After completing her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brigham Young University in 2014, Dr. Maria Soledad Pera, a native of Argentina, joined Boise State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, where she currently co-leads the People and Information Research Team (Piret). Sole's main area of expertise is in information retrieval and her current research work focuses on the application of information retrieval, information extraction, and natural language processing techniques for developing search and recommendation systems, primarily for children.
Research Interest: Information Retrieval, Web Search, Recommender Systems, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Information Extraction, Databases, System Analysis.
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA
Proposed Dissertation Topic: “Using Online Data Sources to Make Recommendations
on Reading Materials for K-12 and Advanced Readers” – Advisor: Dr. Yiu-Kai
Ng
April 2014
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA
Thesis: “Improving Library Searches Using Word-Correlation Factors
and Folksonomies” – Advisor: Dr.Yiu-Kai Ng
Universidad Tecnologica Nacional, Rosario, Argentina
CS 361 – Introduction to the Theory of Computation
CS 537
– Introduction to Information Retrieval
CS 481 – CS Seminar
CS 637 – Information Retrieval
Devan Karsann (B.Sc.)
Michael Green (M.Sc.)
Jason Hall (M.Sc.)
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu (Ph.D.)
Oghenemaro Anuyah (Ph.D.)
Axel Magnuson (M.Sc.)
Deepa Mallela (M.Sc.)
Nevena Dragovic (M.Sc.)
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu (M.Sc.)
Oghenemaro Anuyah (M.Sc.)
Jennifer Ekstrand (M.Sc.)
David McNeill (B.Sc.)
William Bigirimana (B.Sc.)
Daniel Bakyono (B.Sc.)
Web Environment for Children
Readability Assessment
Recommendation Systems
Nevena Dragovic, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, and Maria Soledad Pera. “From Recommendation to Curation: When the system becomes your personal docent". In: Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS); co-located with ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Vancouver, Canada, 2018.
Michael Ekstrand, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Katherine Landau Wright, and Maria Soledad Pera. “Retrieving and Recommending for the Classroom: Stakeholders, Objectives, Resources, and Users”. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Recommendation in Complex Scenarios; co-located with ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Vancouver, Canada, 2018.
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Michael Green, Oghenemaro Anuyah, and Maria Soledad Pera. “Can we leverage rating patterns from traditional users to enhance recommendations for children?”. In: Poster Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '18), Vancouver, Canada, 2018.
Anu Shresta, Francesca Spezzano, and Maria Soledad Pera. “Who is Really Affected by Fraudulent Reviews?: An analysis of shilling attacks on recommender systems in real-world scenarios”. In: Poster Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '18), Vancouver, Canada, 2018.
Yiu-Kai Ng and Maria Soledad Pera. “Recommending Social-Interactive Games for Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)”. In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 209-213), Vancouver, Canada, 2018.
Oghenemaro Anuyah, Jerry Alan Fails, and Maria Soledad Pera. “Investigating Query Formulation Assistance for Children”. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 581-586), Trondheim, Norway, 2018.
Maria Soledad Pera, and Yiu-Kai Ng. “Recommending Books to be Exchanged Online in the Absence of Wish Lists”. In Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Vol. 69, No. 4, pp. 541–552), 2018.
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Nevena Dragovic, Oghenemaro Anuyah, and Maria Soledad Pera. “Looking for the Movie Seven or Sven from the Movie Frozen? A Multi-perspective Strategy for Recommending Queries for Children”. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) (pp. 92-101), New Brunswick, 2018. | DATASET
Michael D. Ekstrand, Mucun Tian, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Jennifer D. Ekstrand, Oghenemaro Anuyah, David McNeill, and Maria Soledad Pera. “All The Cool Kids, How Do They Fit In?: Popularity and Demographic Biases in Recommender Evaluation and Effectiveness”. In Proceedings of the Machine Learning research in the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency Conference (pp 172-186), New York, 2018. | SCRIPTS
Maria Soledad Pera, Jerry Alan Fails, Mirko Gelsomini, and Franca Garzotto. “Building Community: Report on KidRec Workshop on Children and Recommender Systems at RecSys 2017”. In ACM RecSys, 2017.
Maria Soledad Pera, and Yiu-Kai Ng. “Using Online Data Sources to Make Query Suggestions for Children”. In Journal of Web Intelligence (Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 303-323), IOS Press, 2017.
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Maria Soledad Pera, Nevena Dragovic, and Jerry Alan Fails. “Online Searching and Learning YUM and Other tools for Children and Teachers”. In Information Retrieval Journal (Vol. 20, No. 5, pp. 524-545), 2017.
Oghenemaro Anuyah, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, David McNeill and Maria Soledad Pera. “Can Readability Enhance Recommendations on Community Question Answering Sites?”. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys) - Poster, Como, Italy, August 2017.
