Talks

2026



• The Delegation Paradox: Who Is Accountable When Your Agent Acts For You?. Bloomberg. August 26, 2026.
• Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Information Seeking: Why Epistemic Incompatibility Demands New Design Paradigms. ACM CHIIR 2026. Seattle, WA. March 25, 2026.
• A Design Science Framework for Human-Agent Teams in IR. ACM ICTIR 2026. Melbourne, Australia. July 25, 2026.
• Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at University House, Issaquah, WA, USA. June 19, 2026.
• Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at Trilogy at Redmond Ridge, Redmond, WA, USA. May 8, 2026.
• Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Information Seeking. ACM CHIIR 2026 Conference. Seattle, WA, USA. March 25, 2026.
• Being Human in the Age of AI. Wesley U. March 9, 2026.
• Being Human in the Age of AI. Sno-Isle Libraries at Mountlake Terrace Library. February 28, 2026.
• Beyond the Personalization-Privacy Pareto: Can AI Agents Break the Tradeoff?. [Keynote address] Third Workshop on Generative AI for Recommender Systems and Personalization. Boise, Idaho. February 26, 2026.
• The Age of AI Agents: Redefining Interaction, Intelligence, and Industry. [Keynote address] TechArena 2026. Stockholm, Sweden. February 12, 2026.
• Being Human in the Age of AI. Foley Institute, Washington State University. Pullman, WA. January 28, 2026.
• Being Human in the Age of AI. Magnolia United Church of Christ. January 26, 2026.

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2025



• From To-Do to Ta-Da: Transforming Task-Focused IR with Generative AI. ACM SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 15, 2025.
• AI Agents and their Legal Implications. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). Fairfax, VA. November 18, 2025.
• Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Amazon HQ2. Arlington, VA. November 14, 2025.
• The Delegation Paradox: Building AI Agents We Can Trust to Act On Our Behalf. [Keynote address] ASIS&T SIG AI. Washington, DC. November 14, 2025.
• Beyond Autonomous Agents: Building Trust and Accountability in AI-Powered Metadata Ecosystems. [Keynote address] DCMI 2025. Barcelona, Spain. October 24, 2025.
• Pragmatic Pathways: Transforming Information Access with Transparency, Trust, and Truth. [Keynote address] AI for Libraries Symposium. Beijing, China. September 29, 2025.
• From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. Peking University, China. September 26, 2025.
• From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Peking University, China. September 25, 2025.
• From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Renmin University, China. September 25, 2025.
• Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. Tsinghua University, China. September 24, 2025.
• Agentic Al: From Answer to Action. Peking University, China. September 24, 2025.
• Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. [Keynote address] Digital Humanities International Forum. Beijing, China. September 23, 2025.
• AI Primer and Copyright Use Cases. myLawCLE. September 18, 2025.
• AI Primer: What AI Is, What It’s Not, What It Can Do, What It Can’t. myLawCLE. August 22, 2025.
• Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Adobe. San Jose, CA. August 20, 2025.
• From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. [Keynote address] LLM4Eval Workshop at SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 18, 2025.
• From To-Do to Ta-Da: Transforming Task-Focused IR with Generative AI. SIGIR 2025 Perspectives Paper. Padua, Italy. July 16, 2025.
• From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Novel Experiences Through Agentic AI. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 20, 2025.
• From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Transmodal Information Experiences Through Agentic AI. Sorbonne Université, Paris, France. June 13, 2025.
• AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. [Keynote address] AIM 2025 Conference. Seattle, WA. June 9, 2025.
• New Age of AI Agents: Challenges and Opportunities. Global Big Data Conference. June 5, 2025.
• AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. AI Speaker Series, University of Washington, Seattle. May 8, 2025.
• From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science With Human in the Loop. University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada. March 27, 2025.
• What, How, and Why of Agents. Moveworks. San Francisco, CA. March 24, 2025.
• What, How, and Why of Agents. Foster School of Business, University of Washington. February 26, 2025.
• Agentic AI for Envisioning Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). Amazon HQ2. January 28, 2025.
• Toward Transmodal Agentic Systems. Ploutos. January 14, 2025.

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2024



• Building Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE) with Agents. [Keynote address] Amazon Shopping Science Symposium. Fremont, CA. December 10, 2024.
• Building Intelligent and Capable Systems with Responsibility. Defense Intelligence Agency. November 20, 2024.
• Toward Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). [Keynote address] CIKM Workshop on Multimodal Search and Recommendations. Boise, ID. October 25, 2024.
• Envisioning the Future of AI-Driven Information Access. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). October 16, 2024.
• Trust, But Verify: Verification and Validation of AI Systems. [Keynote address]. IEEE New Era World AI Summit. Seattle, WA. August 24, 2024.
• Envisioning New Modalities and Mechanisms for Information Interactions. The 2024 SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce (eCom24). Washington, DC. July 18, 2024.
• AI Basics and Current Issues. Washington State District and Municipal Courts Spring Conference. Tulalip, WA. June 4, 2024.
• AI Promises, Perils, and Paths. Washington State Superior Court Judges Conference. Yakima, WA. April 28, 2024.
• What AI Could, Would, and Should Do? [TEDx Talk]. April 13, 2024.
• Validating LLMs and LLMs for Validation. Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. March 28, 2024.
• Are We Ready for What AI Could and Would Do? Public Relations Society of America. March 27, 2024.
• AI Promises, Perils, and Potential Paths. Washington Appellate Courts Spring Program. Walla Walla, WA. March 25, 2024.
• The AI Frontier: Unveiling the Risks and Rewards. Companis. March 22, 2024.
• Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 21, 2024.
• AI for Information Access: How Do We Do It Responsibly? ASIS&T South Asia Chapter. March 20, 2024.
• Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 4, 2024.
• Positioning as an AI Expert, Researcher, and Developer. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). February 9, 2024.

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2023



• AI-Driven Information Access: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. [Keynote address]. ASIS&T Asia Pacific Conference. December 22, 2023.
• LLMs: A Lesson In Best Practice For Effective Prompts, Addressing Limitations, And Counteracting Bias. UW Tri-Campus HR Institute. November 9, 2023.
• AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors: How Do We Do this Right?. [Award lecture]. AAHSL/GIR Nina Matheson Lecture. November 3, 2023.
• Task Focused IR in the Era of Generative AI. [Keynote address] ACM MMIR Workshop on Deep Multimodal Learning for Information Retrieval. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. November 2, 2023.
• Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. [Keynote address] ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). October 23, 2023.
• AI and the Dilemma of Human Centered Research. SIG USE Symposium. October 7, 2023.
• Promises, Potentials, and Perils of Generative AI. U.S. General Services Administration. September 6, 2023.
• Generative AI and The Future of Information Access. [Keynote address]. The Web Search Revolution Symposium. Melbourne, Australia. August 16, 2023.
• AI: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. San Francisco Public Library. July 17, 2023.
• AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors. Columbus Metropolitan Library, Ohio. June 13, 2023.
• Challenges and Opportunities with Generative AI for Information Access. Inclusive Product Management Summit. Foster School of Business. Seattle, WA. May 13, 2023.
• Bringing Explainability and Transparency in Recommender Systems. Indeed.com. Seattle, WA. May 10, 2023.
• Artificial Intelligence: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. Urban Libraries Council CEO Roundtable. New York, NY. May 8, 2023.
• Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. Pacific NW Gigapop. Seattle, WA. April 18, 2023.
• Bringing Fairness by Mitigating Bias in Information Access Systems. AirBnb. April 4, 2023.
• From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. [Plenary address]. RoboAI-Con 2023. Rome, Italy. March 25, 2023.
• Taking Search to Task. ACM CHIIR 2023 Conference. Austin, TX. March 20, 2023.
• What does Fairness in Information Access Mean and Can We Achieve It? [Keynote address]. NUS Symposium on Search and Data Mining (NSSDM). Singapore. March 2, 2023.
• Data and Model Biases in Information Access. Gates Foundations. Seattle, WA. February 15, 2023.

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2022



• Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Information Systems. Chinese CHI 2022: November 5, 2022.
• Misinformation and the Downward Spiral of Information Access Systems. SIG-Social Media panel at ASIST Annual Meeting. Pittsburgh, PA. November, 1, 2022.
• Responsibility in AI for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Oregan State University. November 4, 2022.
• Bias, Fairness, and Transparency in Search and Recommender Systems. [Keynote address]. Santiago, Chile. October 26, 2022.
• From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. University of Michigan. September 15, 2022.
• Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Microsoft Research. Redmond, Washington. May 11, 2022.
• Algorithmic Information Access is the New Smoking. NorthEast chapter of ASIS&T (NEASIS&T) Summit on "With Great Power: AI and Equity". March 25, 2022.
• Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. University of Helsinki, Finland. March 18, 2022.
• Can Large Scale Information Access Systems Be Made Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. eScience Institute, Seattle, Washington. January 6, 2022.

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2021



• Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation. International Conference on Ethics in Biology, Engineering, and Medicine (ICEBEM 2021). November 13, 2021.
• Can Large Scale Search Ever Be Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst. November 5, 2021.
• Task Intelligence for Search and Recommendation. University of Pretoria, South Africa. October 11, 2021.
• Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Peking University, China. March 24, 2021.
• Fair is the New Smart for Intelligent Systems. Apple. February 1, 2021.

