Dr Ayse Goker

Senior Lecturer, Centre for Interactive Systems Research, Department of Information Science

Biography

Dr Ayşe Göker is a senior academic based in the Centre for Interactive Systems Research (CISR) at the Department of Information Science, School of Informatics, City University London. She has over 20 years' research experience in areas including context-learning algorithms, web user logs, personalisation and mobile information systems. Her work involves a strong user-centred approach to algorithm and search- system design, development and evaluation.

Dr Göker is currently City's Principal Investigator for SocialSensor, a large-scale EU integrated project aimed at developing a new framework for enabling real-time multimedia indexing and search in the Social Web. She secured a 1 million Euro budget for City's participation in this 10 million Euro project, which will benefit from CISR's expertise in context, personalisation and search. She is also PI for the Piclet Project and has led a range of other research projects.

Dr Göker has been an entrepreneur and pioneer in context-aware information retrieval systems since the early 1990s. She holds a lifelong Enterprise Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Scottish Enterprise for her contributions to AmbieSense, a large EU project which subsequently commercialised in the area of mobile information systems.

Dr Göker was a finalist in the highly competitive Blackberry Women in IT Awards (2005) and was Chair of the British Computing Society's Specialist Group in Information Retrieval (2000-2005). She is editor of the book Information Retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century by Wiley.

Prior to working at City, Dr Göker was a Reader (Associate Prof. equivalent) at Robert Gordon University and was Assistant Professor at Turkey's renowned Bilkent University in Ankara. She has a PhD in Information Science (1994), supervised by Professor Stephen Robertson and examined externally by Karen Spärck Jones and Michael Keen. 

Research interests

• Information retrieval
• Context learning
• Web search engines and algorithms
• Log analysis
• Personalisation
• Mobile search
• Mobile and ubiquitous/ambient information access
• Machine learning
• User models, user-centred design and evaluation

Dr Goker's work is driven by a desire to research and improve information access and retrieval for users. Working closely within a team, she investigates, designs, develops and enhances information retrieval systems, empirically evaluates them and then uses the feedback/results to improve and iterate these systems.

She has researched a variety of information environments including the bibliographic environment, the Web, and the mobile environment. The nature of Dr Goker's research often lends itself to commercialisation, and she has developed strong links with the commercial sector.

Research projects

Principle Investigator for the following projects:

(See Dr Goker's Research Projects page for more detailed information, including partners and full project descriptions)

• SocialSensor
  EU-IST, 1 million Euros (2011 - 2013), PI for City University London. A European Union large-scale Integrated Project (Information Systems and Technology), total budget: 10+ million Euros.
  Project description: Focused on novel search, index, and accessing techniques for real-time multimedia content with integration of events in social media.
  Collaborating partners include: Yahoo, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent and other European universities. More details of the project and a full list of partners can be found at http://www.socialsensor.eu/
• Piclet project
  EPSRC & Technology Strategy Board (TSB), £112K (2010 - 2012), PI for City University London.
  Partners: Direct Traffic Media (Search Engine Optimisation company), Media Reach (media advertising company).
  Project description: Investigating the image search and retrieval behaviour of professionals. Developing hybrid approaches from content-based image retrieval and text-based information retrieval techniques to retrieve or filter photographs. Relevant to areas such as news, advertising, blogs, and other social media. The project website is available at: http://project.piclet.com/
• Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship (2004-2005)
• Ambiesense EU-IST project
  IST Programme (2001-2004)
  Project leader/PI for Robert Gordon University and Co-proposer. Total project budget: 5.7 million Euros.
  Project description: Explored ambient, personalised, and context-sensitive information for travellers and tourists.
• AmbieSense: Business Support Application, Scottish Enterprise
  Scottish Enterprise and Grampian Funding. Principal proposer/Project leader. £20K (October 2004 - April 2005). Co-proposer: Stuart Watt.
  Project description: Continuity funding towards commercial demonstration for potential investors. Project involved financial contribution and support from SINTEF ICT as part of continued collaboration.
• Vodafone Senior Visiting Fellowship in Communications (2004-2006)
• Facilitating Information Retrieval by User-Adaptive Learning, EPSRC (2000)
• User Context Learning for Intelligent Information Retrieval, Nuffield Foundation, RGU (1998)

For more information, see:

• Dr Goker's research projects in full (includes partners and project descriptions)
• Collaboration in other projects/working groups

