Sensemaking in Multi-artefact Information Tasks

The School of EECS is hosting the following PhD Progress Review 3 Seminar:

Sensemaking in Multi-artefact Information Tasks

Speaker: Tianwa Chen 
Host: Prof Shazia Sadiq

Abstract: Confronted with information silos and a growing volume of data in an increasingly interconnected data-driven world, knowledge workers, including technical and business users, often have to navigate multiple information artefacts to complete their tasks. These artefacts dispersed across various representational formats, and various information systems, can lead to overlapping, redundant or even conflicting information and inefficiency in information retrieval and knowledge workers’ understanding. Despite a growing market of tools, there is a lack of understanding in the current body of knowledge of how knowledge workers make sense of the multi-artefact information tasks and through what strategies. Motivated by the human-centric nature of the problem, this PhD project employs experiments from exploratory, experimental and empirical studies, and uses a number of behavioural and performance measures to unpack the cognitive demands on knowledge workers as they make sense of dual artefact tasks and multi-artefact information tasks respectively. The research findings provide novel insights and understanding of the sensemaking processes in various settings and contribute to modelling practice and the design of supporting tools.

Bio: Tianwa Chen is currently a final year Ph.D. candidate in Data Science Group at the School of EECS, UQ, under the supervision of Prof Shazia Sadiq, Prof Marta Indulska and A/Prof. Gianluca Demartini. Her research interests include User Behavior, Information Retrieval, Data mining and analysis, Conceptual Modelling and Business Process Management.