---

2020



• Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Facebook AI, Palo Alto, California. September 24, 2020.
• Addressing Zero-Query and Zero-Intent Cases of Recommendations Toward Building Intelligent Agents. Allen Institute of AI (AI2), Seattle, Washington. September 29, 2020.
• Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation [Keynote address]. European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). Lisbon, Portugal. April 15, 2020.
• Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation [Keynote address]. International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation (Bias 2020). Lisbon, Portugal. April 14, 2020.
• Addressing Bias in Search and Fairness in Machine Learning [Keynote address]. International Conference on Industrial Application Engineering (ICIAE) 2020. Matsue, Japan. March 27, 2020.
• Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter, Tokyo, Japan. March 24, 2020.

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2019



• Investigating Tasks and Taskers with Studies of Searching Online and in the Wild. DUB Seminar, University of Washington. November 13, 2019.
• Going Beyond Retrieval: Task Fulfillment and Fostering with Information. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. October 22, 2019.
• Counteracting Bias and Increasing Fairness in Search. iSchool Research Symposium, University of Washington. October 14, 2019.
• Addressing Bias in ML and Fairness in Marketplace. Ai4 Retail conference. New York City. June 25, 2019.
• Going from 'What' and 'How' to 'Who' and 'Why': Task Analysis in Online and Physical Contexts. University College London, UK. March 15, 2019.

---

2018



• Information Fostering - Being Proactive in Retrieval and Recommendation. Amazon, Seattle. Nov. 14, 2018.
• From Priming to Prejudice: The Light and Dark Sides of Data Research. Ryerson University. July 5, 2018.
• Information Fostering: The Art and Science of Providing Answers without Questions. Spotify, NYC. April 30, 2018.
• Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking and Retrieval. ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR). March 13, 2018.

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2017



• Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Seoul, South Korea. July 31, 2017.
• Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. July 24, 2017.
• Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington. March 29, 2017.

---

2016



• Information Fostering: Proactively Supporting Information Seeking. University of Tampere, Finland. October 21, 2016.
• Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. Guest lecture in PhD 610 (Seminar in Information Science). Rutgers University. October 13, 2016.
• Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Ryerson University. July 29, 2016.
• Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 30, 2016.
• Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: Bringing Synergy in Search. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 28, 2016.
• Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 16, 2016.
• Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. University of Texas at Austin. March 4, 2016.

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2015



• Building a parsimonious model for identifying best answers using interaction history in community Q&A. ASIST 2015. St. Louis, MO. November 9, 2015.
• Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: State of the Union [Keynote address]. Workshop on Evaluation in Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval (ECol) at ACM CIKM 2015 conference. Melbourne, Australia. October 23, 2015.
• Minority Report for Information Seeking: Fixing Things Before They Break in Search. University Technology at Sydney, Australia. October 21, 2015.
• Seeking information in online environments - Where, who, and why? iConference 2015. Newport Beach, CA. March 27, 2015.
• Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Search. University of Santiago, Chile. August 14, 2015.
• Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. Google, Mountain View, CA. July 21, 2015.
• Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. University of Maryland. July 14, 2015.

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2014



• Be together, but not the same: Leveraging the power of social and community connections for information seeking. The Center for Dynamic Data Analytics (CDDA). November 5, 2014.
• Questioning the question - Addressing the answerability of questions in community question-answering. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Wikoloa, HI. January 9, 2014.
• Distributed Searching, United Searchers: Investigating Social and Collaborative Aspects of Information Seeking. Google New York. March 19, 2014.
• The Next step: Adding social and collaborative dimensions to search. Yahoo! New York. July 14, 2014.

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2013



• Explore globally, collect locally: Social media data harvesting with ContextMiner. Symposium on Big Data in Public Health. Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. March 19, 2013.
• A proposal for user-focused evaluation and prediction of information seeking process. Position paper presentation at EuroHCIR Workshop at the ACM SIGIR Conference. Dublin, Ireland. August 1, 2013.
• Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. University of London, UK. August 6, 2013.
• Communicating for connecting: From telephone to Twitter. Meadow Lakes Retirement Community, Hightstown, NJ. December 16, 2013.

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2012



• Modalities, motivations, and materials: Investigating traditional and social online q&a services. ALISE 2012 Conference. Dallas, TX: January 18, 2012.
• Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. Yandex, Moscow, Russia: August 3, 2012.

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2011



• Online Question-Answering: Virtual Referencing to Social Q&A and Back. Scholarly & Professional Activity Committee (SAPAC) Brown Bag Talk. Alexander Library, Rutgers: March 24, 2011.
• Social Q&A: Questions of the people, answers by the people, information for the people. SC&I Alumni Association Dinner talk. New Brunswick, NJ: May 12, 2011.
• Collaborative information seeking: The art and science of making the whole greater than the sum of all. Microsoft Research. Redmond, WA: May 18, 2011.
• Seeking synergy in information seeking. Guest lecture in CS672: Recommendation and Search Engines. Dept. of CS, Rutgers: October 28, 2011.
• Online question-answering: Virtual referencing to social q&a and back. Web-based talk to ASIST Student Chapter at University of Alabama. November 10, 2011.

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2010



• Working in Collaboration - What, Why, and How? Collaborative Information Retrieval workshop at CSCW 2010. Savannah, GA: February 7, 2010.
• Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. LIS Lunch Talk. SC&I, Rutgers: October 18, 2010.
• Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. ASIST 2010. Pittsburgh, PA: October 26, 2010.

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2009



• Supporting research data collection from YouTube with TubeKit. At YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference, Amherst, MA. April 16, 2009. [3rd prize] [Talk]
• A story of context-capturing and cross-country coding. University of Wisconsin at Madison. August 12, 2009.
• System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS) Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. August 19, 2009.
• System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS). University of Sheffield, UK. August 21, 2009. [Abstract]
• Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. University of Maryland. October 13, 2009.
• Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. Pennsylvania State University. October 12, 2009.
• Awareness in collaborative information seeking. School of Library and Information Science (SILS) Research Symposium, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 30, 2009
• The same, yet different comparing studies of "raditional" digital reference and social q&a. Presentation with Sanghee Oh on ASIST 2009 Panel on Opportunities, Threats, & Theoretical Approaches: Research in Traditional and Social Virtual Reference Quality (SIG HCI). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 9, 2009.
• Cashing on the wisdom of crowds for question answering. ASIST 2009 Panel on Social Reference and Digital Reference: Online Question Answering Practices in Two Diverse Communities (SIGs SI, BWP, USE). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 10, 2009.
• Beyond Google: A quest to understand information seeking across time and people. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 4, 2009.

---

2008



• From searching to exploring, from finding to understanding, and from seeing to visualizing the information. University Research Day Poster (2nd prize winner). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, March 4, 2008.
• We, the people on YouTube: Understanding democracy of, by, and for the online media sharing. University Research Day Talk. University of North Caraolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 4, 2008.
• Collaborative information retrieval: All for one and one for all. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 24, 2008.
• Collaborative information seeking: An art of making 1+1>2. INLS 490 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 21, 2008.
• Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment. JCDL 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Pittsburgh, PA. June 16, 2008.
• Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment SIGIR 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Singapore. July 20, 2008.
• Collaborative information seeking: Cashing on the wisdom of crowd. School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Penang, Malaysia. July 30, 2008.
• Collaborative information seeking: Counting on the wisdom of crowd. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 23, 2008.
• Hunting for hip, Hipsters, and happenings on YouTube. ASIST 2008 presentation. Columbus, OH. October 27, 2008.
• Republic of web: A web of, by, and for the people. CRADLE talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 14, 2008. [Slides in PDF]

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2007



• Digital museums and user interaction. With Amy Morgan and Stephanie Adamson in Human Information Interaction class. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007
• Mining contextual Information for ephemeral digital video Preservation: A Beginning. Research Issues and Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007.
• Two is a company: A step toward building a Collaborative Exploratory Search (CES) environment. WHIP Talk at FXPAL, CA. June 6, 2007.
• Preserving 2008 US Presidential election videos. International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) 2007. Vancouver, BC, Canada. June 23, 2007. [Slides in PDF]
• Collaborative exploratory search (CES) - A beginning. Summer Interns Presentation at FXPAL, CA. August 7, 2007.
• Finding connectors, mavens, and salesmen on YouTube. Yahoo! Research, Berkeley, CA. August 10, 2007.
• Hunting for hip, hipsters, and happenings on YouTube - A ContextMiner story. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. September 21, 2007. [Slides in PDF]

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2006



• Story link detection (SLD) using named entity graphs. Northeastern University, Boston, MA. January 6, 2006.
• Using named entities based representation for story link detection (SLD). University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. May 5, 2006.
• Use of topicality and information measures to improve representation for story link detection (SLD). National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. August 16, 2006.
• Topic linking with blogs - TREC 2006 Blog Track: Open Task. TREC 2006 at NIST. November 14, 2006.
• Relevance revisited. Research Issues & Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 21, 2006.
• Investigating the effects of faceted interfaces - Research proposal. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 14, 2006.

---

2005



• Model selection in unsupervised tracking. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 6, 2005.
• A formal study of terminological feedback. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 13, 2005.

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2004



• Building plans for household tasks from distributed knowledge. Honda Research Institute (HRI), Mountain View, CA. August 13, 2004.
• Evaluating high accuracy retrieval techniques. SIGIR 2004. Sheffield, UK. July 2004.