Awards, honours, prizes and fellowships

• MIT EDP Team Winner (2009) - Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Entrepreneurship Development Programme, business plan competition, team member in top 3 winning groups).
• Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellow (2005 - ) This is a lifetime title.
• Blackberry Women in IT (2005) - Finalist (Academia). For endeavours in Information Retrieval and mobile technologies.
• Honorary Reader, School of Computing, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen (2007-).
• Teaching Award (2009, 2010) - Nominee, for quality and innovation (nominated by students), City University London.
• British Council FCO (Foreign & Commonwealth Office) Scholarship (1988-1992), academic scholarship during PhD.
• Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Sponsorship (1992) for technical cooperation and knowledge exchange in Electronic Data Processing, Tokyo, Japan.
• Robert Kitchin Award (1989, 1990) during PhD by the Worshipful Company of Saddlers.
• Rotary Group Study Exchange Bursary (1995) to Washington D.C., and Maryland.

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Dr Göker was awarded an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Enterprise Development Programme Award in 2009 and an RSE (Royal Society of Edinburgh) Enterprise Fellowship (2004). Both are highly competitive awards enabling entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer, and innovation.

Further expertise gained from MIT Sloan School of Management includes:

• Financing for Growth (May 2009)
• Leadership, Women in Leadership (Mar 2009)
• Entrepreneurial Product Marketing (Nov 2008)
• Global Sales Strategies (Sep 2008)

The above were run in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and Innovation Ventures and were also sponsored by Scottish Enterprise.

Other:

• Technology Transfer Entrepreneurship, EPSRC & RSE
• Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen. Fully sponsored by EPSRC and Royal Society of Edinburgh (2005-2006)

Research activities

Committees

• Chair of BCS-IRSG (British Computer Society - Information Retrieval Specialist Group) (2000 - 2005)
• BCS-IRSG Committee Member (1999 - present)

Editorial board, reviewer

• JASIST (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology) (2008 - present)
• ACM-SIGIR (Specialist Interest Group in Information Retrieval) Annual Conference Committee/ Reviewer (2001 - present)
• IRSG/ECIR (European Conference in Information Retrieval) Programme Committee/ Reviewer (1999 - present)
• IIiX (2006, 2008, 2010) Information Interaction in Context symposium, Committee
• Journal of Information Retrieval - Web Information Retrieval, Special Issue (2004)
• Journal of Information Processing Management (2004 - present)
• ACM-SAC (Symposium on Applied Computing) (2002, 2003)
• Norwegian Research Council R&D Proposal Reviewer (2004 - present)
• EU-IST R&D Project Reviewer (2005 - present)

Conferences

• UM2005 International Conference on User Modeling, Organising Committee and Publicity Chair
• CoLIS 2005 Conceptions of Library and Information Science, Doctoral Consortium Program Committee
• UM2003 International Conference on User Modeling, Organising Committee
• UM2002 Workshop on User Modeling, Machine Learning and Information Retrieval, Organising Committee
• UM2001 Workshop on User Modeling, Machine Learning and Information Retrieval, Organiser
• IRSG 2000 (Now ECIR - European Conference in Information Retrieval), Programme Chair

Further research activities

• BCS / BCS IRSG Karen Sparck Jones Award (2009 - present), Panel Chair for the Award
• Invited scholar: Google EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) Faculty Summit Zurich, Switzerland (2009)
• Invited speaker: BCS IRSG Industry Day, London, 2009
• Mobile Search Masterclass - City University London. Jointly run by Geographic Information Centre and Centre for Interactive Systems Research
• Invited presentations: Glasgow University, Huddersfield, University of Maryland, US and others in European universities
• IIiX (Information Retrieval and Interaction in Context) 2008, Panel Member
• IiiX 2008 Tutorial - Mobile Information Retrieval
• Research Student Coordinator, School of Computing, Robert Gordon University (2002 - 2005)
• ECIR Invited Panel Member (2003)
• Departmental Seminar organiser, School of Computing, Robert Gordon University (2000 - 2001)

Further background

Dr Göker has a strongly international background, having been educated in the Far East, the Middle East and Europe. She has worked in both the UK and Turkey (at the renowned Bilkent University).

She speaks fluent English, Turkish and Japanese, has a working knowledge of French and moderate-to-advanced speaking skills in several Central Asian languages.

Her extensive and diverse research and entrepreneurial experience means she has strong interpersonal and communication skills. She has an appreciation of different cultures and languages and an ability to collaborate and work in teams with a wide range of research and business partners.

