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I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Digital Video Processing at Dublin City University funded under the CLARITY project.
My research interests lie in Synchrononous Collaborative Information Retrieval - the process by which two or more people search for information (text, video, images etc.) in a realtime, explicit, collaboration which can take place in either a co-located environment or a distributed environment
My early work was in developing a tabletop search system, Físchlár-DiamondTouch, with colleagues of mine from the CDVP. Físchlár-DiamondTouch was evaluated at the TRECVid 2005 workshop, this system represented the first collaborative search system evaluated at any TREC or TRECVid workshop
I completed my PhD in 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Alan F. Smeaton . My PhD research was funded by the Embark Initiative operated by the Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology (IRCSET)
Publications
Here you will find a list of my publications, a more comprehensive list (with bibtex) is maintained on the CDVP publications page
Creating A Web-Scale Video Collection For Research Over P, Awad G, Smeaton A.F., Foley C, Lanagan J.International Workshop on Web-Scale Multimedia Corpus (WSMC09) held in conjunction with ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Beijing, China. 19-24 Oct 2009
DCU Collaborative Video Search System Foley C, Smeaton A.F, Wilkins, P,CIVR 2009 - ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval. VideOlympics @ CIVR, Santorini, Greece, 8-10 July 2009
Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval: Techniques and Evaluation. Foley C and Smeaton A.F, In Advances in Information Retrieval, ECIR 2009 - 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval, Toulouse, France 2009
Combining Relevance Information in a Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval Environment. Foley C, Smeaton A.F and Jones G. Chapter in: Collaborative and Social Information Retrieval and Access: Techniques for Improved User Modeling, 2008
Mobile, Ubiquitous Information Seeking, as a Group:The iBingo Collaborative Video Retrieval System. Smeaton A.F, Foley C, Byrne D and Jones G. MobiQuitous 2008 - The 5th Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, Dublin, Ireland, 21-25 July 2008.
iBingo Mobile Collaborative Search. Smeaton A.F, Foley C, Byrne D and Jones G. CIVR 2008 - ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval. VideOlympics @ CIVR, Niagara Falls, Canada, 7-9 July 2008
Evaluation of Coordination Techniques in Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval. Foley C and Smeaton A.F. JCDL Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval, Pittsburgh, PA., 20 June 2008.
Collaborative Video Searching on a Tabletop. Smeaton A.F, Lee H, Foley C and Mc Givney S. Multimedia Systems Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2006. (pp375-391)
Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval with Relevance Feedback. Foley C, Smeaton A.F and Lee H. CollaborateCom 2006 - 2nd International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing, Atlanta, Georgia, 17-20 November 2006.
Físchlár-DiamondTouch: Collaborative Video Searching on a Table. Smeaton A.F, Lee H, Foley C, Mc Givney S and Gurrin C. SPIE Electronic Imaging - Multimedia Content Analysis, Management, and Retrieval, SPIE Vol. 6073, Vol. 6073, No. 1, San Jose, CA, 15-19 January 2006.
Collaborative Searching for Video Using the Físchlár System and a DiamondTouch Table. Smeaton A.F, Foley C, Gurrin C, Lee H and Mc Givney S TableTop2006 - The 1st IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems, Adelaide, Australia, 5-7 January 2006.
TRECVid 2005 Experiments at Dublin City University. Foley C, Gurrin C, Jones G, Lee H, Mc Givney S, O'Connor N, Sav S, Smeaton A.F and Wilkins P. TRECVid 2005 - Text REtrieval Conference TRECVID Workshop, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 14-15 November 2005.
Annodex-ing Broadcast TV News for Semantic Browsing and Retrieval. Smeaton A.F, Foley C and Mc Donald K. ISWC2005 - 4th International Semantic Web Conference, Galway, Ireland, 6-10 November 2005.
PhD Thesis
Division of Labour and Sharing of Knowledge for Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval
Abstract
Traditional Information Retrieval (IR) research has focussed on a single user interaction modality, where a user searches to satisfy an information need. Recent advances in web technologies and computer hardware have enabled multiple users to collaborate on many computer-supported tasks, therefore there is an increasing opportunity to support two or more users searching together at the same time in order to satisfy a shared information need, which we refer to as Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval. Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval (SCIR) represents a significant paradigmatic shift from traditional IR systems. In order to support an effective SCIR search new techniques are required to coordinate users' activities. In particular, in this thesis we will explore the effectiveness of two techniques on SCIR: division of labour and sharing of knowledge. By implementing an effective division of labour policy the search task can be divided across collaborating searchers, thereby avoiding any duplication of effort across the users. In addition, a sharing of knowledge policy refers to the process of passing relevance information across users, whereby group members can benefit from the discoveries of their collaborators. In order to explore these techniques we will simulate two users searching together through an incremental feedback system, whereby the ranked lists of documents returned to each user are modified in order to implement various division of labour and sharing of knowledge policies. In order to populate these simulations we extract data from the logs of interactive text search experiments from previous Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) workshops. These experiments represent the first simulations of SCIR to-date and the first use of TREC logs in order to populate simulations.
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