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Africa

1. Task Intelligence for Search and Recommendation. University of Pretoria, South Africa. October 11, 2021.

Asia

1. Pragmatic Pathways: Transforming Information Access with Transparency, Trust, and Truth. [Keynote address] AI for Libraries Symposium. Beijing, China. September 29, 2025.
2. From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. Peking University, China. September 26, 2025.
3. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Peking University, China. September 25, 2025.
4. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Renmin University, China. September 25, 2025.
5. Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. Tsinghua University, China. September 24, 2025.
6. Agentic Al: From Answer to Action. Peking University, China. September 24, 2025.
7. Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. [Keynote address] Digital Humanities International Forum. Beijing, China. September 23, 2025.
8. AI for Information Access: How Do We Do It Responsibly? ASIS&T South Asia Chapter. March 20, 2024.
9. AI-Driven Information Access: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. [Keynote address]. ASIS&T Asia Pacific Conference. December 22, 2023.
10. What does Fairness in Information Access Mean and Can We Achieve It? [Keynote address]. NUS Symposium on Search and Data Mining (NSSDM). Singapore. March 2, 2023.
11. Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Information Systems. Chinese CHI 2022: November 5, 2022.
12. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Peking University, China. March 24, 2021.
13. Addressing Bias in Search and Fairness in Machine Learning [Keynote address]. International Conference on Industrial Application Engineering (ICIAE) 2020. Matsue, Japan. March 27, 2020.
14. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter, Tokyo, Japan. March 24, 2020.
15. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Seoul, South Korea. July 31, 2017.
16. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. July 24, 2017.
17. Use of topicality and information measures to improve representation for story link detection (SLD). National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. August 16, 2006.
18. Collaborative information seeking: Cashing on the wisdom of crowd. School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Penang, Malaysia. July 30, 2008.
19. Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. Yandex, Moscow, Russia: August 3, 2012.

Europe

1. From To-Do to Ta-Da: Transforming Task-Focused IR with Generative AI. ACM SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 15, 2025.
2. The Age of AI Agents: Redefining Interaction, Intelligence, and Industry. [Keynote address] TechArena 2026. Stockholm, Sweden. February 12, 2026.
3. Beyond Autonomous Agents: Building Trust and Accountability in AI-Powered Metadata Ecosystems. [Keynote address] DCMI 2025. Barcelona, Spain. October 24, 2025.
4. From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. [Keynote address] LLM4Eval Workshop at SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 18, 2025.
5. From To-Do to Ta-Da: Transforming Task-Focused IR with Generative AI. SIGIR 2025 Perspectives Paper. Padua, Italy. July 16, 2025.
6. From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Novel Experiences Through Agentic AI. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 20, 2025.
7. From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Transmodal Information Experiences Through Agentic AI. Sorbonne Université, Paris, France. June 13, 2025.
8. Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. [Keynote address] ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). October 23, 2023.
9. AI and the Dilemma of Human Centered Research. SIG USE Symposium. October 7, 2023.
10. From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. [Plenary address]. RoboAI-Con 2023. Rome, Italy. March 25, 2023.
11. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. University of Helsinki, Finland. March 18, 2022.
12. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation [Keynote address]. European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). Lisbon, Portugal. April 15, 2020.
13. Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation [Keynote address]. International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation (Bias 2020). Lisbon, Portugal. April 14, 2020.
14. Going from 'What' and 'How' to 'Who' and 'Why': Task Analysis in Online and Physical Contexts. University College London, UK. March 15, 2019.
15. Information Fostering: Proactively Supporting Information Seeking. University of Tampere, Finland. October 21, 2016.
16. Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 30, 2016.
17. Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: Bringing Synergy in Search. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 28, 2016.
18. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 16, 2016.
19. Evaluating high accuracy retrieval techniques. SIGIR 2004. Sheffield, UK. July 2004.
20. System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS) Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. August 19, 2009.
21. System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS). University of Sheffield, UK. August 21, 2009. [Abstract]
22. A proposal for user-focused evaluation and prediction of information seeking process. Position paper presentation at EuroHCIR Workshop at the ACM SIGIR Conference. Dublin, Ireland. August 1, 2013.
23. Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. University of London, UK. August 6, 2013.

North America

Canada

1. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science With Human in the Loop. University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada. March 27, 2025.
2. Task Focused IR in the Era of Generative AI. [Keynote address] ACM MMIR Workshop on Deep Multimodal Learning for Information Retrieval. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. November 2, 2023.
3. From Priming to Prejudice: The Light and Dark Sides of Data Research. Ryerson University. July 5, 2018.
4. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Ryerson University. July 29, 2016.
5. Preserving 2008 US Presidential election videos. International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) 2007. Vancouver, BC, Canada. June 23, 2007. [Slides in PDF]

