Research Experience


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Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee Knoxville

I was featured as Quest Scholar of the Week by UTK for the week of July 11 to July 18, 2009 Scholar of the Week

Assistant Professor, University of North Texas (August 2007 to July 2008)

  1. Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board funded project “The Texas Course Redesign Learning Object Repository: Research and Development for a Production System”. (Co-PI on User Experience, Usability and Policy section of the project). Total Project Cost $250,000 [2007-2008]
  2. “Technical Support in Open Source Software – Peer to Peer Digital Knowledge Creation, Sharing and Re-Use” (PI) Awarded as Faculty Research Grant by University of North Texas. ($10,000) [2007-2008]

 

Research Assistant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  1. Technical Support for Software

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation funded project, “Over The Shoulder Learning”. The aim of this project was to study the problem solving techniques used by people in collaboratively solving software issues. This study helps in defining the design of user friendly systems. I conducted ethnographic research on three different levels of technical support under this project:

*Face to face

In the face to face research project we focused on understanding the work place interaction between employees, trying to solve problems in using CAD software. We studied effective knowledge sharing activities of the employees and proposed requisite changes in the software that could ease the learning curve of new employees. This study was conducted at Caterpillar Inc and State Farm.

*Over telephone

We conducted ethnographic study of a unit of State Farm Corporation that dealt with handling telephone calls to solve the problems of their company wide intranet. Their agents in different parts of the country use their intranet to track technical problems in the offices of their agents and do the work of scheduling the technical support employees to these locations. This study was conducted at Caterpillar Inc and State Farm.

*Online (on Internet in Open Source Software)

This study was aimed towards understanding the same process of technical support provided to users but it was in an online context. The availability of the discussion lists and support forums on the websites of Open Source Software made it easy to analyze the process of help giving in digital medium.

2. Knowledge Management Systems

*In State Farm

Collected data on in-house users of a knowledge base for the usability group at State Farm, Bloomington, and presented the results of data analysis. We studied the adoption of the knowledge base, the problems that the employees were having in understanding this system and the methods they were adopting to solve these problems.

*At NCSA

Worked at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) with the Knowledge and Learning Systems group. The group has an objective of improving information systems by developing better visualization techniques and identifying parameters for evaluation of information quality for knowledge management and e-learning systems.

3. Collaborative software

*At Microsoft

Microsoft provided us with the beta version of their software Share Point Team Server. We worked in teams to evaluate the usability of the system, explain the shortcomings, propose recommendations and develop prototypes for the recommendations. We used cognitive walkthrough, heuristics evaluation techniques and scenario based design for this study. I presented the results of this study at Microsoft, Redmond November 2002.

4. Usability Research Experience

In a course on interfaces I designed a user study, conducted usability test, worked towards iterative web design by using rapid prototyping techniques to present an alternative website for the then existing engineering library interface at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

5. Community Informatics

I made a database of relevant conferences, key journals, key articles, relevant national and international organizations and key people in the field of Community Informatics. This was done to establish a common point for these resources and also to invite and involve the main people in Community Informatics community to the Initiative. This was used as the starting point in the current Community Informatics Initiative at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

6. Distributed Communities/ Open Source Software Development/Online Learning

Dissertation Research