For a while now, Google has been serving up tweets related to searches as part of its real-time search effort. Now they are making it possible to search the Twitter stream in exactly the way Twitter doesn’t allow — that is, to search for tweets older than a few days. A query like

cyberwarfare site:twitter.com

will return a bunch of tweets, formatted as Google search results. As of the time I ran this query, it identified 1,380 hits from Twitter. Twitter’s search yielded about 250 tweets, going back to no more than 10 days ago. So far, so good.

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If you are doing research in interactive information retrieval, information seeking, collaborative search, and the like (that is, you’re concerned with what users do when they look for information), you might consider submitting  paper to IIiX 2010.

IIiX will explore the relationships between the contexts that affect information retrieval and information seeking, how these contexts impact information behavior, and how knowledge of information contexts and information behaviors can help design truly interactive information systems.

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This is one in a series of posts advertising internship positions at FXPAL for the summer of 2010. A listing of all internship positions currently posted is available here.

The focus of Human-Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) is to help people find and make sense of the information that satisfies their evolving information needs, and to do so with an emphasis on interaction and not just on clever algorithms that attempt to approximate users’ intent. Over the past couple of years, we have developed some novel information retrieval algorithms such as collaborative search. While we have evaluated the work in various ways (e.g., evaluating algorithms offline and testing with people on artificial information needs), we have not tested them on people with real information needs.

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Just when you thought browser wars were a thing of the past, here comes Google Chrome. In a bid to increase its browser’s market penetration, Google announced Quick Scroll, a Chrome extension that enhances Google’s search results by highlighting matching passages that may not be easy to find otherwise.

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ReBoard is a system we built at the lab to automatically capture whiteboard images and make them accessible and sharable through the web. A technical description of the system is available here. At CHI 2010, Stacy Branham will present an evaluation of ReBoad that she conducted over the summer as an intern at FXPAL¹.

Until then, check out our dorky demonstration video!

And be sure to watch the other videos of the latest and greatest FXPAL technologies.

1. The paper is
“Let’s go from the whiteboard: Supporting transitions in work through whiteboard capture and reuse” by Stacy Branham, Gene Golovchinksy, Scott Carter, and Jacob Biehl.

Marti Hearst recently gave a talk at Google related to the themes in her book. She does a good job of explaining the challenges and opportunities related to interactive information seeking, including design, evaluation, query reformulation, integrating navigation and search, information visualization as it relates to search, and future trends. While most of this is music to the ears of HCIR types, her discussion of collaborative search (around minute 46) is particularly “relevant:” Marti spends a good deal of time on our paper on collaborative search, describing the various models of collaboration and showing some figures from our paper. The talk is on YouTube, the paper is on the web. Questions and comments are very welcome.

ps: Marti’s mention of Diane “Green” in minute 24 actually refers to Diane Kelly, whose well-received paper on query suggestion was presented at SIGIR 2009.

We’re happy to note that the book “Designing User Friendly Augmented Work Environments” (edited by Saadi Lahlou) has been published by Springer, in hardcover with an online version available. We have a chapter in it on our USE smart conference room system: “Designing an Easy-to-Use Executive Conference Room Control System.” The chapter starts with some of the field work we did to understand the work flows of the stakeholders, and then describes the evolution of the system we built to support the executive, his assistant, and others who used the meeting room. The system developed during this project was the precursor to the DICE system.

The process of writing and publishing this chapter took a considerable amount of time, and thus it is interesting to look back on some of our early designs to see how they have evolved. One aspect that changed was the name of project: we started out calling the system USE (Usable Smart Environment) and that terminology is used in the book chapter. By the time we completed this project and moved onto the larger conference room, we changed the name to DICE (Distributed Intelligent Conferencing Environment). DICE now runs in both rooms, and USE is the name of Gene’s group, just to add to the confusion.

For more information on this work, check out the video, some before/after pictures, and the CHI 2009 paper. We’re also working on a journal article that extends the CHI findings. Look for it in a few years!

ReBoard architecture (from a ReBoard image)

Over the last year or so, Scott Carter, Jacob Biehl, and I have built and deployed an interesting system for managing whiteboard content. The system, ReBoard, consists of a camera that takes pictures of a traditional (or electronic, if you wanted) whiteboard when whiteboard content changes. The images captured by the camera are cleaned up by adjusting contrast and correcting for skew, and then saved into a database along with a bunch of metadata that identifies the changed region, the time and place the image was taken, and whether the content was likely created as a collaboration. Once captured, images can be shared with others and can be annotated by adding tags and notes.

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OK, it’s a sonnet, not an ode, but still. Making Light is one of my favorite blogs, run by science fiction editors Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden; it has a rich subject range and a great community of commenters. I also enjoy its commenters’ tendency to break into verse at the least provocation. Google Wave (which Jeremy discussed here) was the topic of a recent post titled “Panhandling for invites” in which Abi Sutherland offers this delight:

The sea has depths in which no net is cast,
With trackless kelpine forests where great squid,
Like Sasquatch in his mountains safely hid,
Dance dreaming with the fishes swimming past.
And human interaction is the same.
Beneath an email surface lies the deep:
Unmodeled work and social patterns creep
And spread in ways existing tools don’t frame.

Go here to see the whole sonnet.

This has been a busy summer for the ReBoard project: Scott Carter, Jake Biehl and I spent a bunch of time building and debugging our code, and  Wunder-intern Stacy ran a great study for us, looking at how people use their office whiteboards before and after we deployed our system. We’ll be blogging more about some of the interesting details in the coming months, but I wanted to touch on a topic that occurred to me as we’re working on the CHI 2010 submission.

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