USA

1. The Delegation Paradox: Who Is Accountable When Your Agent Acts For You?. Bloomberg. August 26, 2026.
2. Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Information Seeking: Why Epistemic Incompatibility Demands New Design Paradigms. ACM CHIIR 2026. Seattle, WA. March 25, 2026.
3. Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at University House, Issaquah, WA, USA. June 19, 2026.
4. Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at Trilogy at Redmond Ridge, Redmond, WA, USA. May 8, 2026.
5. Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Information Seeking. ACM CHIIR 2026 Conference. Seattle, WA, USA. March 25, 2026.
6. Being Human in the Age of AI. Wesley U. March 9, 2026.
7. Being Human in the Age of AI. Sno-Isle Libraries at Mountlake Terrace Library. February 28, 2026.
8. Beyond the Personalization-Privacy Pareto: Can AI Agents Break the Tradeoff?. [Keynote address] Third Workshop on Generative AI for Recommender Systems and Personalization. Boise, Idaho. February 26, 2026.
9. Being Human in the Age of AI. Foley Institute, Washington State University. Pullman, WA. January 28, 2026.
10. Being Human in the Age of AI. Magnolia United Church of Christ. January 26, 2026.
11. AI Agents and their Legal Implications. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). Fairfax, VA. November 18, 2025.
12. Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Amazon HQ2. Arlington, VA. November 14, 2025.
13. The Delegation Paradox: Building AI Agents We Can Trust to Act On Our Behalf. [Keynote address] ASIS&T SIG AI. Washington, DC. November 14, 2025.
14. AI Primer and Copyright Use Cases. myLawCLE. September 18, 2025.
15. AI Primer: What AI Is, What It’s Not, What It Can Do, What It Can’t. myLawCLE. August 22, 2025.
16. Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Adobe. San Jose, CA. August 20, 2025.
17. AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. [Keynote address] AIM 2025 Conference. Seattle, WA. June 9, 2025.
18. New Age of AI Agents: Challenges and Opportunities. Global Big Data Conference. June 5, 2025.
19. AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. AI Speaker Series, University of Washington, Seattle. May 8, 2025.
20. What, How, and Why of Agents. Moveworks. San Francisco, CA. March 24, 2025.
21. What, How, and Why of Agents. Foster School of Business, University of Washington. February 26, 2025.
22. Agentic AI for Envisioning Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). Amazon HQ2. January 28, 2025.
23. Toward Transmodal Agentic Systems. Ploutos. January 14, 2025.
24. Building Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE) with Agents. [Keynote address] Amazon Shopping Science Symposium. Fremont, CA. December 10, 2024.
25. Building Intelligent and Capable Systems with Responsibility. Defense Intelligence Agency. November 20, 2024.
26. Toward Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). [Keynote address] CIKM Workshop on Multimodal Search and Recommendations. Boise, ID. October 25, 2024.
27. Envisioning the Future of AI-Driven Information Access. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). October 16, 2024.
28. Trust, But Verify: Verification and Validation of AI Systems. [Keynote address]. IEEE New Era World AI Summit. Seattle, WA. August 24, 2024.
29. Envisioning New Modalities and Mechanisms for Information Interactions. The 2024 SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce (eCom24). Washington, DC. July 18, 2024.
30. AI Basics and Current Issues. Washington State District and Municipal Courts Spring Conference. Tulalip, WA. June 4, 2024.
31. AI Promises, Perils, and Paths. Washington State Superior Court Judges Conference. Yakima, WA. April 28, 2024.
32. What AI Could, Would, and Should Do? [TEDx Talk]. April 13, 2024.
33. Validating LLMs and LLMs for Validation. Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. March 28, 2024.
34. Are We Ready for What AI Could and Would Do? Public Relations Society of America. March 27, 2024.
35. AI Promises, Perils, and Potential Paths. Washington Appellate Courts Spring Program. Walla Walla, WA. March 25, 2024.
36. The AI Frontier: Unveiling the Risks and Rewards. Companis. March 22, 2024.
37. Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 21, 2024.
38. Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 4, 2024.
39. Positioning as an AI Expert, Researcher, and Developer. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). February 9, 2024.
40. LLMs: A Lesson In Best Practice For Effective Prompts, Addressing Limitations, And Counteracting Bias. UW Tri-Campus HR Institute. November 9, 2023.
41. AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors: How Do We Do this Right?. [Award lecture]. AAHSL/GIR Nina Matheson Lecture. November 3, 2023.
42. Promises, Potentials, and Perils of Generative AI. U.S. General Services Administration. September 6, 2023.
43. AI: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. San Francisco Public Library. July 17, 2023.
44. AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors. Columbus Metropolitan Library, Ohio. June 13, 2023.
45. Challenges and Opportunities with Generative AI for Information Access. Inclusive Product Management Summit. Foster School of Business. Seattle, WA. May 13, 2023.
46. Bringing Explainability and Transparency in Recommender Systems. Indeed.com. Seattle, WA. May 10, 2023.
47. Artificial Intelligence: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. Urban Libraries Council CEO Roundtable. New York, NY. May 8, 2023.
48. Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. Pacific NW Gigapop. Seattle, WA. April 18, 2023.
49. Bringing Fairness by Mitigating Bias in Information Access Systems. AirBnb. April 4, 2023.
50. Taking Search to Task. ACM CHIIR 2023 Conference. Austin, TX. March 20, 2023.
51. Data and Model Biases in Information Access. Gates Foundations. Seattle, WA. February 15, 2023.
52. Misinformation and the Downward Spiral of Information Access Systems. SIG-Social Media panel at ASIST Annual Meeting. Pittsburgh, PA. November, 1, 2022.
53. Responsibility in AI for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Oregan State University. November 4, 2022.
54. From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. University of Michigan. September 15, 2022.
55. Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Microsoft Research. Redmond, Washington. May 11, 2022.
56. Algorithmic Information Access is the New Smoking. NorthEast chapter of ASIS&T (NEASIS&T) Summit on "With Great Power: AI and Equity". March 25, 2022.
57. Can Large Scale Information Access Systems Be Made Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. eScience Institute, Seattle, Washington. January 6, 2022.
58. Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation. International Conference on Ethics in Biology, Engineering, and Medicine (ICEBEM 2021). November 13, 2021.
59. Can Large Scale Search Ever Be Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst. November 5, 2021.
60. Fair is the New Smart for Intelligent Systems. Apple. February 1, 2021.
61. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Facebook AI, Palo Alto, California. September 24, 2020.
62. Addressing Zero-Query and Zero-Intent Cases of Recommendations Toward Building Intelligent Agents. Allen Institute of AI (AI2), Seattle, Washington. September 29, 2020.
63. Investigating Tasks and Taskers with Studies of Searching Online and in the Wild. DUB Seminar, University of Washington. November 13, 2019.
64. Counteracting Bias and Increasing Fairness in Search. iSchool Research Symposium, University of Washington. October 14, 2019.
65. Addressing Bias in ML and Fairness in Marketplace. Ai4 Retail conference. New York City. June 25, 2019.
66. Information Fostering - Being Proactive in Retrieval and Recommendation. Amazon, Seattle. Nov. 14, 2018.
67. Information Fostering: The Art and Science of Providing Answers without Questions. Spotify, NYC. April 30, 2018.
68. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking and Retrieval. ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR). March 13, 2018.
69. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington. March 29, 2017.
70. Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. Guest lecture in PhD 610 (Seminar in Information Science). Rutgers University. October 13, 2016.
71. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. University of Texas at Austin. March 4, 2016.
72. Building a parsimonious model for identifying best answers using interaction history in community Q&A. ASIST 2015. St. Louis, MO. November 9, 2015.
73. Seeking information in online environments - Where, who, and why? iConference 2015. Newport Beach, CA. March 27, 2015.
74. Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. Google, Mountain View, CA. July 21, 2015.
75. Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. University of Maryland. July 14, 2015.
76. Be together, but not the same: Leveraging the power of social and community connections for information seeking. The Center for Dynamic Data Analytics (CDDA). November 5, 2014.
77. Building plans for household tasks from distributed knowledge. Honda Research Institute (HRI), Mountain View, CA. August 13, 2004.
78. Model selection in unsupervised tracking. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 6, 2005.
79. A formal study of terminological feedback. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 13, 2005.
80. Story link detection (SLD) using named entity graphs. Northeastern University, Boston, MA. January 6, 2006.
81. Using named entities based representation for story link detection (SLD). University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. May 5, 2006.
82. Topic linking with blogs - TREC 2006 Blog Track: Open Task. TREC 2006 at NIST. November 14, 2006.
83. Relevance revisited. Research Issues & Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 21, 2006.
84. Investigating the effects of faceted interfaces - Research proposal. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 14, 2006.
85. Digital museums and user interaction. With Amy Morgan and Stephanie Adamson in Human Information Interaction class. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007
86. Mining contextual Information for ephemeral digital video Preservation: A Beginning. Research Issues and Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007.
87. Two is a company: A step toward building a Collaborative Exploratory Search (CES) environment. WHIP Talk at FXPAL, CA. June 6, 2007.
88. Collaborative exploratory search (CES) - A beginning. Summer Interns Presentation at FXPAL, CA. August 7, 2007.
89. Finding connectors, mavens, and salesmen on YouTube. Yahoo! Research, Berkeley, CA. August 10, 2007.
90. Hunting for hip, hipsters, and happenings on YouTube - A ContextMiner story. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. September 21, 2007. [Slides in PDF]
91. From searching to exploring, from finding to understanding, and from seeing to visualizing the information. University Research Day Poster (2nd prize winner). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, March 4, 2008.
92. We, the people on YouTube: Understanding democracy of, by, and for the online media sharing. University Research Day Talk. University of North Caraolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 4, 2008.
93. Collaborative information retrieval: All for one and one for all. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 24, 2008.
94. Collaborative information seeking: An art of making 1+1>2. INLS 490 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 21, 2008.
95. Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment. JCDL 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Pittsburgh, PA. June 16, 2008.
96. Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment SIGIR 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Singapore. July 20, 2008.
97. Collaborative information seeking: Counting on the wisdom of crowd. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 23, 2008.
98. Hunting for hip, Hipsters, and happenings on YouTube. ASIST 2008 presentation. Columbus, OH. October 27, 2008.
99. Republic of web: A web of, by, and for the people. CRADLE talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 14, 2008. [Slides in PDF]
100. Supporting research data collection from YouTube with TubeKit. At YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference, Amherst, MA. April 16, 2009. [3rd prize] [Talk]
101. A story of context-capturing and cross-country coding. University of Wisconsin at Madison. August 12, 2009.
102. Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. University of Maryland. October 13, 2009.
103. Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. Pennsylvania State University. October 12, 2009.
104. Awareness in collaborative information seeking. School of Library and Information Science (SILS) Research Symposium, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 30, 2009
105. The same, yet different comparing studies of "raditional" digital reference and social q&a. Presentation with Sanghee Oh on ASIST 2009 Panel on Opportunities, Threats, & Theoretical Approaches: Research in Traditional and Social Virtual Reference Quality (SIG HCI). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 9, 2009.
106. Cashing on the wisdom of crowds for question answering. ASIST 2009 Panel on Social Reference and Digital Reference: Online Question Answering Practices in Two Diverse Communities (SIGs SI, BWP, USE). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 10, 2009.
107. Beyond Google: A quest to understand information seeking across time and people. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 4, 2009.
108. Working in Collaboration - What, Why, and How? Collaborative Information Retrieval workshop at CSCW 2010. Savannah, GA: February 7, 2010.
109. Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. LIS Lunch Talk. SC&I, Rutgers: October 18, 2010.
110. Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. ASIST 2010. Pittsburgh, PA: October 26, 2010.
111. Online Question-Answering: Virtual Referencing to Social Q&A and Back. Scholarly & Professional Activity Committee (SAPAC) Brown Bag Talk. Alexander Library, Rutgers: March 24, 2011.
112. Social Q&A: Questions of the people, answers by the people, information for the people. SC&I Alumni Association Dinner talk. New Brunswick, NJ: May 12, 2011.
113. Collaborative information seeking: The art and science of making the whole greater than the sum of all. Microsoft Research. Redmond, WA: May 18, 2011.
114. Seeking synergy in information seeking. Guest lecture in CS672: Recommendation and Search Engines. Dept. of CS, Rutgers: October 28, 2011.
115. Online question-answering: Virtual referencing to social q&a and back. Web-based talk to ASIST Student Chapter at University of Alabama. November 10, 2011.
116. Modalities, motivations, and materials: Investigating traditional and social online q&a services. ALISE 2012 Conference. Dallas, TX: January 18, 2012.
117. Explore globally, collect locally: Social media data harvesting with ContextMiner. Symposium on Big Data in Public Health. Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. March 19, 2013.
118. Communicating for connecting: From telephone to Twitter. Meadow Lakes Retirement Community, Hightstown, NJ. December 16, 2013.
119. Questioning the question - Addressing the answerability of questions in community question-answering. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Wikoloa, HI. January 9, 2014.
120. Distributed Searching, United Searchers: Investigating Social and Collaborative Aspects of Information Seeking. Google New York. March 19, 2014.
121. The Next step: Adding social and collaborative dimensions to search. Yahoo! New York. July 14, 2014.

Oceania

1. A Design Science Framework for Human-Agent Teams in IR. ACM ICTIR 2026. Melbourne, Australia. July 25, 2026.
2. Generative AI and The Future of Information Access. [Keynote address]. The Web Search Revolution Symposium. Melbourne, Australia. August 16, 2023.
3. Going Beyond Retrieval: Task Fulfillment and Fostering with Information. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. October 22, 2019.
4. Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: State of the Union [Keynote address]. Workshop on Evaluation in Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval (ECol) at ACM CIKM 2015 conference. Melbourne, Australia. October 23, 2015.
5. Minority Report for Information Seeking: Fixing Things Before They Break in Search. University Technology at Sydney, Australia. October 21, 2015.

South America

1. Bias, Fairness, and Transparency in Search and Recommender Systems. [Keynote address]. Santiago, Chile. October 26, 2022.
2. Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Search. University of Santiago, Chile. August 14, 2015.

