Early last year, Daniel Tunkelang proposed a way to measure people’s influence on Twitter; this metric was dubbed TunkRank, and Jason Adams put up an implementation of it that people could use to calculate their (and others’) scores. The site has been evolving, and getting slicker. It even has an API for incorporating these scores into other applications.

The basic premise of the algorithm is that its not how many followers you have, but how influential they are. Your influence flows from them. For those interested in more details and rationale about algorithm, Daniel’s slides from a recent talk offer a nice overview. What’s also interesting, as pointed out in the comments on his post, is that this model, proposed on the blog and never published in a peer-reviewed forum, has become quite influential.

Working on parsing and indexing the patent collection that Google made available has been an interesting education in just how noisy allegedly clean data really is, and in the scale of the collection. I am by no means done; in fact, I’ve had to start over a couple of times. I have learned a few things so far, in addition to my earlier observations.

Continue Reading

This post was co-authored with Jeremy Pickens

The RescueTime blog, in a piece titled Google is eating Microsoft’s lunch, one tasty bite at a time, showed a comparative usage analysis between Microsoft Office tools and various Google tools such as Gmail, Google Docs, etc. Based on an analysis of their several hundred thousand users, they claim that the use of Microsoft tools had declined whereas the use of Google tools increased.

There are a bunch of problems with this analysis.

Continue Reading

I read newspapers (seriously, print newspapers) as they pile up around my house.  A nice thing about such piles is they don’t admit order, producing serendipitous juxtapositions (I should credit my children at this point). The data-driven life is an article by a Wired writer that looks into wearable computing and how the ability to outfit oneself with sensors might better inform decisions and behavioral strategies. By my reading, it was a basically positive take on the application of technology to help people live better lives on their own terms, whatever they might be.

Next I came across Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price which took a fairly negative slant, ranging somewhere between blaming technology for diminishing our quality of life and attributing to it irreversible neurological damage. Continue Reading

Today is FXPAL’s 15th anniversary. While we’re young by the standards of research labs (IBM Watson was founded in 1945, (Xerox) PARC in 1970,  IBM Almaden in 1986, and MSR in 1991), we’ve managed to accumulate a pretty good record for our size. With an annual staff of 20-25 PhD-level researchers and a bunch of summer interns, we’ve consistently produced about 30 research publications a year on a variety of research topics ranging from multimedia to HCI to information retrieval. While no single post can do justice to the great work of so many people, here are some highlights.

Continue Reading

It seems that the Twitter API function that returns  @mentions fails to return new-style retweets. I discovered this by accident after seeing references to tweets on my blog that TweetDeck didn’t show me in the @mentions column. I then looked on the Twitter site, and saw the same behavior there.

This seems like yet another problem with the RT API, and, like the lack of ability to add comments to a new style retweet, this behavior also seems unwarranted. It doesn’t really complicate the system to include new-style RTs of one’s tweets in @mentions, and it certainly makes for a more consistent interface.

If Twitter doesn’t fix it API, perhaps the good folks at TweetDeck could inject those missing tweets into the @mentions stream.

I am pleased to learn (and to pass on) that an annual award has been created for a fourth-year University of Toronto engineering student “for the imaginative and successful application of the principles of human factors to the design of a medical device.” This award is established by the family of John W. Senders in honor of his 90th birthday.

John Senders is a Professor Emeritus from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Toronto, and sports a CV equal to that of a dozen other researchers. He continues to lecture and consult, and shows no signs of quitting his imaginative and successful ways.

Last month I had to use the ACM Word template to format our IIiX 2010 submission, and found that document to be flawed as a template because it did not use styles to specify appearance, and thus did not make an easy-to-use template. I took the liberty of generating a Word template (.DOT) file that I believe captures the formatting requirements correctly but does so in a way that makes it easy to create new documents from it. Note that this template differs from the CHI template (on which it is based) in some ways, most notably in the numbering of sections and in the formatting of references.

I would like to make the template available on the ACM site for use in future conferences, and am open to suggestions as to how to do that. In the meantime, here is the new template. There are a number of conferences coming up that use this template.  Please let me know if you have any problems with it, or find any incorrect styles.

Reading images is a quite common task; radiologists looks at X-rays, airport screeners scan suitcases, and astronomers inspect images from telescopes. In many of these visual search tasks, the outcome is important. We don’t want the airport screens to miss a weapon, or the radiologist to miss any lesions. In a paper we presented at the recent Eye Tracking Research and Application Symposium (ETRA 2010), we looked into how information of where people have looked can be used to guide them to parts of images not yet examined.

Continue Reading

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

Continue Reading