I am a Professor at the School of Information Sciences (iSchool) , the University of Pittsburgh. I also have academic affiliation with the Intelligent Systems Program, an interdisciplinary academic unit focusing on research and education on Artificial Intelligence. I am the director of a research lab called Information Retrieval, Integration and Synthesis. I was the chair of SIS Council, the governing body for the iSchool, between 2012 and 2014. I currently serve on the editorial board of SCI/SSCI indexed journals “Information Processing and Management”, “Internet Research” and “Aslib Journal of Information Management”.

News

• Social Information Access: Systems and Technologies, Peter Brusilovksy, Daqing He. Springer, 2018
• JCDL 2018, June 3-5, 2018 For Worth, Texas
• iConference 2017 Call for Workshops
• ECIR 2017 Call for Tutorials

Research Interests

• information retrieval (monolingual and multilingual)
• information access on the social web
• adaptive web systems and user modeling
• interactive retrieval interface design
• web log mining and analysis
• research data management

Research Goals and Methodology

The goal of my research aims to advance people’s capabilities of accessing online information with the support of various cutting-edge intelligent and social information technologies. This goal fits nicely to the current data and information exploration environment, where there is too much data for people to process and consume, therefore, people need information technologies to assist them.

At the same time, I believe that the role that intelligent technologies can play is not to replace humans but rather to assist and augment humans in the access process. The relationship between humans and the technologies is a synergistic one where humans and machines work together to resolve the needs of the humans. Therefore, I am interested in making technology as enabler rather replacer, and it is people who initiate the needs of access, provide meaningful context, and utmost measures of success or failure of the technologies.

My research interests also root in the fact that I am in an information science school, where interdisciplinary and collaborative research is natural and has the greatest impact. I have built research teams and projects that involve faculty and students from different disciplines and various universities/institutions, but my goal of the research is always consistent.

Research Themes

My research can be summarized into two major themes. The first one is called intelligent information processing, which combines information science and computer science. Within this theme, I mainly worked on two research topics:

• intelligent information retrieval and its applications to personalization and social information access, and
• multilingual information access and its applications to interactive multilingual environment.

The second research theme is scholar data management, which combines information science and management. On this theme, my research work has been mainly on

• scholarly collaboration and research data management on modern knowledge and information infrastructure.

Major Research Projects

• Open Corpus Personalized Learning
  Funded by NSF, Duration: 2015-2018
  This project merges research on text analysis, human learning, and personalization to enable open corpus personalized learning.
• Teen Health Information Behavior and Social Q&A
  Funded by OCLC/ALISE, Duration: 2015
  This project investigates teens' assessments of the Accuracy, Credibility, and Reliability of health information in Yahoo! Answers about eating disorders. The aim is to contribute to the greater understanding of youth information behavior, health information literacy, and the role of Social Q&A in the provision of health information to young people.
• Tapping into Public Academic Information on the Social Web: Towards a Novel Academic Recommendation Framework
  Funded by NSF, Duration: 2010-2012
  This project aims to explore the utility of new and rapidly expanding public academic information resources on the social Web. The goal is to develop a quality assessment and an association discovery framework for online academic information, and ultimately to establish a novel framework for supporting researchers in accessing, organizing, utilizing, and exchanging all types of academic information.
• User-centric, Adaptive and Collaborative Information Filtering
  Funded by NSF, Duration: 2007-2012, Partner: CMU CLAIR group
  Working with our CMU partner, the objective of this project is to develop new technologies for Adaptive Filtering (AF) -- the problem of learning and adapting to a user's information needs "on-the-fly". We propose a new framework called "Enriched Vector Space Model" (EVSM) that allows a rich representation of user's interests in terms of queries, entities (person names, locations, dates), topical categories (politics, crime, economics), implicit and explicit feedback received from the user. Such user profiles can be used to perform more intelligent and personalized information filtering for each user.
• Adaptive, Robust, and Distilled Information Access
  Funded by DARPA GALE Program, Duration: 2005-2007.
  We propose to develop and demonstrate an integrated set of techniques for building an adaptive, robust and distilled information access module for information distillation, which is able to handle electronic newswire, transcriptions from broadcast news, telephone conversations, and talk shows, and web documents from newsgroups and weblogs, no matter whether they are originally in English or in Chinese, Arabic or surprise languages.
• Digital Library for Learning Digital Library
  Funded by University of Pittsburgh, Provost's Innovation in Teaching Award. Duration: 2005-2006.
  This project designed and developed an interactive, integrated and active learning environment using digital library technologies, with the goals to improve the quality of the student's learning experience and increase the effectiveness of that experience.

• More in my CV

I view teaching as a communication of knowledge and ideas between the teacher and students. A successful teaching session needs careful thinking, imaginative designing, clear presentation, and frequent evaluation and updating.

Graduate Courses

• LIS2002 Retrieving Information (Fall 2005, Fall 2006, Spring 2007, Spring 2008) [Syllabus. PDF]
• LIS2600 Introduction to Information Technology (Spring 2007, Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013) [Syllabus. PDF]
• LIS2658 Advanced Topics for Information Storage and Retrieval (Spring 2010, Spring 2011) [Syllabus. PDF]
• LIS2670 Digital Libraries (Spring 2005, Fall 2005, Spring 2006, Fall 2006, Fall 2007, Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013)[Syllabus. PDF]
• LIS2672 Technologies and Services for Digital Data (Fall 2015, Fall 2016)[Syllabus. PDF]
• LIS2680 Database Design and Applications (Spring 2005, Spring 2006, Spring 2016)[Syllabus. PDF]
• LIS3600 Doctoral Seminar: Web Information System (Spring 2008, Spring 2009, Fall 2010) [Syllabus. PDF]
• INFSCI2140 Information Storage and Retrieval (Spring 2008, Spring 2009, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016)[Syllabus. PDF]

I have published more than 140 articles in internationally-recognized journals and conferences in these areas, which include Journal of Association for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, ACM Transaction on Information Systems, Journal of Information Science, ACM SIGIR, CIKM, WWW, CSCW, and so on.

The full list of my publications can be access via my profiles at the following online sites:

Daqing He, Ph.D.
Room 618, Information Science Building
135 North Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Tel: (412) 624 2477 Fax: (412) 648 7001
Email: dah44 AT pitt DOT edu