We would like to invite you to the FIKA meeting on Monday, November 12th, from 3:00 - 4:00 PM in ITE 430. We will have one of the Ph.D. students, Victor Ondego, giving a practice talk. We would appreciate your participation to give him feedback on his talk. 

 

Bio

Victor Ondego is a PhD student in Human-centered Computing at UMBC. His research interests lie around Web Relevance and Credibility judgments from a Web Searcher’s perspective. Victor is interested in looking at ways in which information seekers go about deciding on the relevance and credibility of the information they encounter on the Internet.

 

Overview

Speakers of many languages have limited content available on the web in their native languages and thus search in English when looking for information on the Internet. The percentage of websites using English as their content language stands at about 52.1%, placing all other non-English language content on the Internet at about 48%. English native speakers on the Internet, on the other hand, are estimated to account for only about 25.3% of Internet users overall.  At the same time, native speakers of other languages are often multi-lingual, and English is the most frequently spoken second or foreign language.  Due to these circumstances, native speakers of languages other than English will therefore inevitably encounter situations where they seek information on the Internet in English as opposed to their native language.

When searching online, query formulations, search results selection decisions, and other aspects of information seeking, and retrieval have been found to be difficult when conducting the search in a language and culture other than the searcher’s native one. There are also some notable differences that have been found when people are presented with instances to make decisions and judgments in languages other than their native tongue.

The purpose of this research is to further understand non-native English speakers’ information search behavior and explore design solutions that may better support them.

Also, you can join us through Skype, please search 'umbc.isrc' and call us around 2:50 pm. 

 

Best,

The HCC FIKA Committee