Contributed (Refereed)

1. From To-Do to Ta-Da: Transforming Task-Focused IR with Generative AI. ACM SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 15, 2025.
2. Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Information Seeking: Why Epistemic Incompatibility Demands New Design Paradigms. ACM CHIIR 2026. Seattle, WA. March 25, 2026.
3. A Design Science Framework for Human-Agent Teams in IR. ACM ICTIR 2026. Melbourne, Australia. July 25, 2026.
4. Taking Search to Task. ACM CHIIR 2023 Conference. Austin, TX. March 20, 2023.
5. Misinformation and the Downward Spiral of Information Access Systems. SIG-Social Media panel at ASIST Annual Meeting. Pittsburgh, PA. November, 1, 2022.
6. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking and Retrieval. ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR). March 13, 2018.
7. Building a parsimonious model for identifying best answers using interaction history in community Q&A. ASIST 2015. St. Louis, MO. November 9, 2015.
8. Seeking information in online environments - Where, who, and why? iConference 2015. Newport Beach, CA. March 27, 2015.
9. Evaluating high accuracy retrieval techniques. SIGIR 2004. Sheffield, UK. July 2004.
10. Topic linking with blogs - TREC 2006 Blog Track: Open Task. TREC 2006 at NIST. November 14, 2006.
11. Preserving 2008 US Presidential election videos. International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) 2007. Vancouver, BC, Canada. June 23, 2007. [Slides in PDF]
12. From searching to exploring, from finding to understanding, and from seeing to visualizing the information. University Research Day Poster (2nd prize winner). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, March 4, 2008.
13. We, the people on YouTube: Understanding democracy of, by, and for the online media sharing. University Research Day Talk. University of North Caraolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 4, 2008.
14. Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment. JCDL 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Pittsburgh, PA. June 16, 2008.
15. Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment SIGIR 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Singapore. July 20, 2008.
16. Hunting for hip, Hipsters, and happenings on YouTube. ASIST 2008 presentation. Columbus, OH. October 27, 2008.
17. Supporting research data collection from YouTube with TubeKit. At YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference, Amherst, MA. April 16, 2009. [3rd prize] [Talk]
18. The same, yet different comparing studies of "raditional" digital reference and social q&a. Presentation with Sanghee Oh on ASIST 2009 Panel on Opportunities, Threats, & Theoretical Approaches: Research in Traditional and Social Virtual Reference Quality (SIG HCI). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 9, 2009.
19. Cashing on the wisdom of crowds for question answering. ASIST 2009 Panel on Social Reference and Digital Reference: Online Question Answering Practices in Two Diverse Communities (SIGs SI, BWP, USE). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 10, 2009.
20. Working in Collaboration - What, Why, and How? Collaborative Information Retrieval workshop at CSCW 2010. Savannah, GA: February 7, 2010.
21. Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. ASIST 2010. Pittsburgh, PA: October 26, 2010.
22. Modalities, motivations, and materials: Investigating traditional and social online q&a services. ALISE 2012 Conference. Dallas, TX: January 18, 2012.
23. A proposal for user-focused evaluation and prediction of information seeking process. Position paper presentation at EuroHCIR Workshop at the ACM SIGIR Conference. Dublin, Ireland. August 1, 2013.
24. Questioning the question - Addressing the answerability of questions in community question-answering. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Wikoloa, HI. January 9, 2014.

