About J. Blustein

I was a student in the department of Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario until 1999 when I completed my PhD. Now I am an associate professor of Computer Science and Information Management at Dalhousie (in Halifax, Nova Scotia). I take my Judaism seriously. Although those facts don't wholly define who I am, I thought you'd like to know.

And yes, I do try to guard my privacy online. How did you guess?

Research Interest

My research interests include hypertext applications, information seeking (helping people to find and use information), and human-computer interaction. For my PhD I developed a method of evaluating hypertext links within scholarly articles and compared two methods of automatically generating hypertext links. My MSc thesis was about possible methods for automatically evaluating the quality of hypertext links. Abstracts from my publications are available online.

Other Main Interests

• I love riding my bike but I don't have the time to do it as much as I'd like anymore.
• I used to run Linux on my homebox, but when Apple moved to Unix I got a Mac laptop
• I collect pins.
• I used to be active in Usenet
  • I used to maintain a public archive of postings to the Usenet newsgroup alt.backrubs. As well, I used to maintain the frequently asked questions list for that group.
  • In February 1997, I created the frequently asked questions for the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The HTML version is at this site.
  • I'm not on Usenet anymore mostly because it has changed so much from the way it used to be. I don't feel at home there anymore and I have less time for that type of interaction than I used to. That's life they say.

This document is copyright by its author, J. Blustein.