philip fei wu

email: fwu [at] umd [dot] edu

I have joined The School of Management at University of Surrey (UK) as a Lecturer in Information Systems.

email: f.wu[at]surrey.ac.uk

I successfully defended my dissertation on February 10, 2009!

My dissertation work, co-mentored by Dr. Jenny Preece and Dr. Yan Qu, studies motivation for adopting and using emergency response system in community settings. The dissertation proposal won Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship, awarded by the Graduate School of University of Maryland.

I hold an M.Sc. in instructional technology, an M.A. in aesthetics, and a B.A. in Chinese language & literature.

My research interest lies in the intersection of social informatics and human-computer interaction. The two major themes of my research are: 1) information system design and use in socio-technical context and 2) the grass-roots emergency response facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). These two research themes are connected by a general inquiry into the dynamics between user, technology, and context. 

Research topics that excite me include:

• Grassroots emergency response using ICTs
• Human-computer interaction in socio-technical systems
• Motivation for participating in ICT-mediated collective actions
• Technology adoption and community culture
• ...

I have worked on several projects since I started my PhD study at Maryland, including:

• Community Response Grids, funded by the Office of Vice President for Research at University of Maryland;
• Virtual Communities & Higher Education in the U.S., funded by the Department of Electronics and Information at Politecnico di Milano;
• TREC 2005 - HARD, funded in part by the DARPA GALE program;
• Computer Literacy for Older Adults, funded by the Maryland's iSchool.

• Philip Fei Wu. User Acceptance of Emergency Alert Technology: A Case Study. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2009), May 10-13, 2009, Gothenburg, Sweden.

• Yan Qu, Philip Fei Wu, & Xiaoqing Wang. Online Community Response to Major Disaster: A Case Study of Tianya Forum in the 2008 China Earthquake. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-42), January 5-8, 2009, Waikoloa, HI, USA. [PDF]

• Philip Fei Wu, Yan Qu, & Jennifer Preece. Why an Emergency Alert System isn't Adopted: The Impact of Socio-Technical Context. (Short paper). Proceedings of the 22nd Human-Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2008), September 2008, Liverpool, UK. [PDF]

• Philip Fei Wu, Yan Qu, Ken Fleischmann, Jennifer Golbeck, Paul Jaeger, Jennifer Preece, & Ben Shneiderman (2008). Designing a Community-Based Emergency Communication System: A Preliminary Study. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T 2008), October 2008, Columbus, OH, USA.

• Philip Fei Wu, Yan Qu, Jennifer Preece, Ken Fleischmann, Jennifer Golbeck, Paul Jaeger, & Ben Shneiderman. Community Response Grid (CRG) for a University Campus: Design Requirements and Implications. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2008), May 2008, Washington, DC, USA. [PDF] [PPT slides]

• Philip Fei Wu. Motivation for Adopting Community Response Technologies. Poster presented at the 5th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM 2008), May 2008, Washington, DC, USA. [PDF]

• Philip Fei Wu, Jenny Preece, Ben Shneiderman, Paul Jaeger, & Yan Qu. Community Response Grids for Older Adults: Motivations, Usability, and Sociability. Proceedings of 13th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2007), August 2007, Keystone, Colorado, USA. [PDF]

• Jimmy Lin, Philip Wu, Dina Demner-Fushman, & Eileen Abels. Exploring the Limits of Single-Iteration Clarification Dialogs. Proceedings of the 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2006), August 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. [PDF]

• Jimmy Lin, Eileen Abels, Dina Demner-Fushman, Douglas W. Oard, Philip Wu, & Yejun Wu. A Menagerie of Tracks at Maryland: HARD, Enterprise, QA, and Genomics, Oh My! Proceedings of the 14th Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2005), November 2005, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.

• Ann Fife, Philip Wu, & Richard Lamberski. A Survey of Prerequisite Resources to Distance Learning Courses. Proceedings of the 25th Annual National Educational Computing Conference (NECC 2004), June 2004, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

• Jimmy Lin, Philip Wu, & Eileen Abels (2008). Toward automatic facet analysis and need negotiation: Lessons from mediated search. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 27(1), Article No.6. [Abstract]

• Paul Jaeger, Ken Fleischmann, Jennifer Preece, Ben Shneiderman, Philip Fei Wu, & Yan Qu (2007). Community Response Grids: Facilitating Community Response to Biosecurity and Bioterror Emergencies through Information and Communication Technologies. Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, 5(4), 335-346. [Abstract]

• Paul Jaeger, Ben Shneiderman, Ken Fleischmann, Jennifer Preece, Yan Qu, & Philip Fei Wu (2007). Community Response Grids: E-government, Social Networks, and Effective Emergency Response. Telecommunications Policy, 31, 592-604. [Abstract]

I'm an amature photographer and I travel a lot [my flickr album].