Dr. Daniel M. Russell shares insights on improving search experiences and the future of information retrieval
On November 13, 2024, UMD students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends joined us for the latest Search Mastery Speaker Series.
Abstract: Our speaker, formerly at Google, wants to understand the nature of how people use large and complex collections of information in useful ways, and to create an attractive, comprehensible, evocative user experience of that information. He tries to invent new mechanisms that let us know more, perceive more richly, and comprehend the world in new ways. He has worked on the design of information experience, sensemaking; intelligent agents; knowledge-based assistance; information visualization; multimedia documents; advanced design and development environments; design rationale; planning; intelligent tutoring; hypermedia; human/computer interfaces, etc. With an eye on new technologies, Dan will talk about how people search, what kinds of information they seek, and how their tools influence their search process. He shares lots of tips and insights to apply to our communities of searchers and discusses possible new pathways for search in our future.
Bio: Dr. Daniel M. Russell has been working in Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction for nearly 40 years. He has worked at several of the top technology invention companies in Silicon Valley (Google, Apple, Xerox, IBM) and has been at the forefront of many of their innovations. He currently teaches in the Human-AI group at Stanford’s Computer Science department, and was in the core search engineering team at Google for over 17 years. He has written over 200 technical articles for professional journals as well many articles for the popular press. His most recent book, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics, is now out in paperback. He has taught over 1,000 classes in-person in venues ranging from 4th grade classes to professional classes for reference librarians at the Library of Congress. He has been on the faculty at Stanford, the University of Maryland, the University of Zürich and serves on multiple boards of information schools. His online classes have been watched by millions of students for an accumulated watch-time of 450 years. Dan now teaches human-computer interaction and AI at Stanford and the University of Zürich.