William Jones Research Associate Professor The Information School University of Washington williamj@u.washington.edu

Research Interests

• Personal Information Management
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Cognitive Science

Background

At the iSchool, I manage the Keeping Found Things Found project (in collaboration with Dr. Harry Bruce; see also http://pim.ischool.washington.edu/). I received my doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University for research in human memory over twenty years ago. I’ve published basic research in cognitive psychology as well as more applied research in personal information management (PIM), information retrieval and human-computer interaction. For a while I left research altogether to work with information management in the business world. I worked as a program manager at Microsoft for nearly six years in the 90’s, where I was involved in the production of information management features for both Microsoft Office and MSN Search. Before that, I worked as an internal consultant at Boeing, where I led an effort to create an information repository for flight deck problems and design rationale. The most unusual patent in my name is for “step indexing” of Japanese text (embodied in a search facility that shipped in the Japanese version of Microsoft Office’97).

Other Interests

• Hiking, biking, Nordic skiing, grappling – none of which I do very regularly.
• Travel to far-away places such as Mongolia (in pictures). I’ve also been to Ladakh (also known as “Little Tibet”), Nepal and Pakistan.
• Sweden and learning Swedish. I speak well enough now to have long conversations in Swedish that make my head hurt.
• Pretensions to write non-academically – though only one short article has been published so far (http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0806/p18s02-hfes.html?entryBottomStory).

Recent Publications

• Jones, W. (in press). Personal Information Management. The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.
• Jones, W. and Ross, B.(in press). Human Cognition and Personal Information Management. in Durso, F.T., Nickerson, R.S., Schvaneveldt, R.W., Dumais, S.T., Lindsay, D.S. and Chi, M.T.H. eds. Handbook of Applied Cognition, 2006.
• Jones, W., Munat, C & Bruce, H., (in press). The Universal Labeler: Plan the Project and Let Your Information Follow (accepted). in 68th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST 2005), (Charlotte, North Carolina, 2005), American Society for Information Science & Technology, TBD.
• Jones, W., Phuwanartnurak, A. J., Gill, R & Bruce, H., Don't Take My Folders Away! Organizing Personal Information to Get Things Done. Accepted for inclusion in Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), (Portland, OR., 2005), ACM Press.

Contact Info

William Jones
The Information School
University of Washington Box 354985
4311 11th Avenue NE, Suite 400
Seattle WA, 98105-4985

Phone: +1- 206-616-1995
Fax: +1 206-616-5149