Chirag Shah's WebHome

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I am a PhD candidate at School of Information & Library Science (SILS) at UNC Chapel Hill. I received MTech (Computer Science) from IIT Madras, India and MS (Computer Science) from UMass Amherst.

At UMass, I worked with W. Bruce Croft and James Allen in CIIR, and David Jensen in KDL. My work focused on issues related to High Accuracy Retrieval, Topic Detection and Tracking, and Applications of Social Networks in Information Filtering.

At present I am working with Gary Marchionini on issues related to Collaborative Information Seeking, Result Space Support for Personal and Group Information Seeking Over Time, and Contexual Mining for Digital Preservation; and with Diane Kelly on issues related to User/System Relevance, and Perception of Search Engines. I am also active in the research related to Social Information Retrieval or Q&A.

During summer 2007 I interned at FXPAL in California working on various aspects of TRECVid as well as developing a framework for collaborative information retrieval. I spent summer of 2006 as a visiting research fellow at National Institute of Informatics (NII) at Tokyo working on formal aspects of Story Link Detection and TREC's Blog Track.

Some of the highlights of my life and work are given below. My detailed Curriculum Vitae can be seen here [PDF].

Publications

Shah, Chirag, Pickens, Jeremy, and Golovchinsky, Gene (in press). Role-Based Results Redistribution for Collaborative Information Retrieval. To be published in the Journal of Information Processing and Management (IP&M). [Pre-print PDF]
Shah, Chirag, Oh, Sanghee, and Oh, Jung Sun (2009). Research agenda for Social Q&A. Library & Information Science Research (LISR), 31(4), 205-209.
Shah, Chirag, Marchionini, Gary, and Kelly, Diane. Learning Design Principles for a Collaborative Information Seeking System. In the Proceedings of CHI 2009. April 4-9, 2009. Boston, MA. [PDF]

Writings

Shah, Chirag. What Do You Look Like on YouTube? Politics Magazine. July 2009. [Online]
Shah, Chirag. ContextMiner: Explore Globally, Aggregate Locally. In IEEE Computer. March 2009.
Shah, Chirag. TubeKit - A Query-based YouTube Crawling Toolkit. In Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, 5(1), Spring 2009. [Online]

Talks

Toward a model for Collaborative Information Seeking, Synthesis, and Sense-making: A Work in Progress. University of Maryland. October 13, 2009.
System-mediated and user-mediated Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS). Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK. August 19, 2009.
Collaborative Information Seeking: Cashing on the Wisdom of Crowd. School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Penang, Malaysia. July 30, 2008.

Teaching

I designed a new graduate course on Information Retrieval Systems Design and Implementation, which I taught at UNC Chapel Hill during Fall 2008 and Spring 2009. This course has also been "unofficially" audited by several students around the world!

For the Fall 2009 semester, I am teaching my course on IR systems design and implementation as a web-based course. More information available here.

I am also in the process of developing a new course on designing interactive information systems. I plan on teaching this course in Spring 2010 at UNC Chapel Hill.

Tools Developed

Coagmento - A collaborative search interface
ContextMiner - A tool for curators and researchers for collecting data as well as contextual information by doing automated crawls from various sources
TubeKit - A toolkit for building crawlers for YouTube
DiscoverInfo - A collection visualization interface for 1898 North Carolina election documents
DIToolkit - A toolkit to crawl, index, and visualize a collection

Services/Contributions

Some of the tools and services that I have developed over the last few years have influenced and helped several individuals and organizations around the world in their projects. Some of the examples are:

TubeKit being used in studying cancer research and other issues by University of Wisconsin at Madison.
ContextMiner helped two masters students at School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in their final year project.
A German PhD student at L3S will use data collected with ContextMiner to study automatic detection of video duplicates.
An intern at Lip6 in Paris has been using TubeKit to study information diffusion in social networks.

Awards and Honors

3rd prize ($500) for the paper at "YouTube and 2008 Elections Cycle" conference. April 2009.
NSF award for $448,071 beginning Sept 1, 2008 and running for 3 years titled "Result Space Support for Personal and Group Information See Time" (proposal written with Gary Marchionini and Rob Capra). September 2008.
Best paper award ($1000) at SIGIR 2008. July 2008.
Lester Asheim Fellowship at SILS, UNC Chapel Hill. 2006-2007.
Prime Minister Award for outstanding academic achievement. New Delhi, India. August, 1995.

Travel	More

One of my passions is backpacking. I have traveled to and/or lived in dozens of countries. The world-map here shows those countries marked in red.

Ballroom Dancing	More
I am a competitor ballroom dancer and trainer. I have competed in several regional and national competitions, such as Harvard, MIT, Manhattan Amateur Classic (MAC), International Grand Ballroom at San Francisco, and USA Dance Nationals in 2007 and 2009.
I have been very active in teaching and promoting ballroom dancing at various places. I was the captain of UMass Ballroom Dance Team, and have trained dancers at UMass, UNC, Duke, and NC State.