Invited

1. The Delegation Paradox: Who Is Accountable When Your Agent Acts For You?. Bloomberg. August 26, 2026.
2. Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at University House, Issaquah, WA, USA. June 19, 2026.
3. Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at Trilogy at Redmond Ridge, Redmond, WA, USA. May 8, 2026.
4. Being Human in the Age of AI. Wesley U. March 9, 2026.
5. Being Human in the Age of AI. Sno-Isle Libraries at Mountlake Terrace Library. February 28, 2026.
6. Beyond the Personalization-Privacy Pareto: Can AI Agents Break the Tradeoff?. [Keynote address] Third Workshop on Generative AI for Recommender Systems and Personalization. Boise, Idaho. February 26, 2026.
7. The Age of AI Agents: Redefining Interaction, Intelligence, and Industry. [Keynote address] TechArena 2026. Stockholm, Sweden. February 12, 2026.
8. Being Human in the Age of AI. Foley Institute, Washington State University. Pullman, WA. January 28, 2026.
9. Being Human in the Age of AI. Magnolia United Church of Christ. January 26, 2026.
10. AI Agents and their Legal Implications. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). Fairfax, VA. November 18, 2025.
11. Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Amazon HQ2. Arlington, VA. November 14, 2025.
12. The Delegation Paradox: Building AI Agents We Can Trust to Act On Our Behalf. [Keynote address] ASIS&T SIG AI. Washington, DC. November 14, 2025.
13. Beyond Autonomous Agents: Building Trust and Accountability in AI-Powered Metadata Ecosystems. [Keynote address] DCMI 2025. Barcelona, Spain. October 24, 2025.
14. Pragmatic Pathways: Transforming Information Access with Transparency, Trust, and Truth. [Keynote address] AI for Libraries Symposium. Beijing, China. September 29, 2025.
15. From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. Peking University, China. September 26, 2025.
16. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Peking University, China. September 25, 2025.
17. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Renmin University, China. September 25, 2025.
18. Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. Tsinghua University, China. September 24, 2025.
19. Agentic Al: From Answer to Action. Peking University, China. September 24, 2025.
20. Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. [Keynote address] Digital Humanities International Forum. Beijing, China. September 23, 2025.
21. AI Primer and Copyright Use Cases. myLawCLE. September 18, 2025.
22. AI Primer: What AI Is, What It’s Not, What It Can Do, What It Can’t. myLawCLE. August 22, 2025.
23. Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Adobe. San Jose, CA. August 20, 2025.
24. From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. [Keynote address] LLM4Eval Workshop at SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 18, 2025.
25. From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Novel Experiences Through Agentic AI. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 20, 2025.
26. From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Transmodal Information Experiences Through Agentic AI. Sorbonne Université, Paris, France. June 13, 2025.
27. AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. [Keynote address] AIM 2025 Conference. Seattle, WA. June 9, 2025.
28. New Age of AI Agents: Challenges and Opportunities. Global Big Data Conference. June 5, 2025.
29. AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. AI Speaker Series, University of Washington, Seattle. May 8, 2025.
30. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science With Human in the Loop. University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada. March 27, 2025.
31. What, How, and Why of Agents. Moveworks. San Francisco, CA. March 24, 2025.
32. What, How, and Why of Agents. Foster School of Business, University of Washington. February 26, 2025.
33. Agentic AI for Envisioning Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). Amazon HQ2. January 28, 2025.
34. Toward Transmodal Agentic Systems. Ploutos. January 14, 2025.
35. Building Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE) with Agents. [Keynote address] Amazon Shopping Science Symposium. Fremont, CA. December 10, 2024.
36. Building Intelligent and Capable Systems with Responsibility. Defense Intelligence Agency. November 20, 2024.
37. Toward Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). [Keynote address] CIKM Workshop on Multimodal Search and Recommendations. Boise, ID. October 25, 2024.
38. Envisioning the Future of AI-Driven Information Access. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). October 16, 2024.
39. Trust, But Verify: Verification and Validation of AI Systems. [Keynote address]. IEEE New Era World AI Summit. Seattle, WA. August 24, 2024.
40. Envisioning New Modalities and Mechanisms for Information Interactions. The 2024 SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce (eCom24). Washington, DC. July 18, 2024.
41. AI Basics and Current Issues. Washington State District and Municipal Courts Spring Conference. Tulalip, WA. June 4, 2024.
42. AI Promises, Perils, and Paths. Washington State Superior Court Judges Conference. Yakima, WA. April 28, 2024.
43. What AI Could, Would, and Should Do? [TEDx Talk]. April 13, 2024.
44. Validating LLMs and LLMs for Validation. Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. March 28, 2024.
45. Are We Ready for What AI Could and Would Do? Public Relations Society of America. March 27, 2024.
46. AI Promises, Perils, and Potential Paths. Washington Appellate Courts Spring Program. Walla Walla, WA. March 25, 2024.
47. Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 21, 2024.
48. AI for Information Access: How Do We Do It Responsibly? ASIS&T South Asia Chapter. March 20, 2024.
49. Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 4, 2024.
50. Positioning as an AI Expert, Researcher, and Developer. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). February 9, 2024.
51. AI-Driven Information Access: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. [Keynote address]. ASIS&T Asia Pacific Conference. December 22, 2023.
52. LLMs: A Lesson In Best Practice For Effective Prompts, Addressing Limitations, And Counteracting Bias. UW Tri-Campus HR Institute. November 9, 2023.
53. AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors: How Do We Do this Right?. [Award lecture]. AAHSL/GIR Nina Matheson Lecture. November 3, 2023.
54. Task Focused IR in the Era of Generative AI. [Keynote address] ACM MMIR Workshop on Deep Multimodal Learning for Information Retrieval. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. November 2, 2023.
55. Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. [Keynote address] ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). October 23, 2023.
56. AI and the Dilemma of Human Centered Research. SIG USE Symposium. October 7, 2023.
57. Promises, Potentials, and Perils of Generative AI. U.S. General Services Administration. September 6, 2023.
58. Generative AI and The Future of Information Access. [Keynote address]. The Web Search Revolution Symposium. Melbourne, Australia. August 16, 2023.
59. AI: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. San Francisco Public Library. July 17, 2023.
60. AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors. Columbus Metropolitan Library, Ohio. June 13, 2023.
61. Challenges and Opportunities with Generative AI for Information Access. Inclusive Product Management Summit. Foster School of Business. Seattle, WA. May 13, 2023.
62. Bringing Explainability and Transparency in Recommender Systems. Indeed.com. Seattle, WA. May 10, 2023.
63. Artificial Intelligence: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. Urban Libraries Council CEO Roundtable. New York, NY. May 8, 2023.
64. Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. Pacific NW Gigapop. Seattle, WA. April 18, 2023.
65. Bringing Fairness by Mitigating Bias in Information Access Systems. AirBnb. April 4, 2023.
66. From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. [Plenary address]. RoboAI-Con 2023. Rome, Italy. March 25, 2023.
67. What does Fairness in Information Access Mean and Can We Achieve It? [Keynote address]. NUS Symposium on Search and Data Mining (NSSDM). Singapore. March 2, 2023.
68. Data and Model Biases in Information Access. Gates Foundations. Seattle, WA. February 15, 2023.
69. Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Information Systems. Chinese CHI 2022: November 5, 2022.
70. Responsibility in AI for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Oregan State University. November 4, 2022.
71. Bias, Fairness, and Transparency in Search and Recommender Systems. [Keynote address]. Santiago, Chile. October 26, 2022.
72. From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. University of Michigan. September 15, 2022.
73. Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Microsoft Research. Redmond, Washington. May 11, 2022.
74. Algorithmic Information Access is the New Smoking. NorthEast chapter of ASIS&T (NEASIS&T) Summit on "With Great Power: AI and Equity". March 25, 2022.
75. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. University of Helsinki, Finland. March 18, 2022.
76. Can Large Scale Information Access Systems Be Made Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. eScience Institute, Seattle, Washington. January 6, 2022.
77. Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation. International Conference on Ethics in Biology, Engineering, and Medicine (ICEBEM 2021). November 13, 2021.
78. Can Large Scale Search Ever Be Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst. November 5, 2021.
79. Task Intelligence for Search and Recommendation. University of Pretoria, South Africa. October 11, 2021.
80. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Peking University, China. March 24, 2021.
81. Fair is the New Smart for Intelligent Systems. Apple. February 1, 2021.
82. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Facebook AI, Palo Alto, California. September 24, 2020.
83. Addressing Zero-Query and Zero-Intent Cases of Recommendations Toward Building Intelligent Agents. Allen Institute of AI (AI2), Seattle, Washington. September 29, 2020.
84. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation [Keynote address]. European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). Lisbon, Portugal. April 15, 2020.
85. Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation [Keynote address]. International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation (Bias 2020). Lisbon, Portugal. April 14, 2020.
86. Addressing Bias in Search and Fairness in Machine Learning [Keynote address]. International Conference on Industrial Application Engineering (ICIAE) 2020. Matsue, Japan. March 27, 2020.
87. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter, Tokyo, Japan. March 24, 2020.
88. Investigating Tasks and Taskers with Studies of Searching Online and in the Wild. DUB Seminar, University of Washington. November 13, 2019.
89. Going Beyond Retrieval: Task Fulfillment and Fostering with Information. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. October 22, 2019.
90. Counteracting Bias and Increasing Fairness in Search. iSchool Research Symposium, University of Washington. October 14, 2019.
91. Addressing Bias in ML and Fairness in Marketplace. Ai4 Retail conference. New York City. June 25, 2019.
92. Going from 'What' and 'How' to 'Who' and 'Why': Task Analysis in Online and Physical Contexts. University College London, UK. March 15, 2019.
93. Information Fostering - Being Proactive in Retrieval and Recommendation. Amazon, Seattle. Nov. 14, 2018.
94. From Priming to Prejudice: The Light and Dark Sides of Data Research. Ryerson University. July 5, 2018.
95. Information Fostering: The Art and Science of Providing Answers without Questions. Spotify, NYC. April 30, 2018.
96. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Seoul, South Korea. July 31, 2017.
97. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. July 24, 2017.
98. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington. March 29, 2017.
99. Information Fostering: Proactively Supporting Information Seeking. University of Tampere, Finland. October 21, 2016.
100. Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. Guest lecture in PhD 610 (Seminar in Information Science). Rutgers University. October 13, 2016.
101. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Ryerson University. July 29, 2016.
102. Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 30, 2016.
103. Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: Bringing Synergy in Search. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 28, 2016.
104. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 16, 2016.
105. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. University of Texas at Austin. March 4, 2016.
106. Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: State of the Union [Keynote address]. Workshop on Evaluation in Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval (ECol) at ACM CIKM 2015 conference. Melbourne, Australia. October 23, 2015.
107. Minority Report for Information Seeking: Fixing Things Before They Break in Search. University Technology at Sydney, Australia. October 21, 2015.
108. Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Search. University of Santiago, Chile. August 14, 2015.
109. Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. Google, Mountain View, CA. July 21, 2015.
110. Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. University of Maryland. July 14, 2015.
111. Be together, but not the same: Leveraging the power of social and community connections for information seeking. The Center for Dynamic Data Analytics (CDDA). November 5, 2014.
112. Building plans for household tasks from distributed knowledge. Honda Research Institute (HRI), Mountain View, CA. August 13, 2004.
113. Model selection in unsupervised tracking. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 6, 2005.
114. A formal study of terminological feedback. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 13, 2005.
115. Story link detection (SLD) using named entity graphs. Northeastern University, Boston, MA. January 6, 2006.
116. Using named entities based representation for story link detection (SLD). University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. May 5, 2006.
117. Use of topicality and information measures to improve representation for story link detection (SLD). National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. August 16, 2006.
118. Relevance revisited. Research Issues & Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 21, 2006.
119. Investigating the effects of faceted interfaces - Research proposal. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 14, 2006.
120. Digital museums and user interaction. With Amy Morgan and Stephanie Adamson in Human Information Interaction class. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007
121. Mining contextual Information for ephemeral digital video Preservation: A Beginning. Research Issues and Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007.
122. Two is a company: A step toward building a Collaborative Exploratory Search (CES) environment. WHIP Talk at FXPAL, CA. June 6, 2007.
123. Collaborative exploratory search (CES) - A beginning. Summer Interns Presentation at FXPAL, CA. August 7, 2007.
124. Finding connectors, mavens, and salesmen on YouTube. Yahoo! Research, Berkeley, CA. August 10, 2007.
125. Hunting for hip, hipsters, and happenings on YouTube - A ContextMiner story. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. September 21, 2007. [Slides in PDF]
126. Collaborative information retrieval: All for one and one for all. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 24, 2008.
127. Collaborative information seeking: An art of making 1+1>2. INLS 490 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 21, 2008.
128. Collaborative information seeking: Cashing on the wisdom of crowd. School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Penang, Malaysia. July 30, 2008.
129. Collaborative information seeking: Counting on the wisdom of crowd. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 23, 2008.
130. Republic of web: A web of, by, and for the people. CRADLE talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 14, 2008. [Slides in PDF]
131. A story of context-capturing and cross-country coding. University of Wisconsin at Madison. August 12, 2009.
132. System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS) Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. August 19, 2009.
133. System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS). University of Sheffield, UK. August 21, 2009. [Abstract]
134. Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. University of Maryland. October 13, 2009.
135. Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. Pennsylvania State University. October 12, 2009.
136. Awareness in collaborative information seeking. School of Library and Information Science (SILS) Research Symposium, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 30, 2009
137. Beyond Google: A quest to understand information seeking across time and people. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 4, 2009.
138. Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. LIS Lunch Talk. SC&I, Rutgers: October 18, 2010.
139. Online Question-Answering: Virtual Referencing to Social Q&A and Back. Scholarly & Professional Activity Committee (SAPAC) Brown Bag Talk. Alexander Library, Rutgers: March 24, 2011.
140. Social Q&A: Questions of the people, answers by the people, information for the people. SC&I Alumni Association Dinner talk. New Brunswick, NJ: May 12, 2011.
141. Collaborative information seeking: The art and science of making the whole greater than the sum of all. Microsoft Research. Redmond, WA: May 18, 2011.
142. Seeking synergy in information seeking. Guest lecture in CS672: Recommendation and Search Engines. Dept. of CS, Rutgers: October 28, 2011.
143. Online question-answering: Virtual referencing to social q&a and back. Web-based talk to ASIST Student Chapter at University of Alabama. November 10, 2011.
144. Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. Yandex, Moscow, Russia: August 3, 2012.
145. Explore globally, collect locally: Social media data harvesting with ContextMiner. Symposium on Big Data in Public Health. Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. March 19, 2013.
146. Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. University of London, UK. August 6, 2013.
147. Communicating for connecting: From telephone to Twitter. Meadow Lakes Retirement Community, Hightstown, NJ. December 16, 2013.
148. Distributed Searching, United Searchers: Investigating Social and Collaborative Aspects of Information Seeking. Google New York. March 19, 2014.
149. The Next step: Adding social and collaborative dimensions to search. Yahoo! New York. July 14, 2014.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML)

