At the OU Human-Computer Interaction and Recommendation (HCIR) Lab, we are working toward modeling and supporting people’s problem-solving and decision-making activities with intelligent information search and recommender systems, and understanding the economic, societal, and ethical impacts of advanced search and recommendation algorithms.
Our long-term research goal is to provide useful, timely, fair, and responsible information support for people from diverse backgrounds and communities. Our methods include computational approaches such as data/text mining, deep learning, and natural language processing, as well as qualitative, participatory, and user study research methods.
Topics of interest include user biases in information interactions, intelligent information retrieval, bias-aware recommender systems, and adaptive information system evaluation.
The Principal Investigator, Dr. Jiqun Liu, started this lab in 2020. Dr. Liu is an interdisciplinary information science researcher by training, with research interests, including information retrieval, recommender system, bounded rationality, and ethics in human-computer interaction.
Lab News
2025
- PhD candidate Ben Wang has successfully defended his dissertation titled “LLM-based Long-Term Life Task Planning to Reduce Human Uncertainty”. He is now working as an Applied Scientist at Amazon. Congratulations!
- New Grant: Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) NLG award: “Gauging Library Needs for Integrating Generative AI into Children’s Maker-based Learning”. ($150,000, PI: Dr. Jiqun Liu, co-PI: Dr. Yong Ju Jung).
- PhD student Maddy Nazari passed her General Exam. Congratulations!
- Our paper “Re-rankers are effective reference judgment predictors” (with Chuan Meng, Jiqun Liu, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Fengran Mo, and Maarten de Rijke) accepted to LLM4EVAL workshop at ACM SIGIR 2025!
- Our project “Syllabi and Activities for AI-Assisted Maker Education: Design and Evaluation” received a funding award of $9,964 from OU DISC Summer AI Project Seed Funding program.
- PhD Candidate Ben Wang passed his dissertation proposal (titled “LLM-based long-term task planning to reduce human uncertainty”) defense! Congratulations!
- We (Drs. Anett Hoppe, Ran Yu, Jiqun Liu, and Nilavra Bhattacharya) co-organized the 5th International Workshop on Investigating learning during Web search (IWILDS 2025) at WSDM (March 14, 2025).
- Our Special issue “AI in education: transforming teaching and learning” published at Information and Learning Sciences. (Guest editors: Drs. Dania Bilal, Jiangen He, Jiqun Liu).
- New grant: Faculty Investment Program (FIP) Award: Making mistakes like humans: Detecting biased judgments of artificial intelligence, University of Oklahoma Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships ($15,000, PI: Jiqun Liu).
2024
- Award: Jamshed Karimnazarov received Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program award. Congratulations!
- Award: The research proposal titled “Enhancing AI Literacy through Maker-based Learning with Generative AI”, co-authored by Dr. Yong Ju Jung and Dr. Jiqun Liu, has received the Elfreda A. Chatman Research Award 2024 from ASIS&T SIG USE.
- New grant: Project titled “Functional fixedness evaluation in human-large language model (LLM) interaction” received funding support from Microsoft Research ($20,000, PI: Jiqun Liu).
Join Us
We are actively looking for self-motivated students to join the lab and work on interesting cutting-edge problems in HCIR-related topics. Research opportunities are available at both undergraduate and graduate levels. We are especially interested in students with any of the following backgrounds:
- Human-Computer Interaction, Interactive Information Seeking/Retrieval, Cognitive Psychology or Experimental Economics using quantitative or qualitative methods (or both);
- Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Text/Data Mining.
If you are interested, please email jiqunliu@ou.edu with your CV and a brief description of your previous research experiences and current research interests.