Scope of Interactive Systems Research

The work carried out by the Centre for Interactive Systems Research (CISR) focuses on access to, and retrieval of, information, as illustrated in the triangle figure below:

Figure illustrating the scope of information access and retrieval

The internal part of this triangle is the basic concepts and models of recorded information and its retrieval (for example the Robertson/Sparck Jones Probabilistic model and Cognitive models of IR).

Each 'node' of the triangle is related to the others, largely through the various theories which can be applied to IR:

the Information Retrieval systems and algorithmsnode reflects the majority of the Centre's interests to date
the contexts & resources of Information Retrieval node addresses either IR for particular groups (such as media and advertising professionals, disabled people, dyslexics, engineers, scholars of the humanities, etc.) or within a particular environment (such as libraries, information centres)
finally, the information behaviour node addresses the issue of how and why users do IR and seek information.

There is a great deal of interaction between each of these nodes.

Much of the research done in CISR has concentrated on textual data, particularly for ad hoc searching and information filtering tasks. More recently, however, Centre members have been taking their expertise in user interface design and probabilistic models for IR and applying them to new areas. For example, although the Centre's expertise was historically in the area of relevance feedback for text, the evidence that these methods can be used on other types of media such as images has led to research on multimedia retrieval and social search.