FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 31, 2011 

CHAPEL HILL - The School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill welcomes scholars Jaime Arguello, Robert G. Capra III and Zeynep Tufekci who will join the School's faculty as assistant professors on July 1, 2011.

"We are thrilled that three young scholars of their caliber are joining our faculty," said Dr. Gary Marchionini, dean of SILS and Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor. "Their educational backgrounds, varied experiences and research interests brings strength in diverse areas that are excellent additions to the school's teaching and research."  

Zeynep Tufeckci comes to SILS from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where she has been an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and completed her dissertation on, "In Search of Lost Jobs: The Rhetoric and Practice of Computer Skills Training." Tufeckci is the principal investigator on the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, "Beyond the Deficit Model: Gender Schemas, Computing, Preferences and IT Career Choices." Her research interests are social impacts of technology, privacy and surveillance, inequality, research methods and complex systems. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Science, Washington Post and other media. She blogs at technosociology.org. Tufeckci will teach courses in "Human Information Interaction" and "Social Media."

Dr. Tufeckci has a master's degree from University of Texas at Austin, a bachelor's degree in sociology from Istanbul University, Turkey and an undergraduate degree in computer science from Bosphorus University, Turkey. 

Robert G. Capra III has worked as a postdoctoral fellow/research scientist at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2006. His research interests include human-computer interaction, personal information management (PIM), exploratory and collaborative search, interactive information retrieval and social media. He regularly publishes on these topics at major conferences such as CHI, JCDL, and ASIS&T and won the Best Poster Award at the ASIS&T 2010 annual meeting for research with one of his undergraduate students. Dr. Capra has helped secure over $570,000 in research funding through grants and contracts from the NSF and IBM. He serves in leadership roles for two emerging research communities (PIM and HCIR) and has co-authored two book chapters on personal information management research. He will teach classes in "Human Computer Interaction" and "Database Management."

Dr. Capra holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech where he completed his dissertation on information re-finding, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to earning his Ph.D., he worked in corporate research and development, spending five years in the Speech and Language Technologies group at SBC Labs in Austin, TX (now merged with AT&T Labs), where he focused on voice user interfaces, speech recognition and natural language processing.
 
Jaime Arguello comes to SILS from Carnegie Mellon University where he is a Ph.D. candidate in Language Technologies at the Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. His research focuses on vertical search engines. In his thesis work, he investigates aggregated search - the task of providing integrated access to multiple services within a single search interface. Prior to this, he conducted research in blog retrieval, information extraction, topic-segmentation of transcribed dialogue, and on developing visualizations and interactions for corpus exploration at Yahoo! Laboratories. He has published on these subjects at conference such as SIGIR, CIKM, ECIR, TREC, CHI, ICWSM, HLT and DG.O. He was a recipient of the "SIGIR 2009 Best Paper Award," the "2009 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Program Award" and best ECIR 2011 Student Paper. He will teach classes in "Information Retrieval" and "Large-Scale Data Management."  

Arguello has master's degrees in language technologies and information systems management from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.  


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Wanda Monroe
Director of Communications
School of Information and Library Science University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
100 Manning Hall, CB 3360
Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3360
Phone: 919-843-8337
Web: sils.unc.edu
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