Dania Bilal, PI, and Jacek Gwizdka, Co-PI, Receive Google Research Award

Dania Bilal, a Professor in the iSchool of Information Sciences at University of Tennessee, and Jacek Gwizdka, Assistant Professor in the School of Information and co-Director of the Information eXperience Lab at University of Texas at Austin, have received a $41,363 Google Research Award for a project titled “Child-friendly search engine results pages (SERPs): Towards better understanding of Google search results readability by children.”  In this project, Drs. Bilal and Gwizdka will investigate how children read and assess the reading levels of Google’s search results pages (SERPs). One of the goals of this project is to modify Google’s Reading Level metric.

In making the Award, Google Research Team indicated, “we receive many strong proposals every round and conduct a very thorough review of all the submissions, involving several teams of Google engineers and researchers.” According to Google web page, “The Google Research Awards are structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world.” Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT are among the others to receive awards from Google in the human-computer interaction category, the focused area of Drs. Bilal’s and Gwizdka’s project.

Dr. Bilal is one of most often-cited researchers worldwide on children’s cognitive and affective information behavior in using and interacting with information retrieval systems in multicultural contexts. Her research is situated at the intersection of information retrieval, information behavior, and human-computer interaction. She teaches courses in information access and retrieval, human-computer interaction, Web mining, information systems design and implementation, and research methods.

Dr. Jacek Gwizdka research is situated at the intersection of interactive-information retrieval (IIR) and human-computer interaction (HCI), where he is focusing on cognitive aspects of human-information interaction and on using eye-tracking to assess cognitive states of users. Dr. Gwizdka teaches in the area of human-computer interaction and user experience design.