Investigating Information Search Behavior using Personal and Social Contextual Signals

People have their behavioral patterns, through which they determine how to use, seek and share information. Also, the patterns interact with a person's intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics such as values, attitudes, social and cognitive capitals, affecting behaviors in different contexts and situations. Meanwhile, the emerging trends of smartphones and wearable computing allow for the creation of a rich user behavioral profile. Such a behavioral (personal, social, mobile, and cognitive) profile goes beyond traditional browser-based context and allows one's personality type and social capital to become pivotal indicators of search behavior. Through the multi-modal data analysis, I want to identify the correlations between different signal types as observed in everyday life information seeking contexts and predict individuals' search behavior using personal and social contextual signals.