Alan Medlar is a member of the Exploratory Search and Personalization (ESP) research group lead by Prof. Dorota Głowacka. Alan has undergraduate degrees in Computer Science from University College London (UCL), UK and in 2012 was awarded a PhD in Bioinformatics and Genetics from UCL Medical School. After arriving in Finland, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Dr Ari Löytynoja’s Evolutionary Sequence Analysis group and in Prof. Liisa Holm’s Bioinformatics group. In 2019, he moved to the Department of Computer Science where he is currently a university researcher and HIIT research fellow.
Alan’s research interests are related to information seeking, interactive systems and user experience. In particular, he is interested in how we can support users performing challenging search tasks, such as exploratory search, and how to model users’ subjective preferences as they relate to interactive systems, such as AI-based systems and video games.
Sample publications:
[1] D. Kotkov, A. Medlar, T. Kask, D. Głowacka. The Dark Matter of Serendipity in Recommender Systems. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) 2024.
[2] A. Medlar, Mari Lehtikari, D. Głowacka. Behind the Scenes: Adapting Cinematography and Editing Concepts to Navigation in Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2024.
[3] D. Kotkov, A. Medlar, Y. Liu, D. Głowacka. On the Negative Perception of Cross-domain Recommendations and Explanations. Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2024.