Dr Annie Lau

Research Fellow
PhD(UNSW), BE Hons I (UNSW)

Profile

Annie is a Research Fellow with qualifications in Health Informatics (PhD UNSW) and Software Engineering (BE Hons I UNSW). She is currently working in the decision support research stream at the Centre for Health Informatics, using Web and social technologies to design a national website for Australian healthcare consumers to manage their health and answer their health-related questions.

For her doctoral research, she conducted the first study providing evidence that clinicians and consumers can experience cognitive biases whilst searching for online information. In that research, she also designed and trialled a series of interventions on the search user interface, demonstrating that attempts to 'debias' search behaviours can influence the accuracy and confidence in answering health-related questions.

Research Interests

Consumer decision support, social computing, human behaviour modelling.

Past Projects

Learning strategies for personal agents to assist professional users in searching the Web.

Publications

• Lau, A.Y.S., & Coiera, E. (2008). Can cognitive biases during information searches be reduced to improve consumer decision making? Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. (accepted).
• Lau A.Y.S., Coiera E. (2008) Impact of web searching and social feedback on consumer decision making: a prospective online experiment. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 10(1):e2.
• Lau, A.Y.S., & Coiera, E. (2007). Do people experience cognitive biases while searching for information? Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 14, 599–608.
• Lau, A.Y.S., & Coiera, E. (2007). How do clinicians search and access biomedical literature to answer clinical questions? 12th World Congress on Medical Informatics (MedInfo), Brisbane, Australia.
• Lau A.Y.S., Coiera E. (2007) Cognitive biases during information searching. 2nd ARC Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet) Workshop of the Next Generation Search Priority Area (NGS07); Macquarie University.
• Coiera E, Lau A.Y.S., Magrabi F. (2007) Knowledge based approaches to improving clinical search behaviours and decision outcomes -- the Quick Clinical Project. 2nd ARC Network in Human Communication Science (HCSNet) Workshop of the Next Generation Search Priority Area (NGS07); Macquarie University.
• Lau, A.Y.S., (2007). The impact of cognitive biases on information searching and decision making (PhD thesis).
• Lau, A.Y.S., & Coiera, E. (2006). A Bayesian Model That Predicts the Impact of Web Searching on Decision Making. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(7), 873–880.
• Lau, A.Y.S., Ong, S.S., Mahidadia, A., Hoffmann, A.G., Westbrook, J., & Zrimec, T. (2003). Mining Patterns of Dyspepsia Symptoms Across Time Points Using Constraint Association Rules. Paper presented at the Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 7th Pacific-Asia Conference (PAKDD), Seoul, Korea. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, (vol. 2637, pp. 124–135).
• Lau, A.Y.S., Coiera, E., & Lovell, N. (2002). The need for evidence-based knowledge at the point of care: what problems do general practitioners have?, National Health Informatics Conference, Melbourne, Australia Health Informatics Society of Australia.