1. The Delegation Paradox: Who Is Accountable When Your Agent Acts For You?. Bloomberg. August 26, 2026.
2. From To-Do to Ta-Da: Transforming Task-Focused IR with Generative AI. ACM SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 15, 2025.
3. Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Information Seeking: Why Epistemic Incompatibility Demands New Design Paradigms. ACM CHIIR 2026. Seattle, WA. March 25, 2026.
4. A Design Science Framework for Human-Agent Teams in IR. ACM ICTIR 2026. Melbourne, Australia. July 25, 2026.
5. Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at University House, Issaquah, WA, USA. June 19, 2026.
6. Being Human in the Age of AI. Invited talk at Trilogy at Redmond Ridge, Redmond, WA, USA. May 8, 2026.
7. Rethinking Human-AI Collaboration in Information Seeking. ACM CHIIR 2026 Conference. Seattle, WA, USA. March 25, 2026.
8. Being Human in the Age of AI. Wesley U. March 9, 2026.
9. Being Human in the Age of AI. Sno-Isle Libraries at Mountlake Terrace Library. February 28, 2026.
10. Beyond the Personalization-Privacy Pareto: Can AI Agents Break the Tradeoff?. [Keynote address] Third Workshop on Generative AI for Recommender Systems and Personalization. Boise, Idaho. February 26, 2026.
11. The Age of AI Agents: Redefining Interaction, Intelligence, and Industry. [Keynote address] TechArena 2026. Stockholm, Sweden. February 12, 2026.
12. Being Human in the Age of AI. Foley Institute, Washington State University. Pullman, WA. January 28, 2026.
13. Being Human in the Age of AI. Magnolia United Church of Christ. January 26, 2026.
14. AI Agents and their Legal Implications. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). Fairfax, VA. November 18, 2025.
15. Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Amazon HQ2. Arlington, VA. November 14, 2025.
16. The Delegation Paradox: Building AI Agents We Can Trust to Act On Our Behalf. [Keynote address] ASIS&T SIG AI. Washington, DC. November 14, 2025.
17. Beyond Autonomous Agents: Building Trust and Accountability in AI-Powered Metadata Ecosystems. [Keynote address] DCMI 2025. Barcelona, Spain. October 24, 2025.
18. Pragmatic Pathways: Transforming Information Access with Transparency, Trust, and Truth. [Keynote address] AI for Libraries Symposium. Beijing, China. September 29, 2025.
19. From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. Peking University, China. September 26, 2025.
20. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Peking University, China. September 25, 2025.
21. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science. Renmin University, China. September 25, 2025.
22. Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. Tsinghua University, China. September 24, 2025.
23. Agentic Al: From Answer to Action. Peking University, China. September 24, 2025.
24. Beyond Chatbots: Building Personal, Proactive, and Purposeful AI Agents. [Keynote address] Digital Humanities International Forum. Beijing, China. September 23, 2025.
25. AI Primer and Copyright Use Cases. myLawCLE. September 18, 2025.
26. AI Primer: What AI Is, What It’s Not, What It Can Do, What It Can’t. myLawCLE. August 22, 2025.
27. Building Capable, Personal, and Trustworthy Agents for Task-Focused User Experiences. Adobe. San Jose, CA. August 20, 2025.
28. From Relevance to Reality: Scaling Human-Centered Evaluation in the LLM Era. [Keynote address] LLM4Eval Workshop at SIGIR 2025. Padua, Italy. July 18, 2025.
29. From To-Do to Ta-Da: Transforming Task-Focused IR with Generative AI. SIGIR 2025 Perspectives Paper. Padua, Italy. July 16, 2025.
30. From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Novel Experiences Through Agentic AI. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 20, 2025.
31. From Retrieval to Renaissance: Building Transmodal Information Experiences Through Agentic AI. Sorbonne Université, Paris, France. June 13, 2025.
32. AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. [Keynote address] AIM 2025 Conference. Seattle, WA. June 9, 2025.
33. New Age of AI Agents: Challenges and Opportunities. Global Big Data Conference. June 5, 2025.
34. AI Agents Renaissance: Personalization, Proactivity, and Privacy. AI Speaker Series, University of Washington, Seattle. May 8, 2025.
35. From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Science With Human in the Loop. University of Quebec, Montreal, Canada. March 27, 2025.
36. What, How, and Why of Agents. Moveworks. San Francisco, CA. March 24, 2025.
37. What, How, and Why of Agents. Foster School of Business, University of Washington. February 26, 2025.
38. Agentic AI for Envisioning Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). Amazon HQ2. January 28, 2025.
39. Toward Transmodal Agentic Systems. Ploutos. January 14, 2025.
40. Building Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE) with Agents. [Keynote address] Amazon Shopping Science Symposium. Fremont, CA. December 10, 2024.
41. Building Intelligent and Capable Systems with Responsibility. Defense Intelligence Agency. November 20, 2024.
42. Toward Transmodal Information Experiences (TIE). [Keynote address] CIKM Workshop on Multimodal Search and Recommendations. Boise, ID. October 25, 2024.
43. Envisioning the Future of AI-Driven Information Access. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). October 16, 2024.
44. Trust, But Verify: Verification and Validation of AI Systems. [Keynote address]. IEEE New Era World AI Summit. Seattle, WA. August 24, 2024.
45. Envisioning New Modalities and Mechanisms for Information Interactions. The 2024 SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce (eCom24). Washington, DC. July 18, 2024.
46. AI Basics and Current Issues. Washington State District and Municipal Courts Spring Conference. Tulalip, WA. June 4, 2024.
47. AI Promises, Perils, and Paths. Washington State Superior Court Judges Conference. Yakima, WA. April 28, 2024.
48. What AI Could, Would, and Should Do? [TEDx Talk]. April 13, 2024.
49. Validating LLMs and LLMs for Validation. Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. March 28, 2024.
50. Are We Ready for What AI Could and Would Do? Public Relations Society of America. March 27, 2024.
51. AI Promises, Perils, and Potential Paths. Washington Appellate Courts Spring Program. Walla Walla, WA. March 25, 2024.
52. The AI Frontier: Unveiling the Risks and Rewards. Companis. March 22, 2024.
53. Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 21, 2024.
54. AI for Information Access: How Do We Do It Responsibly? ASIS&T South Asia Chapter. March 20, 2024.
55. Making LLMs More Reliable and Robust Through Auditing and Validation. Amazon. March 4, 2024.
56. Positioning as an AI Expert, Researcher, and Developer. National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI). February 9, 2024.
57. AI-Driven Information Access: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. [Keynote address]. ASIS&T Asia Pacific Conference. December 22, 2023.
58. LLMs: A Lesson In Best Practice For Effective Prompts, Addressing Limitations, And Counteracting Bias. UW Tri-Campus HR Institute. November 9, 2023.
59. AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors: How Do We Do this Right?. [Award lecture]. AAHSL/GIR Nina Matheson Lecture. November 3, 2023.
60. Task Focused IR in the Era of Generative AI. [Keynote address] ACM MMIR Workshop on Deep Multimodal Learning for Information Retrieval. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. November 2, 2023.
61. Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. [Keynote address] ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM). October 23, 2023.
62. AI and the Dilemma of Human Centered Research. SIG USE Symposium. October 7, 2023.
63. Promises, Potentials, and Perils of Generative AI. U.S. General Services Administration. September 6, 2023.
64. Generative AI and The Future of Information Access. [Keynote address]. The Web Search Revolution Symposium. Melbourne, Australia. August 16, 2023.
65. AI: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. San Francisco Public Library. July 17, 2023.
66. AI Hopes, Hypes, and Horrors. Columbus Metropolitan Library, Ohio. June 13, 2023.
67. Challenges and Opportunities with Generative AI for Information Access. Inclusive Product Management Summit. Foster School of Business. Seattle, WA. May 13, 2023.
68. Bringing Explainability and Transparency in Recommender Systems. Indeed.com. Seattle, WA. May 10, 2023.
69. Artificial Intelligence: Bridging the Gap between Excited and Scared. Urban Libraries Council CEO Roundtable. New York, NY. May 8, 2023.
70. Generative AI and the Future of Information Access. Pacific NW Gigapop. Seattle, WA. April 18, 2023.
71. Bringing Fairness by Mitigating Bias in Information Access Systems. AirBnb. April 4, 2023.
72. From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. [Plenary address]. RoboAI-Con 2023. Rome, Italy. March 25, 2023.
73. What does Fairness in Information Access Mean and Can We Achieve It? [Keynote address]. NUS Symposium on Search and Data Mining (NSSDM). Singapore. March 2, 2023.
74. Data and Model Biases in Information Access. Gates Foundations. Seattle, WA. February 15, 2023.
75. Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Information Systems. Chinese CHI 2022: November 5, 2022.
76. Misinformation and the Downward Spiral of Information Access Systems. SIG-Social Media panel at ASIST Annual Meeting. Pittsburgh, PA. November, 1, 2022.
77. Responsibility in AI for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Oregan State University. November 4, 2022.
78. Bias, Fairness, and Transparency in Search and Recommender Systems. [Keynote address]. Santiago, Chile. October 26, 2022.
79. From Responsible AI to Responsibility in AI: Fairness and Transparency in Information Access. University of Michigan. September 15, 2022.
80. Seeking Human-AI Synergy for Fair and Transparent Search and Recommender Systems. Microsoft Research. Redmond, Washington. May 11, 2022.
81. Algorithmic Information Access is the New Smoking. NorthEast chapter of ASIS&T (NEASIS&T) Summit on "With Great Power: AI and Equity". March 25, 2022.
82. Can Large Scale Information Access Systems Be Made Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. eScience Institute, Seattle, Washington. January 6, 2022.
83. Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation. International Conference on Ethics in Biology, Engineering, and Medicine (ICEBEM 2021). November 13, 2021.
84. Can Large Scale Search Ever Be Fair, Unbiased, and Transparent?. University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst. November 5, 2021.
85. Fair is the New Smart for Intelligent Systems. Apple. February 1, 2021.
86. Addressing Zero-Query and Zero-Intent Cases of Recommendations Toward Building Intelligent Agents. Allen Institute of AI (AI2), Seattle, Washington. September 29, 2020.
87. Investigating Bias and Instigating Fairness in Search and Recommendation [Keynote address]. International Workshop on Algorithmic Bias in Search and Recommendation (Bias 2020). Lisbon, Portugal. April 14, 2020.
88. Addressing Bias in Search and Fairness in Machine Learning [Keynote address]. International Conference on Industrial Application Engineering (ICIAE) 2020. Matsue, Japan. March 27, 2020.
89. Counteracting Bias and Increasing Fairness in Search. iSchool Research Symposium, University of Washington. October 14, 2019.
90. Addressing Bias in ML and Fairness in Marketplace. Ai4 Retail conference. New York City. June 25, 2019.
91. Going from 'What' and 'How' to 'Who' and 'Why': Task Analysis in Online and Physical Contexts. University College London, UK. March 15, 2019.
92. From Priming to Prejudice: The Light and Dark Sides of Data Research. Ryerson University. July 5, 2018.
93. Minority Report for Information Seeking: Fixing Things Before They Break in Search. University Technology at Sydney, Australia. October 21, 2015.
94. Building plans for household tasks from distributed knowledge. Honda Research Institute (HRI), Mountain View, CA. August 13, 2004.

