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I am Francisco Iacobelli. I am currently a Ph.D. student at the Infolab, in the Computer Science department of Northwestern University, and my advisor is Larry Birnbaum.

My research explores intelligent strategies of information retrieval and aggregation to present relevant and interesting information that is on-point with a particular topic.

I got my undergraduate degree in Systems Engineer and Informatics at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile . I got my Masters in Computer Science at DePaul University with a concentration in AI. Other interests include: intelligent tutoring systems and other aspects of AI applied to the education of children. I currently work with Larry Birnbaum at the Infolab In the past I worked developing Virtual Peers for minority children with Justine Cassell at the ArticuLab.

Here's my CV

In my research I build and evaluate "real-world" systems that employ intelligent strategies of information retrieval and aggregation to present users with relevant information that is on-point with a particular topic. That may sound like a search engine... well, not quite.

I am interested in (a) strategies for proactively selecting topics of interest; (b) generation of diverse information around these topics that is, "similar, but different," that is, interesting in some dimension and not just "more of the same"; (c) scalable methods for information filtering and retrieval; (d) development of frictionless applications, that is, they gather and present information with minimal interruptions to the user; and (d) social media as a way to improve the results returned.

In short, when these applications are executed, they "just know" what information is good for the user and present it in a way that does not disrupt her. Additionally, communities can benefit by customizing the contents and rankings if need be.

To create these applications I use NLP, traditional IR techniques, machine learning techniques, computational models of human strategies for information retrieval and I borrow ideas from social media. While I build these applications, I research innovative ways in which computers can provide relevant, timely and diverse information with respect to content that is of interest to the user. I borrow from the literature on HCI to both design and evaluate these applications; Paying special attention to the way in which they interact with users and the way in which users experience them.

I am also interested in the applications of these strategies to create rich online media for education.

Projects I am involved in are:

• Tell Me More: An online news reader that provides relevant details from other news sources. It has been featured in The New Scientist and the french technology magazine L'Atelier
• MakeMyPage: An aggregator that strives to retrieve diverse and on-point information about popular topics.

Francisco Iacobelli, Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum. (to appear). Synergy Between Automatic Content Generation and Social Media Third workshop on Mashups, Enterprise Mashups and Lightweight composition on the web (MEM2010) at WWW2010. April 2010, Raleigh, NC [no pdf yet]

Francisco Iacobelli, Larry Birnbaum, Kristian Hammond. (2010). Tell Me More, not just "More of the Same". To appear in the International Conference of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2010. Feb. 2010, Hong Kong.[draft pdf]

Francisco Iacobelli, Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum. (2009). MakeMyPage: Social Media Meets Automatic Content Generation 3rd International Conference of Weblogs and Social Media.May 2009, San Jose, CA [pdf]

Francisco Iacobelli, Alastair J. Gill, Scott Nowson and Jon Oberlander. (2009). Classification of Personality In Large Blog Data 19th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse. July 2009, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. [poster pdf]

Francisco Iacobelli and Justine Cassell. (2007). Ethnic Identity and Engagement in Embodied Conversational Agents. 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA2007), Sept 2007, Paris, France. [pdf]

David Huffaker, Joseph Jorgensen, Francisco Iacobelli, Paul Tepper and Justine Cassell. (2006). Computational Measures for Language Similarity across Time in Online Communities. In the Workshop on Analyzing Conversations in Text and Speech (ACTS) at HLT-NAACL, June, 8, New York City, NY. [pdf]