I will be chairing the session on exploratory search at CHI 2010. The session, which features a best paper award winner and a best paper nominee, will take place Monday morning after the opening plenary session. The session consists of three papers:

Reactive Information Foraging for Evolving Goals
by Joseph Lawrance, Margaret Burnett, Rachel Bellamy, Christopher Bogart, and Calvin Swart

How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?
Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, and Zhiwei Guan

Effects of Popularity and Quality on the Usage of Query Suggestions during Information Search
Diane Kelly, Amber Cushing, Maureen Dostert, Xi Niu, and Karl Gyllstrom

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Apple.com has a lovely article here on the iPhone app we built so our collaborators at TCHO could monitor and control their chocolate lab machines remotely. This work is part of our explorations in mixed reality for industrial enterprises, in particular the Virtual Factory project. Below you can see a few screenshots from the iPhone lab app (click for larger image).

Twitter recently released some of its tweet-related code as open source. This is great news for those building applications on top of twitter, as it reduces the need to write the same code over and over. The released code  includes parser and HTML markup generator classes, and a Regex class that includes a bunch of Pattern instances. Code is available in Java and Ruby.

The examples seem straightforward to use, which means I will be using them!

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I’ve been messing with the Twitter search API, and I am here to whine about it. Overall, it’s a great feature, but it’s interesting that it imposes costs on the third-party client that the Twitter interface seemingly doesn’t share. For example, I can run a search and get back a bunch of results. When I do it from the Twitter web page, it gives me the option of drilling down and showing conversations when they come up in search results.

When I execute the same query using the API, however, there is no indication that a particular message was related to some other message in any way. Sure, I know who sent what to whom, but that’s not enough! Not only does the search API not tell me when a message is a reply, it doesn’t provide useful information to indicate a retweet, either.

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Recently, I decided to upgrade my laptop. After some research, I chose the Lenovo ThinkPad W500. Not much seems to have changed in two years, as it looks almost identical to my old Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. I felt that with the new decade upon us, it was time to move from Windows XP to Windows 7. While setting up the new laptop, I ran into many problems with VPN, Wi-Fi, and usable RAM.

I figured that I would carry over the settings from the old laptop using Windows Easy Transfer. After setting everything up, I couldn’t get VPN to work. It had worked briefly before I installed the old settings and joined the domain. After unsuccessfully trying to figure out why the IPSec virtual adapter wouldn’t load, I decided to blame it on the transfer of my old settings.

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The ability to manage references to papers is an extremely useful tool for academics. As I see it, the tools divide into two classes: one for managing references while writing, and the other for managing references (often your own) for bibliographic purposes such as putting together your CV. Tools such as EndNote and Mendeley are designed to manage a database of references that can be embedded in documents (such as MS Word) without the need to re-enter all the metadata. The tools work, but are brittle and prone to corrupting the manuscript.

Recently, a number of tools (often based on Google Scholar as the search/data mining engine) have been released. I reviewed CitationTracker earlier, and now got around to looking at Scholarometer.

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I will wind up this year with a post that highlights some posts that I thought were interesting but that didn’t receive as much traffic as I thought they deserved. These are not the out-of-the-ballpark home run posts (see the sidebar for those) but rather solid hits that didn’t get caught on camera for some reason.

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My interest in photography started in the 1980s with a small disc camera. At some point, my brother, a professional photographer, looked at my pictures and commented: “You shoot in color, but you think in black-and-white. Here’s some TMAX film.”

I started with “digital” photography by scanning my paying for high-quality scans of black and white negatives of that TMAX that I shot with my Canon Elan II. The results were mostly good, but the process took a couple of weeks and cost more than I care to remember. At some point, I started using a Canon 20D digital camera, with the same lenses. Now all I had to do was copy the files from the flash card to the PC, and tinker with them in Photoshop. While this produced much better digital pictures, I had to give up my black and white photography because no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get these images to rival the scanned negatives. The tradeoff between convenience and quality swayed toward convenience.

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In the past 15 years, FXPAL has hosted a large number of interns, many of whom have become (even more) prominent in their fields. We will soon be recruiting a new crop of interns, and I thought it would be interesting to dig around a bit and see what people are up to these days. A few are now employees at FXPAL. What about the others?

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The next talk in the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures series is this Friday. Robert Bryant, the current director of MSRI, will speak on “Rolling and Tumbling—The idea of Holonomy.” It sounds like a fun talk; he’ll illustrate his talk with “everyday and some not-so-everyday toys.”

I’ve posted the slides from my Bay Area Mathematical Adventures talk last month on From Photographs to Models: The Mathematics of Image-Based Modeling. I blogged about that experience here. I had hoped to post a link to the video at the same time, but it isn’t ready yet. I never feel that a talk is fully captured from just the slides, especially one that was designed to be interactive. I will post a link to the video once it is up.

I’d be tempted to go to Bryant’s talk except that I’m singing that night. Two FXPAL folks, Bill van Melle and I, sing in the 40 voice Bay Choral Guild. We have concerts Fri, Sat, and Sun at various Bay Area locations. Come if you are in the area and would enjoy a concert of festive Baroque choral works performed by our excellent group together with an outstanding group of soloists and musicians!