Research

Supporting user-developer communication: My current focus is on inventing techniques for providing in-context help for an interactive web application and capturing the user-invoked help request data. In the next phase, I will develop techniques for triaging software issues using this aggregated user data (with Andrew J. Ko and Jacob O. Wobbrock).

Developing user-centered clinical research tools: I am applying user-centered design and evaluation techniques to support the development of querying tools for clinical translational research at the Institute for Translational Health Sciences at UW. In addition to investigating how structured queries are formulated, we are also working on facilitating transformation of the query results into visualizations and summary data artifacts which can aid clinical investigators (with Nick Anderson and Peter Tarczy-Hornoch).

Facilitating knowledge management in public health: In 2007-8, I worked as a research assistant at the Center for Public Health Informatics and was involved in the design and evaluation of a customizable knowledge management system for public health practitioners (with Sherrilynne Fuller).

Information-seeking in bioinformatics software development: During my MS, I investigated software development activities in bioinformatics, focusing on the information-seeking activities of computer scientists versus biologists (with Carole Palmer).

Publications

Boyce, R; Chilana, P. and Rose, T. (2009) iCODEHOP:  a new interactive program for designing COnsensus-DEgenerate Hybrid Oligonucleotide Primers (CODEHOPs) from multiply-aligned protein sequences, Nucleic Acids Research, 37 (1), W222-228.

Chilana P., Ko, A.J., and Wobbrock, J.O. (2009) Designing Software for Unfamiliar Domains. ICSE ’09 Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, Vancouver, BC, May 2009.

Chilana P., Palmer C., and Ko, A.J. (2009) Comparing Bioinformatics Software Development by Computer Scientists and Biologists: An Exploratory Study. ICSE ’09 Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering, Vancouver, BC, May 2009.

Anderson, N., Chilana, P., Anderson, K., Wynden, R., and Tarczy-Hornoch, P. (2009) Implementing Cross-Institutional Clinical Discovery for Population Based Translational Research. AMIA Spring Congress, Orlando, FL, May 2009.

Anderson, N., Chilana, P., and Tarczy-Hornoch, P. (2009) Challenges of Implementing Anonymized Cross-Institutional Federated Querying for Clinical Translational Research. CHI’09 Workshop: The Changing Face of Digital Science -New Practices in Scientific Collaborations, Boston, MA, April 2009.

Choe, E.K., Shinohara, K., Chilana, P., Dixon, M. and Wobbrock, J.O. Exploring the design of accessible goal crossing desktop widgets.(2009) Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09), Boston, MA, April 2009.

Cheung, G., Chilana, P., Kane, S., and Pellett, B. Designing for Discovery: Opening the Hood for Open-Source End User Tinkering.  Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09), Boston, MA, April 2009.

Revere D., Chilana P., Helgerson S. and Fuller S. Building and piloting a customizable knowledge management environment to support public health practice: myPublicHealth. Medical Library Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, 2008.

Revere D,. Bugni, P., Hillringhouse, E., Chilana P., Helgerson S., Sorensen, S., Fuller S. Piloting a Customizable Knowledge Management System to Support Public Health Practice. 6th Annual Public Health Information Network Conference, Atlanta, GA, 2008.

Chilana, P., Revere, D., Fuller, S. Facilitating Scientific Discovery: Information Extraction Approaches for Biomedical Literature. NSF Biomedical Informatics Workshop, 2007.

Barrera, A., Chilana, P., Clarke, K., Giarlo, M. 2007 Code4Lib Conference Report.  Library Hi-Tech News, 24(6), pp 4-7, 2007.

Chilana, P. Developing a Digital Libraries Education Program, Year 1 (Panel presentation), ACM-IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), Chapel Hill, NC, 2006.

Chilana, P., Matsui. H, Lim, A.  ChicTech Soars at SFU.  Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science and Technology (CCWEST) Conference, Calgary, Alberta, 2006.

Hsiao, W., Langille, M., Fedynak, A., Chilana, P., Brinkman, F.S.L. Genomic island analysis: Improved web-based software and insights into an apparent gene pool associated with genomic islands. American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Northwest Branch Meeting, Seattle, WA, 2006.

Hsiao, W., Chilana, P., Fedynak, A., Brinkman, F.S.L. IslandPath 2: web application aiding integrated analysis of genomic islands (Poster E-44). International Meeting of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISMB), Detroit, MI, 2005.

Hsiao, W., Chilana, P., Lowden, B. Coombes, B. Finlay, B., and Brinkman, F.S.L. Computational characterization of prokaryotic genomic islands and evidence of a large novel gene pool associated with these islands. International Conference on Microbial Genomes, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2005.

Matsui, H., Chilana, P. The Rise and Fall: Women and Computer Science.  Canadian Coalition of Women in Engineering, Science and Technology (CCWEST) Conference, St. Catharines, Ontario, 2004.