Lilian Xie

Wellesley College '16, Computer Science

Week 1

Attended a number of lectures from the CS faculty on their current research
Met with advisor Dr. Gao to discuss possible research topics - began initial research on natural language processing and information retrieval with hopes of designing an application for sentence completion
Learned about a number of very interesting NLP & IR tools, including topic signatures, corpus linguistics, semantic analysis, and cross-language information retrieval.

Week 2

NLP/IR project scrapped, invited to work on Dr. Gao's current research topic of information overload instead
Dr. Gao is interested in grounding information overload in the field of computer science
Have been reading a number of cross-disciplinary articles (from journals of psychology, epistemology, information science, and more) in hopes of completing a literature review. Have also been skimming through some CS articles to gleam preexisting CS solutions to the problem of IO - though the majority of papers focus on identifying the sources of IO, there are some solutions, including developing recommender systems, applying data mining techniques, and building better human/computer interfaces.