All posts filed under “Interns”

April 28, 2015

Presentation @ CHI2015: Understanding mobile search & app interactions

Last week JP Carrascal presented our study on the interactions between mobile search and mobile apps at CHI 2015 in Seoul, Korea. JP did a fantastic job presenting and handled the flurry of questions afterwards very well! In fact JP gave two talks in the same “Understanding Everyday Use of Mobile Phones” session chaired by Matt Jones!

The idea behind this work is to understand more about the behaviors and motivations around smartphone users transitioning between mobile search engines and mobile apps (and vice versa) when trying to find information to satisfy their daily information needs. We were also interested in exploring the various triggers and actions associated with mobile search. To shed some light on these mobile search and app interactions we designed and conducted a 2-week, mixed-method study involving 18 Android users in the Bay Area. The deck explains the core motivations, approach alongside key results. Questions or comments feel free to contact JP or I. And if interested in reading the full CHI 2015 paper it’s available here.


February 16, 2015

New Focus, New Role – Leading Native & Mobile Ad Analytics Group

As of this quarter in Yahoo Labs, I’m leading a small team of Research Scientists in a new group focused on Native & Mobile Ad Analytics. Native Advertising has become a hot topic in the Web and advertising spaces in recent years. Given it involves creating and placing engaging, relevant content that matches the underlying intent and context of the end-user, there are lots and lots of open research questions in this space. In particular when we think about native advertising in the mobile world!

The ultimate goal of this new group is to conduct research that will enrich our understanding of native and mobile ad experiences and will improve these experiences. We’ll be focusing on large-scale mobile user behavior modeling; understanding and mining mobile-specific signals like mobile device and app use to help enhance mobile ad engagement and conversion; as well as methods and novel studies exploring offline conversion in mobile, i.e. if I show a person an engaging, relevant ad on their device, do they ever act upon that ad in the physical world, e.g. visiting a store, eating at a restaurant, etc. To this end we’ll be analyzing very, very large datasets across a range of Yahoo properties as well as conducting large-scale in-the-wild mobile experiments / studies. Some of the open research questions / challenges in this domain include: Read More

December 21, 2014

CHI 2015 Paper Accepted! An In-Situ Study on Mobile App & Mobile Search Interactions


We recently discovered that all our hard word has paid off! This past summer, JP Carrascal (a PhD candidate from UPF, Barcelona) and I worked together on a study to understand more about if and how mobile search and mobile app usage interacts. And a full CHI paper reporting our findings has been accepted for publication at CHI 2015 in Korea!

The motivation behind this work is that smartphone users spend much of their time transitioning between mobile search engines and mobile apps (and vice versa) when trying to find information. The figure below helps highlight this fact. The figure shows the timeline of mobile device interactions for a 1 hour period of a single day for an actual participant in our study, showing sequences of mobile device interactions in the form of mobile app launches, home screen interactions and mobile searches. Read More

February 29, 2012

Calling all interns!!

As always we’re hiring talented interns in a number of areas with the scientific teams in Telefonica Research. The intern projects I’m involved in will focus specifically on mobile computing and mobile HCI. We’ll also be doing some work on social computing, social media and… Read more