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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.

Information is essential for social interactions. Most of us get a great deal of the information we share from the web. To make the most of that information, my research explores intelligent strategies of purposeful information retrieval and aggregation to present relevant, distinct and interesting information that is on-point with a particular topic or event. This information should help consumers of web content get a complete report on the topics or events of their interest.

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: Other social instances where technology can make a difference, such as 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

More about my research and publications by clicking the headers below.

In every social interaction there is information flow. This information comes from many sources; the web being one of the main ones. To support social interactions, I build and evaluate computable proxies to retrieve and present information with clear functional goals in mind. That is, the information has to be purposeful and distinct.

Purposeful retrieval and presentation refer to information retrieval mechanisms that work with functionally clear goals and make those goals visible to users. Distinct information, in terms of web results, has to do with the fact that every result displayed should provide a unique and potentially valuable piece of information. This is a departure from traditional models of information retrieval based on similarity, that invariably present "more of the same".

To support distinct and purposeful information at web scale I am also interested in exploring (a) scalable methods for information filtering and retrieval; (b) development of frictionless applications, that is, they gather and present information with minimal interruptions to the user; (c) strategies for proactively selecting topics of interest; and (d) social media as a way to provide feedback and improve the information presented.

To create these applications I start from observations about real world interactions and, based on sound social and cognitive science, I apply novel as well as proven engineering principles. 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 distinct and purposeful information with respect to content that is of interest to users and can support social interaction. I borrow from the literature on social sciences, cognitive science and 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.

In sum, I explore social interactions and ways in which technology can augment information to favor learning. This, in turn, may conduce to richer social interactions.

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 , Le Monde, and in the french technology magazine L'Atelier
• MakeMyPage: An aggregator that strives to retrieve diverse and on-point information about popular topics.

Jessie Paterson, Christian Lange, Iqbal Akhtar, Francisco Iacobelli, Paul Anderson, and Annette Leonhard. (2010). exploring the use of computational linguistics for automated formative feedback in the humanitites. In eAssessment Scotland (EAS2010).

Francisco Iacobelli, Nathan Nichols, Larry Birnbaum and Kristian Hammond. (to appear). Finding New Information via Robust Entity Detection In Proactive Assistant Agents (PAA2010) AAAI 2010 FALL SYMPOSIUM. Nov. 2010, Arlington, VA [pdf]

Francisco Iacobelli, Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum. (2010). 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 [pdf]

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

Francisco Iacobelli, Larry Birnbaum, Kristian Hammond. (2010). Demo/Poster: Tell Me More, not just "More of the Same". International Conference of Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2010. Feb. 2010, Hong Kong.[poster 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]