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Guadalupe Guereta, Santiago Diez, Martin Bianculli Martin, Alejandro Gonzalez, Carlos Flury, Franco Ferrari, Mariano Baudena, Guillermo Leale, and Maria Soledad Pera. “Comparative analysis on text distance measures applied to Community Question Answering data”. Congreso Nacional de Ingenieria Informatica (CONAIISI), 2017.
Michael D. Ekstrand and Maria Soledad Pera. "The Demographics of Cool: Popularity and Recommender Performance for Different Groups of Users". In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys) - Poster, Como, Italy, August 2017.
Deepa Mallela, Dirk Ahlers, and Maria Soledad Pera. “Mining Twitter Features for Event Summarization and Rating”. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence (pp. 615-622), 2017.
Hoda Mehrpouyan, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu and Maria Soledad Pera. “Measuring Personality for Automatic Elicitation of Privacy Preferences”. In the IEEE Symposium on Privacy-Aware Computing (IEEE PAC) Conference (pp. 84-95), 2017.
Nevena Dragovic and Maria Soledad Pera. “Exploiting Reviews to Generate Personalized and Justified Recommendations to Guide Users' Selections”. In the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) Conference (pp. 661-664), 2017.
Jason Hall and Maria Soledad Pera. “UBR: A Book Search - Recommender Hybrid”. In the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) Conference (pp. 665-669), 2017.
Sean MacLachlan, Nevena Dragovic, Stacey Donohue and Maria Soledad Pera. "One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Helping Users Find Events from Multiple Perspectives". In Proceedings of the ACM RecSys Workshop on Recommenders in Tourism, Boston, USA, September 2016.
Stacey Donohue, Nevena Dragovic, and Maria Soledad Pera. "Anything Fun Going On? A Simple Wizard to Avoid the Cold-Start Problem for Event Recommenders". In Proceedings of the ACM RecSys Workshop on Recommenders in Tourism, Boston, USA, September 2016.
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu and Maria Soledad Pera. "Is Readability a Valuable Signal for Hashtag Recommendations?". In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys 2016) - Poster, Boston, USA, September 2016.
Nevena Dragovic and Maria Soledad Pera. "Genre Prediction to Inform the Recommendation Process". In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys 2016) - Poster, Boston, USA, September 2016.
Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Nevena Dragovic, and Maria Soledad Pera. "Finding, Understanding and Learning: Making Information Discovery Tasks Useful for Children and Teachers". In Proceedings of ACM SIGIR Workshop on Search as Learning. Pisa, Italy, July 2016.
Nevena Dragovic, Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, and Maria Soledad Pera. "Is Sven Seven?: A Search Intent Module for Children". In Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference (pp. 885-888), Pisa, Italy, July 17-21, 2016.
Joel Denning, Maria Soledad Pera, and Yiu-Kai Ng. "A readability level prediction tool for K-12 books". In Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 550–565), 2015.
Meher Shaikh, Maria Soledad Pera, and Yiu-Kai Ng. "Suggesting Simple and Comprehensive Queries to Elementary-Grade Children". In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'15) (pp. 252-259), Singapore, December 6-9, 2015.
Nevena Dragovic and Maria Soledad Pera. "Exploiting Reviews to Guide Users’ Selections". In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys 2015) - Poster, Vienna, Austria, September 16-20, 2015.
Maria Soledad Pera and Yiu-Kai Ng. "A Recommendation-Based Book-Exchange System Without Using Wish Lists". In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys 2015) - Poster, Vienna, Austria, September 16-20, 2015.
Shahrzad Karimi and Maria Soledad Pera. "Recommendations to enhance Children Web Searches". In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys 2015) - Poster, Vienna, Austria, September 16-20, 2015.
Maria Soledad Pera and Yiu-Kai Ng. "Analyzing Book-Related Features to Recommend Books for Emergent Readers". In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (ACM HT) (pp. 221-230), Cyprus, September 1-4, 2015.
Boise State University Awards: Faculty Coach for a Game Honoree (November 24, 2018: BSU vs. University of Utah [BSU won])
Boise State University Campus Awards: Nominated for the Advisor of the Year 2018 Award
Golden Apple Award: Awarded the 2017 Golden Apple Award for the Graduate College at Boise State University
Child Adaptive Search Tool (CAST)
Abstract:
More information:
LITERATE: Locating Informational Texts for Engaging Readers and Teaching equitably
Project Outline:
IR for Children: Enhanced Search Environment for Children (
Abstract:
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Related Publications:
solepera@boisestate.edu
1910 University Dr.
Boise, ID 83725
Office: CCP 354
208-426-2487