21. Yasin Ghafourian - TU Wien & RSA : Improving information retrieval systems by modelling a users knowledge gap

# Summary

Yasin is a first year PhD Student working on improving information retrieval systems as part the European DOSSIER project. Where he is investigating new ways to improve the relevance of search results presented by interactive learning systems.

In particular his work focuses on ways to model, leverage and measure the user's Knowledge Gap; which is the difference between a user's prior understanding about a topic, before learning and their understanding after they have spend time using a learning systems to investigate a domain.

With his work, Yasin aspires to build the next generation of learning systems that reduce the time and afford users need to acquire knowledge. Building an adaptive system that is aware of a users understanding of a topic and can therefore adapt its response to present a user with the best next stepping stone on their learning journey.

As part of the interview Yasin is describing his main research topics and the progress so far.

In addition we are talking about different general aspects of Information retrieval systems, like user context and personalization.

# References

• Yasin Ghafourian - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yasinghafourian/
• TU Wien, Ecommerce Group (https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/orgs/e194-04)
• Research Studio Austria (https://www.researchstudio.at/)
• Dossier Project: https://dossier-project.eu/
• Boughareb, D., & Farah, N. (2014, November). Context in information retrieval. In 2014 International Conference on Control, Decision and Information Technologies (CoDIT) (pp. 589-594). IEEE.