Here are the slides of the presentation I gave at the IIiX 2010 conference. I presented work done in collaboration with Jeremy Pickens on session-based search. The paper is here; the talk highlights some of the theoretical considerations and gives some examples of the new interface we’re building.
The IIiX 2010 Doctoral Consortium was a rather intense ten hours filled with great ideas and discussion. We had 11 students and six advisers, representing a broad range of universities and areas of interest related to information seeking. Each student made a 20-25 minute presentation, followed by questions from the advisers and from other students; in addition, there were two 45 minute one-one-one sessions during which students received feedback from an adviser, and also from another student.
On Jon Elsas’s suggestion, I dug into Ancestry.com’s genealogy web site & did some searching for my wife’s and my ancestors. In additional to the personal and historical interest, I was curious to learn about the data and the data sets from an information seeking perspective.
Ancestry.com federates thousands of databases and archives of varying size, purpose and quality. They provide an interface for searching the data, for saving results, for building up family trees, and for connecting with other people.
Searching this collection presents a range of challenges both for the system designers and for its users.
The IIiX2010 conference is coming up, and it promises to be a great week. For me it will start with the Doctoral Consortium, followed by the conference proper, and capped off by the HCIR workshop. I’ve sat in on some doctoral consortia in the past, but this will be my first fully-fledged one. I am looking forward to the presentations and the discussion, and I will be blogging about the various presentations in the coming week.
I don’t expect to get much sleep!
I’ve had occasion to perform genealogical searches for my family as well as for others. Genealogical searches can be rewarding, but more often than not you wind up with nothing. So when starting on such searches one expects that little can be found; only one’s optimism determines whether to continue searching.
This weekend, my optimism paid off. Probably.
Frequently, particularly when searching for work related to possibly novel research ideas I or others at FXPAL have had, it is not easy to determine when to stop searching. This dilemma comes up any time anyone is searching for something we are not sure exists. After doing N searches, and finding nothing, how certain can we be that it isn’t there?
An unusual example of an existence search came up as I was doing background research for my review of N. David Mermin’s book Quantum Computer Science that was recently published in ACM SIGACT News. As part of the review, I wanted to give a sense for the extent that Mermin’s thoughts and writings have influenced scholarly and popular thought on quantum mechanics. I thought I remembered that he was the originator of the “Shut up and calculate” interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I wanted to fact check before putting it in my review. Would this search be a hard or easy one?
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This recent XKCD cartoon made me think of Miles Efron’s project on language change and information retrieval. Perhaps the tools he develops will help scholars in the future parse what we declaim to our tweeps.
Large companies often find it difficult to innovate, but not for lack of trying. Most major corporations have regular means by which new product or product line ideas are vetted. Unfortunately, such processes are designed to select incremental improvements to existing products and services, rather than to introduce radically new offerings. One significant reason for this is that when senior management considers a new idea, they often look at the revenue stream, and compare it, implicitly, with revenue streams from existing (successful) products. Proposed products that are not immediately comparable in their revenue streams with existing product lines are often not approved.
This is the trap of success. A company learns how to do something well, and then gets stuck in that rut. When the market changes, few companies are able to systematically get out of that rut and regain their past levels of success in new areas. IBM’s reliance on mainframe computing, Xerox’s on xerography patents, and Microsoft’s ignoring the Internet for a long time are examples of companies that actually managed to survive these painful transitions; many other companies did not.
This analogy applies to research as well.
Not having gone to SIGIR 2010, I missed Gary Flake’s keynote address, in which he described and demonstrated Microsoft Pivot, a zoomable, faceted search interface that his group built. Jeff Dalton has a good summary of the talk, which parallels Gary’s previous presentations, including a TED talk (video below). The demos are pretty slick, and the scale at which the system operates is impressive.
In some ways, his emphasis on rich clients and interactive control over large, pre-computed datasets, is a great illustration of HCIR principles. The user is encouraged to explore by making fluid, immediate, reversible operations over large data sets with the goal of finding useful information.
Miles Efron wrote about a research project he is starting on statistical processing of 17th and 18th century English texts with the goal of establishing similarities between passages written with different spelling and vocabulary. This is a problem that humanities scholars might have when applying modern information retrieval tools to historical texts, as accepted English spelling and vocabulary was considerably more varied that it is now. (For a fun read about some of the issues, see Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue on the history of the English language.)