Search / Recommendation

1. Taking Search to Task. ACM CHIIR 2023 Conference. Austin, TX. March 20, 2023.
2. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. University of Helsinki, Finland. March 18, 2022.
3. Task Intelligence for Search and Recommendation. University of Pretoria, South Africa. October 11, 2021.
4. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Peking University, China. March 24, 2021.
5. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Facebook AI, Palo Alto, California. September 24, 2020.
6. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation [Keynote address]. European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). Lisbon, Portugal. April 15, 2020.
7. Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation. Tokyo ACM SIGIR Chapter, Tokyo, Japan. March 24, 2020.
8. Investigating Tasks and Taskers with Studies of Searching Online and in the Wild. DUB Seminar, University of Washington. November 13, 2019.
9. Going Beyond Retrieval: Task Fulfillment and Fostering with Information. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. October 22, 2019.
10. Information Fostering - Being Proactive in Retrieval and Recommendation. Amazon, Seattle. Nov. 14, 2018.
11. Information Fostering: The Art and Science of Providing Answers without Questions. Spotify, NYC. April 30, 2018.
12. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking and Retrieval. ACM Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR). March 13, 2018.
13. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. July 24, 2017.
14. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington. March 29, 2017.
15. Information Fostering: Proactively Supporting Information Seeking. University of Tampere, Finland. October 21, 2016.
16. Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. Guest lecture in PhD 610 (Seminar in Information Science). Rutgers University. October 13, 2016.
17. Information Fostering: Proactively Complementing Information Seeking. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 30, 2016.
18. Information Fostering: Being Proactive in Information Seeking. University of Texas at Austin. March 4, 2016.
19. Seeking information in online environments - Where, who, and why? iConference 2015. Newport Beach, CA. March 27, 2015.
20. Be together, but not the same: Leveraging the power of social and community connections for information seeking. The Center for Dynamic Data Analytics (CDDA). November 5, 2014.
21. Evaluating high accuracy retrieval techniques. SIGIR 2004. Sheffield, UK. July 2004.
22. Model selection in unsupervised tracking. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 6, 2005.
23. A formal study of terminological feedback. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. January 13, 2005.
24. Story link detection (SLD) using named entity graphs. Northeastern University, Boston, MA. January 6, 2006.
25. Using named entities based representation for story link detection (SLD). University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. May 5, 2006.
26. Use of topicality and information measures to improve representation for story link detection (SLD). National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan. August 16, 2006.
27. Topic linking with blogs - TREC 2006 Blog Track: Open Task. TREC 2006 at NIST. November 14, 2006.
28. Relevance revisited. Research Issues & Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 21, 2006.
29. Investigating the effects of faceted interfaces - Research proposal. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 14, 2006.
30. From searching to exploring, from finding to understanding, and from seeing to visualizing the information. University Research Day Poster (2nd prize winner). University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, March 4, 2008.
31. Beyond Google: A quest to understand information seeking across time and people. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. December 4, 2009.
32. Seeking synergy in information seeking. Guest lecture in CS672: Recommendation and Search Engines. Dept. of CS, Rutgers: October 28, 2011.
33. Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. Yandex, Moscow, Russia: August 3, 2012.
34. A proposal for user-focused evaluation and prediction of information seeking process. Position paper presentation at EuroHCIR Workshop at the ACM SIGIR Conference. Dublin, Ireland. August 1, 2013.
35. Distributed searching, united searchers: Investigating social and collaborative aspects of information seeking. University of London, UK. August 6, 2013.
36. Distributed Searching, United Searchers: Investigating Social and Collaborative Aspects of Information Seeking. Google New York. March 19, 2014.
37. The Next step: Adding social and collaborative dimensions to search. Yahoo! New York. July 14, 2014.

Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS)

1. Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: Bringing Synergy in Search. GESIS, Cologne, Germany. June 28, 2016.
2. Social and Collaborative Information Seeking: State of the Union [Keynote address]. Workshop on Evaluation in Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval (ECol) at ACM CIKM 2015 conference. Melbourne, Australia. October 23, 2015.
3. Algorithmic Mediation for Collaborative Search. University of Santiago, Chile. August 14, 2015.
4. Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. Google, Mountain View, CA. July 21, 2015.
5. Synergy in Search: Pushing the Boundaries of Information Seeking with Collaboration. University of Maryland. July 14, 2015.
6. Two is a company: A step toward building a Collaborative Exploratory Search (CES) environment. WHIP Talk at FXPAL, CA. June 6, 2007.
7. Collaborative exploratory search (CES) - A beginning. Summer Interns Presentation at FXPAL, CA. August 7, 2007.
8. Collaborative information retrieval: All for one and one for all. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 24, 2008.
9. Collaborative information seeking: An art of making 1+1>2. INLS 490 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 21, 2008.
10. Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment. JCDL 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Pittsburgh, PA. June 16, 2008.
11. Understanding system implementation and user behavior in a collaborative information seeking environment SIGIR 2008 Doctoral Consortium. Singapore. July 20, 2008.
12. Collaborative information seeking: Cashing on the wisdom of crowd. School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. Penang, Malaysia. July 30, 2008.
13. Collaborative information seeking: Counting on the wisdom of crowd. INLS 200 guest lecture. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 23, 2008.
14. System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS) Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. August 19, 2009.
15. System-mediated and user-mediated collaborative information seeking (CIS). University of Sheffield, UK. August 21, 2009. [Abstract]
16. Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. University of Maryland. October 13, 2009.
17. Toward a model for collaborative information seeking, synthesis, and sense-making. Pennsylvania State University. October 12, 2009.
18. Awareness in collaborative information seeking. School of Library and Information Science (SILS) Research Symposium, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. October 30, 2009
19. Working in Collaboration - What, Why, and How? Collaborative Information Retrieval workshop at CSCW 2010. Savannah, GA: February 7, 2010.
20. Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. LIS Lunch Talk. SC&I, Rutgers: October 18, 2010.
21. Exploring Information Seeking Processes in Collaborative Search Tasks. ASIST 2010. Pittsburgh, PA: October 26, 2010.
22. Collaborative information seeking: The art and science of making the whole greater than the sum of all. Microsoft Research. Redmond, WA: May 18, 2011.

Social Information Seeking (SIS)

1. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Seoul, South Korea. July 31, 2017.
2. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. Ryerson University. July 29, 2016.
3. Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd. IRIT, Toulouse, France. June 16, 2016.
4. Building a parsimonious model for identifying best answers using interaction history in community Q&A. ASIST 2015. St. Louis, MO. November 9, 2015.
5. The same, yet different comparing studies of "raditional" digital reference and social q&a. Presentation with Sanghee Oh on ASIST 2009 Panel on Opportunities, Threats, & Theoretical Approaches: Research in Traditional and Social Virtual Reference Quality (SIG HCI). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 9, 2009.
6. Cashing on the wisdom of crowds for question answering. ASIST 2009 Panel on Social Reference and Digital Reference: Online Question Answering Practices in Two Diverse Communities (SIGs SI, BWP, USE). Vancouver, BC, Canada. November 10, 2009.
7. Online Question-Answering: Virtual Referencing to Social Q&A and Back. Scholarly & Professional Activity Committee (SAPAC) Brown Bag Talk. Alexander Library, Rutgers: March 24, 2011.
8. Social Q&A: Questions of the people, answers by the people, information for the people. SC&I Alumni Association Dinner talk. New Brunswick, NJ: May 12, 2011.
9. Online question-answering: Virtual referencing to social q&a and back. Web-based talk to ASIST Student Chapter at University of Alabama. November 10, 2011.
10. Modalities, motivations, and materials: Investigating traditional and social online q&a services. ALISE 2012 Conference. Dallas, TX: January 18, 2012.
11. Questioning the question - Addressing the answerability of questions in community question-answering. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Wikoloa, HI. January 9, 2014.

Social Media

1. Preserving 2008 US Presidential election videos. International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) 2007. Vancouver, BC, Canada. June 23, 2007. [Slides in PDF]
2. Finding connectors, mavens, and salesmen on YouTube. Yahoo! Research, Berkeley, CA. August 10, 2007.
3. Hunting for hip, hipsters, and happenings on YouTube - A ContextMiner story. CRADLE Talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. September 21, 2007. [Slides in PDF]
4. We, the people on YouTube: Understanding democracy of, by, and for the online media sharing. University Research Day Talk. University of North Caraolina, Chapel Hill, NC. March 4, 2008.
5. Hunting for hip, Hipsters, and happenings on YouTube. ASIST 2008 presentation. Columbus, OH. October 27, 2008.
6. Republic of web: A web of, by, and for the people. CRADLE talk. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. November 14, 2008. [Slides in PDF]
7. Supporting research data collection from YouTube with TubeKit. At YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States Conference, Amherst, MA. April 16, 2009. [3rd prize] [Talk]
8. A story of context-capturing and cross-country coding. University of Wisconsin at Madison. August 12, 2009.
9. Explore globally, collect locally: Social media data harvesting with ContextMiner. Symposium on Big Data in Public Health. Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. March 19, 2013.
10. Communicating for connecting: From telephone to Twitter. Meadow Lakes Retirement Community, Hightstown, NJ. December 16, 2013.

Other

1. Digital museums and user interaction. With Amy Morgan and Stephanie Adamson in Human Information Interaction class. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007
2. Mining contextual Information for ephemeral digital video Preservation: A Beginning. Research Issues and Questions Seminar. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. April 24, 2007.