Employment/positions

• Senior Lecturer, City University London, 2006 - present
• Honorary Reader, The Robert Gordon University, 2007 - present
• Reader, Robert Gordon University, 2005 - 2006
• Senior Lecturer, Robert Gordon University,  2001 - 2005
• Lecturer, Robert Gordon University,  1998 - 2001
• Co-Deputy Chair, Bilkent University, Turkey, 1997 - 1998
• Assistant Professor, Bilkent University, Turkey, 1994 - 1998
• Research Assistant, Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University London, 1988 - 1992

PhD students/researchers

• Somayeh Khatiban - PhD, Recommendation in social media
• Maykel Perez - PhD, Internet framework and implementation in Cuba
• Hassan Syed - PhD, Web analytics and sessions
• Ralf Bierig (later Rutgers University) - PhD, Event and map content personalization in a mobile, context-aware environment
• Daqing He (Research Assistant, later University of Maryland, University of Pittsburgh) - RA, User-context learning for intelligent information retrieval
• Hannah Cumming (later Total R&D) - RA, Probabilistic ranking, context, and mobile search
• Sree Kanth Nuti (later software engineer, SME in India) - RA, Wireless information tags and content push/pull
• Bin Hu (later Birmingham City University) - RF, Pervasive computing
• Murat Yakici (later University of Strathclyde) - RA, Ambient context-aware content retrieval
• Gheorghe Muresan (later Rutgers University, Microsoft) - PhD, Cluster-based information retrieval for Web
• Zia Syed (later Micromuse, Oasys, Panasonic) - PhD candidate, Mobile computing
• Fional Walsh (later Logica, RWE) - PhD candidate, Intelligent adaptive interfaces on mobile

Key publications

For a full list of Dr Goker's publications see 'Selected publications'.

Books/monographs

• Goker, A., and Davies, J. (Eds) Information Retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century.  John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., ISBN-13: 978-0470027622, November 2009.

Book chapters

• Goker, A., Myrhaug, H., and Bierig, R. Context in Information Retrieval. In: Goker, A., and Davies, J. (Eds) Information Retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century. John Wiley and Sons., 2009, pp. 131-158.
• Mountain, D., Myrhaug, H., and Goker, A. Mobile Search. In: Goker, A., and Davies, J. (Eds) Information Retrieval: Searching in the 21st Century.  John Wiley and Sons, 2009, pp.103-130.

Journal articles (refereed)

• Goker A. and Myrhaug H. Evaluation of a mobile information system in context. Information Processing & Management Journal, Special Issue on "Evaluating Interactive Information Retrieval Systems" Eds: Borlund P., and Ruthven I. 44(1), November 2007, 327-338.
• He D., Goker A., and Harper D.J. Combining Evidence for Automatic Web Session Identification, Information Processing & Management Journal, Special Issue on "Context in Information Retrieval", Volume 38, Issue 5, pp. 605-742, September 2002.

Conference papers (refereed)

• Goker, A. Information in Context: The Mobile Environment, ELPUB 2011, 15th International Conference on Electronic Publishing Digital Publishing and the Mobile Environment.
• Bierig R., and Goker A. Time, location and interest: an empirical and user-centred study. Proceedings of the international conference on Information Interaction in Context, 2006, pp 79-87.
• Goker A., and He D. Personalization via collaboration in web retrieval systems: a context based approach. American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Conference ASIST03, pp.357-365, Long Beach, CA., USA, 2003.
• Muresan G., Harper D., Goker A., and Lowitt P. ClusterBook, a dual tool for information access. ACM-SIGIR 2000, Athens, Greece, pp. 319.
• He D., and Goker A. Detecting session boundaries from Web user logs. IRSG 2000. 22nd Annual Colloquium of IR Research. April 5-7, 2000, Cambridge - UK. pp. 57-66.
• Goker A. and McCluskey, T. L. "Incremental learning in a probabilistic information retrieval system". In: Machine Learning, Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop ML91.  Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 1991, Ed by Birnbaum, L A; Collins G C.  pp. 255-9.

Other: Conference workshop papers (refereed)

• Butterworth, R., and Goker, A. The potential of a 'high density' image retrieval interface. HCIR 2011 Workshop, Human Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, Google, Mountainview, CA. 2011.
  
• Goker A. Capturing Information Need by Learning User Context. Sixteenth International Joint Conference in Artificial Intelligence: Learning About Users Workshop. 1999, pp 21-27.

N.B. See 'Selected publications' for a full list of publications.