Dr Robert Villa

Lecturer

BSc (Strathclyde), MSc (Heriot-Watt), PhD (Glasgow)

Robert Villa joined the Information School in May 2010, before which he worked at Glasgow University on the EU project SALERO, developing user interfaces for image and video retrieval systems. Previous to this, he worked at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Milan as part of the PENG project, working in the area of text filtering, and before this, at Strathclyde University on the Diogene project, on an ontology mapping system. He has a Ph.D. from the Department of Computing Science, Glasgow University, an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction from Heriot-Watt University, and an undergraduate degree from Strathclyde University in Information Engineering (Computing Science and Electronics).

Teaching

I am currently involved in four modules: Designing Usable Websites, Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, and as coordinator, Digital Multimedia Libraries. All four of these modules are linked to my research interests, which revolve around the area of Interactive Information Retrieval, with an emphasis on Multimedia Retrieval. With my background in Computer Science, I tend to bring a more technical point of view to my teaching, often aiming to describe the principles behind how different computer systems work "under the hood". For example, on the Information Retrieval module, I lectured on Web search and Multimedia retrieval. Most of my teaching has taken place as lectures, or as laboratories. Lectures have included discussions and student tasks, which prove particularly useful when discussing web site interface issues, for example.

Research interests

Interactive Information retrieval, in particular interactive image and video retrieval; supporting complex search tasks; collaborative search; and the evaluation of information retrieval systems.

Key publications

Bermejoa, P., Joho, H., Jose, J. M., and Villa, R. (2011), Study of context influence on classifiers trained under different video-document representations, In Information Processing and Management, Volume 47(2), pp. 215-226.

Sushmita, S., Joho, H., Lalmas, M., and Villa, R. (2010), Factors Affecting Click-Through Behavior in Aggregated Search Interfaces, In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2010), Toronto, Canada, October 2010.

Villa, R., Halvey, M., Joho, H., Hannah, D., Jose., J.M. (2010), Can an intermediary collection help users search image databases without annotations? In Proceedings of the 10th annual joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL 2010), Surfer's Paradise, Australia, June, 2010.

Villa, R., Jose, J.M., Joho, H., and Cantador, I. (2009), An aspectual interface for supporting complex search tasks, In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Boston, USA, July 2009.

Tuomola, M. L., Korpilahti, T., Pesonen, J., Singh, A., Villa, R., Punitha, P., Feng, Y., Jose, J. M. (2009), Concept, Content and the Convict, In Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Multimedia (MM'09), Beijing, China, October 2009.

Villa, R., Gildea, N., and Jose, J.M. (2008), FacetBrowser: a user interface for complex search tasks, In Proceeding of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia (MM'08), Vancouver, Canada, October 2008.

Villa, R., Gildea, N., Jose, J.M. (2008). A Study of Awareness in Multimedia Search. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL 2008), Pittsburgh, USA, June 2008.