Dania Bilal, a professor of information sciences, has received a Google Research Award to further her work on how children read and assess the readability of Google’s search results pages (SERPs).
One of the goals of this research is to modify Google’s Reading Level measure.
Bilal will receive $41,363 from Google for a research project titled Child-friendly search engine results pages (SERPs): Towards better understanding of Google search results readability by children.
Google Research Awards are unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top institutions around the world. Google Research Teams “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 the award announcement.
Bilal’s co-principal investigator on this proposal is Jacek Gwidzka, assistant professor at University of Texas-Austin.
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.
Bilal, who came to UT in 1997, is one of most often-cited researchers worldwide on how children seek and use information retrieval systems to find information. She teaches courses in information access and retrieval, human-computer interaction, web mining, information systems design and implementation, and research methods. Her research focuses on children’s use of web search engines and digital libraries to find information, as well as the design and usability of these tools from children’s perspectives in multicultural contexts.
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C O N T A C T:
Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)