Developing Gotcha 
Gotcha is being built by a group of graduate students at the UC Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS). You can read general information about this project at our group web site. Specific information about the development of the user interface can be found at the UI group site. If you are interested in contacting the general group, email knowman@sims.berkeley.edu. 
 
 

Gotcha Creators Bios on the Creators are available at the bottom of this page. Haydee Hernandez  (bottom left) Qun Liang  (bottom right) Pamela Prescott  (top left) Arti Kirch (top right)

Acknowledgments 
We would like to say a special thanks to the people who made a major contribution to this project through their feedback, testing, and content development. First and foremost, we'd like to thank the entire team of KM World, including Bruce Taylor, Jim Montgomery, Russ Jones, Chuck Luce, Tom Chamberlain, and Andy Moore for their collaborative efforts. A special thanks also goes to John Maloney of Net Intelligence for his unsurpassed enthusiasm and participation in Gotcha testing. We thank Dean Varian of SIMS, who served as our advisor and helped fund our pocket reference; He also put us in touch with contacts in the field (such as Laurence Prusak, for example, who included us as his guests at the Conference on Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning ). KM expert David Teece of the Haas School of Business was particularly helpful in the early stages of thesaurus development. We'd also like to express our gratitude to Hailing Jiang who assisted with our interface design. Finally, the following people deserve special mention for their support and consultation: Michael Buckland, Marti Hearst, Ray Larson, Brad Dawson, and Mark Ginsburg.
 
 

Bios of Creators

Haydee Hernandez
Haydee Hernandez is the project manager for Gotcha and lead the user interface design and the usability testing teams.  She will receive her masterís degree from the School of Information Management & Systems at UC Berkeley in May 1999 where her primary interests have been knowledge management and information architecture. Upon graduation she will work as a consultant for Ernst & Young.  Prior to discovering her current passions, she studied Anthropology at the George Washington University for her bachelor's degree.  Email Haydee at haydee@sims.berkeley.edu

Arti Kirch
From a professional standpoint, Arti has deep, project-oriented roots in international banking information management.  As a Vice President at Bank of America and before coming to SIMS, she participated in and managed the development of practically every type of information management system: customer and product profitability, performance measurement, decision support, financial results analysis, etc.  Her roles on these projects ranged from project manager, to business analyst, to system and user trainer, to tester.  In addition, while working in the London, Paris, Madrid, and New York offices, she established close contact with business users and gained insight into the global market place. While at SIMS, she has focused on information architecture, data visualization methods, usability engineering, data warehousing & mining, and, of course, knowledge management; as for the last topic, she interned with the KM division of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. last summer to practice some of what she has been learning at Berkeley. 

From a personal standpoint, Artiís ambition is to have fun with her best buddies while saving the world from environmental armageddon.  If that fails to happen, she will stick to hiking, reading, daily doses of chocolate, and trying to see every movie ever made which must then be talked about it endlessly over cups of Peetís. Email Arti at akirch@sims.berkeley.edu

Qun Liang
Qun Liang is the developer of the Gotcha search engine and MetaKM, a Knowledge Management metasearch engine, which powers Gotcha web search. She also developed the user interface for the search engines. She has a passion for programming and is a fluent user of a number of 3GLs, including C, C++, and Java, several 4GLs, such as SQL, SAS, and SPSS, as well as scripting languages such as Perl and JavaScript. At UC Berkeley, she has participated in the TREC research project and a major datawarehousing project (i.e., the Cal-Learn project), and has been a key player of the Berkeley anti-ad proxy server project. At SIMS, her focus has been on information retrieval, UI design and development, database development, and Web technology. Before attending UC Berkeley, she studied sociology at SUNY, Albany, where she participated in several research projects that dealt with large amount of social science and economics data. At SUNY, her focus was on quantitative research methodology and criminology. She also graduated from Tsinghua University and Peking University in China, where she was trained not only in advanced math, physics, computer science, but also in linguistics and literature. Her post graduation plans include joining a promising information technology company, and R&D of interesting Web and database applications. Email Qun at qliang@sims.berkeley.edu

Pamela Prescott
Pamela Prescott is a masters student and also an information resources analyst at the University of California Office of the President. Her contribution to Gotcha includes the development of the knowledge management thesaurus, website content development, public relations, and marketing (including the Gotcha pocket reference). At SIMS she has focused on information policy, information architecture, and knowledge management. Prior to attending SIMS she earned her bachelor's degree in Anthropology from UC Berkeley while working in records management in campus libraries. Post graduation plans include a month-long retreat in Hawaii before beginning her new Project Management position at Matrix Logic Corporation in Novato. She hopes one day to return to Eastern Europe where she worked as a travel writier in Hungary in 1995. A native of Southern California, she loves beaches, dogs, BBQs, and gardening.  Email Pamela at pprescot@sims.berkeley.edu

Copyright and disclaimer © 1999, Gotcha.
Last updated on April 27, 1999