEX evaluation initiative.
Biography: Dr Mounia Lalmas is a Reader in Information Retrieval at Queen Mary University of London, which she joined as a lecturer in 1999. Prior to this, she was a Research Scientist at the University of Dortmund in 1998, a Lecturer from 1995 to 1997 and a Research Fellow from 1997 to 1998 at the University of Glasgow, where she received her PhD in 1996. She has been an active researcher in information retrieval since 1990. She has expertise in: knowledge representations; logical models; modelling uncertainty; structured document retrieval (XML, MPEG-7), web retrieval, combination of evidence in IR, data fusion, and evaluation. She has published widely on these aspects in conferences, workshops and journals, and organised a number of related events (WIRUL, LUMIS, FM/IR), and has been on various programme committees of information retrieval and related events (CIKM, SIGIR, FQAS, ECIR). Currently she is co-leading INEX, the evaluation initiative for content-oriented XML retrieval.
Supporting Information Seeking Behaviour in Online Distance Learning
Abstract: Effective distance learning incorporates elements of both individual learning and communication with peers and others. The change in focus from teaching to learning paradigms requires the instructor to support learners in activating previously acquired knowledge and skills, and to respond to their needs during this process. This learner-centred approach is grounded in the constructivist theory of learning which emphasises that learning is both an individual and a social process where the learner defines what he or she needs to learn by setting his or her own personal learning goals and constructs. Technology designed for constructivist learning must, therefore, achieve two main goals: firstly, to support efficient and effective individual learning, and, secondly, to foster productive dialogue and collaboration between the learner, his peers and his instructors. While current commercially available virtual learning environments (VLEs) usually achieve the second of these aims to a reasonable standard, they fail to satisfactorily address the first. Current information access through VLEs is usually limited to instructor-provided learning materials and a disorganised mass of unverified, often poor quality, web-based resources. Timely, integrated access to quality, full-text, electronic resources is, therefore, crucial. This talk will present the development of a VLE design methodology that will explicitly support the information seeking behaviour of distance learners through integrated provision of access to quality external information sources.
Biography: Sandra Tury is a part-time PhD. In the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, the University of London. She also works full-time as an Information Systems Manager for Richmond University. She is an expert on Library Database Systems. Sandra has a Degree in Library and Information Studies from Loughborough University and an MSc. In Information Technology from the University of East London. Her research interests are the areas of Information Seeking Behaviour, Distance Learning and Virtual Learning Environments Design Frameworks. She is a member of the Queen Mary Information Retrieval Group and London Knowledge Management Group, the British Computer Society, IEEE and CILIP.
A Cognitive Approach for Personalised Hypermedia Environments
Abstract: The Web is widely used for many applications such as digital libraries, online learning, and electronic commerce. The Web uses hypermedia technologies, which present information in non-linear formats. In hypermedia environments, users have to decide navigation paths by themselves. However, not all types of users appreciate being given freedom. In the past decade, many studies have found that individual differences had significant effects on non-linear interaction with hypermedia systems, ranging from gender differences, through system experience, to cognitive styles. Among these differences, cognitive styles especially play an important role in the development of hypermedia environments. In this talk, I am going to present our approaches that apply cognitive style mapping to develop a personalised interface for hypermedia environments. Various examples are used to illustrate how content presentation and navigation support are tailored to the needs of different cognitive style groups.
Biography: Dr. Sherry Chen is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Systems and Computing at Brunel University. She obtained her PhD degree from University of Sheffield in the UK in 2000. She was the guest editor for the special issues, Individual Differences in Web-based Instruction, of the British Journal of Educational Technology. Her major research interests focus on personalization and human-computer interaction. . In recent years, she has attempted to develop personalised web-based applications that can accommodate users’ individual differences. She is the principle investigator of three research projects: [1] Human Factors in the Design of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems: funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); [2] Cognitive Approach to Adaptive User Interface for Search Engines (CAUSE): funded by Brunel Research Initiative & Enterprise Fund (BRIEF); and [3] Cognitive Personalised Interfaces for Web-based Library Catalogues: funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).
Can Machines Reason like Humans in Mathematics?
Abstract: In this talk, I present how some powerful human-oriented reasoning techniques, in particular reasoning with diagrams and learning from examples, can be modelled on machines. Human mathematicians often informally use diagrams in order to better convey solutions to problems. Yet, diagrams have only seldom been used as formal tools for reasoning - symbolic logic is the predominant method of automated reasoning. I demonstrate how formalising the use of diagrams in flexible architectures allow users (in the case of interactive systems) and systems (in the case of completely automated systems) to reason both purely diagrammatically, and with a combination of diagrammatic and symbolic inferencing methods. The second informal human reasoning technique I aim to model is the process of learning a general concept from specific examples. The rare existing research into mechanising reasoning systems that can learn from examples only addresses symbolic reasoning. The goal is to combine the use of diagrams and learning from examples by devising a system that can reason with diagrammatic, symbolic, and combined diagrammatic and symbolic methods (the so-called heterogeneous methods), and can moreover learn such methods automatically from well-chosen examples. The hope is that ultimately such a system will be able to automatically discover new, interesting and intuitive solutions to problems.
Biography: Mateja Jamnik has been a lecturer at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory since January 2003, although she is currently on leave in order to hold the EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship "Automating Informal Human Mathematical Reasoning". She is interested in exploring and computationally modeling how people reason, in particular in mathematics. Broadly, her research is in, or is related to, the areas of artificial intelligence, automated reasoning, diagrammatic reasoning, theorem proving, proof planning, cognitive science, machine learning, human-computer interaction, knowledge representation, agent technology. She is married and has a daughter.
Layout in Natural Language Processing: The Case for Document Structure
Abstract: This talk will present the case for abstract document structure as a separate descriptive level in the interpretation and production of written texts. The purpose of this representation is to mediate between the message of a text (i.e., its discourse structure) and its physical presentation (i.e., its organisation into graphical constituents like sections, paragraphs, sentences, bulleted lists, figures, footnotes and so forth). Abstract document structure can be seen as an extension of Nunberg's `text-grammar'; it is also closely related to `logical' mark-up in languages like HTML and LaTeX. I will argue that by using this intermediate representation, several subtasks in natural language processing can be defined more cleanly.
Biography: Donia Scott is professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Brighton, where she has been director of the Information Technology Research Institute since 1991. During this period she has built a research group specializing in several areas of computational linguistics, especially natural language generation (NLG), lexical representation, and corpus linguistics. Her own research has focused on multilingual NLG, and on the realization of rhetorical relationships through layout, punctuation, and discourse connectives. Earlier in her career Professor Scott worked for some years on speech and intonation, at Sussex University and Philips Research Laboratories.