ABOUT
My name is Karen Church and I work as a Researcher in the Multimedia Scienfic Team lead by Nuria Oliver in Telefonica Research in sunny Barcelona, Spain. I've been based at Telefonica Research since October 2008. In 2010 I was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship (IEF) in conjunction with Telefonica Research. My current research focus in Telefonica spans: future mobile information access, social mobile applications and mobile HCI.
I was born in Dublin, Ireland and grew up in a town called Leixlip in Co. Kildare (home of Guinness!). I hold a BSc. in Computer Science from the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (2003) and a PhD in Computer Science from University College Dublin (2008). During my PhD I worked as part of a research group called the Adaptive Information Cluster under the supervision of Barry Smyth and Mark T. Keane. The focus of my research was in the mobile Web and in particular the mobile search space. The goal of my research was to learn about emerging mobile information access behaviours in order to develop innovative solutions for personalizing and improving mobile search. The areas that I researched as part of my PhD included: 1) interfaces for more intelligent mobile search, (2) mobile content enrichment and (3) understanding mobile information access behaviour. I was awarded my PhD in May 2008 with a dissertation entitled "A Study of Mobile Internet Usage and Implications for Mobile Search Interfaces".
In my spare time, in fact anytime I can, I love to cook (mainly sweet things!). I'm a pretty big movie fan and I love music, especially live gigs/music festivals.
ADDRESS
Torre Telefonica – Diagonal 00Plaza de Ernest Lluch i Martín, 5, floor 15
08019 Barcelona – Spain