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Education

2001-
Ph.D. Program School for Information Management and Systems University of California, Berkeley, California, USA
April 2004: Qualifying Exam - Advanced to Candidacy
Fields: Information Organization and Retrieval, Science and Technology Studies, Computational Linguistics

1999-2000
Master Program School for Information Management and Systems University of California, Berkeley, California, USA
1 year exchange within the UC's Education Abroad Program

1999-2001
Business Administration Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany
Degree: Vordiplom

1995-2001
Library and Information Science (Major) Art History, Business Administration (Minors) Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany
Degree: Magistra Artium
Thesis: Entry Vocabulary Modules - Tools for Improving Subject Access to Retrieval Systems

Experience & Activities

August 2001-
Metadata Research Group
School for Information Management and Systems, Univ. of California, Berkeley

• IMLS Project Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who (Oct. 2004-). Objective: to build a dynamic search interface simulating a library reference room - drawing different resources (topical, geographical, chronological, biographical) together and creating interoperable search and content standards for these resources to interact with each other.
• IMLS Project Going Places in the Catalog: Improved Geographic Access (Oct. 2002-Sep. 2004). Objective: to show how place-related searching in library catalogs can be substantially improved and how place-related searches can be extended to scholarly and education resources in and beyond library catalogs.
• IMLS Project Seamless Searching of Numeric and Textual Resources (2001). Objective: to improve access to written material and numerical data on the same topic in different bibliographical and numerical databases.

August 2000 -
Cross-Language Evaluation Forum
Participation in European Cross-Language Retrieval Competition with emphasis on domain-specific retrieval and English, German & Russian languages

August 2002 - December 2004
School for Information Management and Systems, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Teaching Assistant

• IS 203 Social and Organizational Issues of Information (08-12/2004)
• IS 142AC - Access to American Cultural Heritages (08-12/2003)
• IS 246 Multimedia Information (01-05/2003)
• IS 202 - Information Organization and Retrieval (also Project Coordinator for the Photo Project) (08-12/2002)

December 1998 - December 2000
Institute for Library Science at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany
Lecturer together with Professor W. Umstätter

• Seminar (HTML / SGML / XML) (12/2000)
• Seminar (HTML / SGML) (12/1998-01/1999)

May - August 2000
Unfamiliar Metadata project
School of Information Management and Systems, Univ. of California, Berkeley Objective: to link ordinary language queries to unfamiliar indexes and classifications

April 1997 - July 2001
Institute for Library Science at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany
Assistant for Professor W. Umstätter
Responsibilities: Web-design and administration, support of lectures, seminars & research projects

August - September 1998
Deutscher Bundestag (German Parliament) Bonn, Germany
Internship in the Information Services

1997-1999
Participation in several SGML Projects of the itaw - Institute for Terminology and applied Knowledge Research Berlin, Germany

February - March 1997
HWWA - Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (Institute for Economic Research) Hamburg, Germany
Internship in the Information Services

March 1996
Library of the Institute of Art History at Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany
Internship in the Library

1996-2001
Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany
Evaluation of Lectures and Seminars at the Economics Department
Student-lead project

Fellowships and Grants

2004-2005
Normative Time Fellowship, UC Berkeley

2001-2001
Carnegie Fellowship, School of Information Management and Systems

2001
Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes

1999-2000
Fulbright Travel Grant

Computer Skills

Operating Systems: Windows, UNIX
Languages: XML, HTML, basic knowledge in SQL, C, Java, Perl, Flash
Applications: MS Office (Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint), WordPerfect, SPSS, Dreamweaver, Visio

Languages

German (mother tongue), English, basic Russian, French, Italian

Publications

2006
Time Period Directories: A Metadata Infrastructure for Placing Events in Temporal and Geographic Context. Vivien Petras, Ray R. Larson & Michael Buckland. In: Opening Information Horizons - Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2006, 11-15 June, Chapel Hill, NC.

2005
How one Word can make all the Difference - Using Subject Metadata for Automatic Query Expansion and Reformulation.
Vivien Petras. In: Working Notes for the CLEF 2005 Workshop, 21-23 September, Vienna, Austria. [PDF]

Berkeley2 at GeoCLEF: Cross-Language Geographic Information Retrieval of German and English Documents.
Vivien Petras, Fredric Gey. In: Working Notes for the CLEF 2005 Workshop, 21-23 September, Vienna, Austria. [PDF]

2004
GIRT and the Use of Subject Metadata for Retrieval.
Vivien Petras. In: C. Peters et al. (Ed.) Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images: 5th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2004, Bath, UK, September 15-17, 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3491, Springer 2005, S. 298-309. [Link]

Statistical Analysis of Geographic and Language Clues in the MARC Record. Vivien Petras. Technical Report for IMLS Project Going Places in the Catalog. Dezember 2004. [PDF]

2003
UC Berkeley at CLEF 2003 -- Russian Language Experiments and Domain-Specific Cross-Language Retrieval.
Vivien Petras, Natalia Perelman and Fredric Gey. In: Comparative Evaluation of Multilingual Information Access Systems: 4th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2003, Trondheim, Norway, August 21-22, 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3237, Springer 2004, pp. 401-411. [Link]

Domain Analysis and Domain Vocabularies in Information Retrieval.
Vivien Petras. Poster at the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on "Mapping Knowledge Domains", May 9-11, 2003 in the Beckman Center of the National Academy of Sciences, Irvine, CA.

2002
Using Thesauri in Cross-Language Retrieval of German and French Indexed Collections.
Vivien Petras, Natalia Perelman and Fredric Gey. In: C.A. Peters (Ed.) Advances in Cross-Language Information Retrieval, Third Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2002. Rome, Italy, September 19-20, 2002. Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2785, Springer 2003, pp. 349-362. [Link]

2001
Domain-Based Indexes: Indexing for Communities of Users.
Michael Buckland, Hailing Jiang, Youngin Kim and Vivien Petras. In: 3e Congrès du Chapitre français de L'ISKO, 506 juillet 2001. Filtrage et résumé informatique de l'information sur les réseaux. Paris: Université Nanterre Paris X. pp 181-185. [PDF]

2000
Cross-Language Retrieval for the CLEF Collections -- Comparing Multiple Methods of Retrieval.
Fredric Gey, Hailing Jiang, Vivien Petras and Aitao Chen. In: C.A. Peters (Ed.) Cross-Language Information Retrieval and Evaluation: Workshop of Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2000, Lisbon, Portugal, September 21-22, 2000, Revised Papers, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2069, Springer 2001, S. 116-128. [PDF]

Subdomain Entry Vocabulary Module Evaluation.
Vivien Petras. Technical Report for Unfamiliar Metadata Project. August 2000. [PDF]

1998
Comparision of the Search Engines AltaVista and HotBot related to their Hit Rate and Freshness.
Vivien Petras and Matthias Bank. In: Nachrichten für Dokumentation (NfD), (6) 1998. [Abstract]

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