So I fired up IE-8 and I tried Google Instant. It’s fast: as fast as I can type, it’s showing me search results. Mind you the results aren’t always sensible, but they are delivered quickly. It works great for short queries such as looking for a popular sense of some word. In this case, it saves me the trouble of hitting enter. Nice, but not earth-shattering.

When I am looking for something less obvious, it guesses wrong. For example, the query “information processing and management” (an academic journal) first produced a set of results for the partial string “”inform” that match informatica.com. Nice, but not the journal. After I typed “information,” it showed me the wikipedia page for “information” (oh the irony) and a bunch of other links highly-associated with the term. But no journal. “information proc” produced a bunch of hits on “information processing.” Better, but not what I am after. Completing the second word and pressing the space bar yielded a number of links to “information processing theory,” which also happens to be the top query suggestion. But no journal. Only when I typed “information processing and” did I get the results I wanted.

So what are we to make of this new addition to Google’s bag of tricks?

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Daniel Tukelang wrote an interesting review/commentary on Clifford Nass and Corina Yen‘s new book on affective computing, where they cite many examples that biasing results toward one’s expectations can improve users’ satisfaction with the results. Another class of responses (that is also well-documented in the affective computing literature) is the tendency for people to anthropomorphize computers.

Daniel’s conclusion is that it’s relatively straightforward to use these techniques to deceive people, to subvert personalization, to mislead rather that to inform. I’ve got two reactions to this work, one related to system design, and one more specifically to information seeking.

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While many of the systems we build at FXPAL are either deployed internally or transferred to our parent company, in some cases we get to deploy them in the real world. This week, we released TalkMiner, a system for indexing and searching video of lecture broadcasts. We’ve indexed broadcasts from a variety of sources, including the U.C. Berkeley webcast.berkeley site, the blip.tv site, and various channels on YouTube, including Google Tech Talks, Stanford University, MIT Open Courseware, O’Reilly Media, TED Talks, and NPTEL Indian Institute of Technology.

But all of these videos are already indexed by web search engines, you say; why do we need TalkMiner?

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I played a bit with the Twitter for iPad app (announced recently on the Twitter blog), and found it a pleasant experience for casual use, but not particularly well-suited for more intensive use that involves multi-tasking. The slide-over pane organization is elegant and more usable than TweetDeck for iPad’s browser. It works particularly well for reading web pages in portrait mode: pages can be zoomed to hide the ads and show just the main column in a reasonably-sized font.

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The IIiX conference series (the latest installment of which took place recently at Rutgers University) arose from IRiX (Information Retrieval In conteXt) workshops (2004, 2005) held in conjunction with SIGIR 2004 and 2005. The workshops were organized by what I think of as the Scandinavian contingent of the IR community — the likes of Peter Ingwersen, Kalervo Järvelin, Pia Borlund, Birger Larsen and others — who collectively represented a more user-centered (as opposed to system-centered) approach to studying information retrieval. Yes, others were involved, but it still seems that the Scandinavians somehow inspired and led the movement. Given the success of the workshops, they organized the IIiX conference series to create a more formal venue for these topics.

One of the highlights of the 2010 conference was a debate between the system camp and the user camp about the value of simulating users. (See Saturday August 21 in the program.) This was a reprise of the theme of a workshop held at this year’s SIGIR conference, this time on the other side’s turf.

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Daniel Russell wrote up a nice summary of my search for the origins of Daniel  Tunkelang’s name. Daniel R. drew two lessons from the exercise: one, that social search (although I would say the social was bordering on the collaborative, in this case) can be effective because it integrates insights of multiple people; and two, that some domain knowledge helped me navigate the search results more effectively.

I’d like to expand his second point a bit.

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If you’re in the business of conveying information to people, you might be interested in engaging their interest to cause them to seek out more information and to deepen their understanding of the data. That’s the premise that Nick Diakopoulos is trying to explore with some interactive visualizations of demographic data.

Nick (a former FXPAL Intern) is exploring the design space of interactive, semi-automated visualizations that can be put together quickly and yet leverage the kinds of interaction design characteristic of computer games.

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A little while ago I wrote about the lack of details in reports of iPad/eBook use for education; I am happy to point to an article that gets it right. Joel Mathis surveyed some recent efforts by universities to use the iPad to replace some more traditional educational materials. He reported on some specific apps that one university was considering using (although the textbook app by ScrollMotion appears to be in development, as I wasn’t able to find any details on this app other than the Februrary 2010 announcements. According to another article, the tool would integrate multimedia textbooks with note-taking and other features. Does that mean that the notes would be attached to the textbook app, or could they be exported and integrated with notes on other materials?

This is a specific instance of a more general pattern of data use on the iPad: with each app holding on to its own data, it’s difficult to see how to manage notes and annotations across several applications that are required for one’s studies or work.

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Ten days ago,  a theoretical computer science community Q&A site went beta and seems to be generating a fair amount of activity. I’m a big fan of MathOverflow, and am delighted to see a similar site springing up for a different field.

Thirty-nine days ago,  a new mathematics site went beta, which initially puzzled me since the mathematics community already has the highly successful MathOverflow site. The difference appears to be that MathOverflow is specifically for research mathematics whereas the new site aims to be broader, allowing more elementary questions.

Overall, I think a proliferation of such sites is great, but it is also confusing. It isn’t always clear when a question is research level or not. There are questions tagged algebra or topology on the CS theory site that are pure mathematics questions. There’s a question tagged  graph theory that had been posted previously to MathOverflow. I am delighted to see that both cs.cr.crypto-security and quantum computing already are populated with a few questions, but similar questions in these areas received good answers on MathOverflow. It would be a shame if the proliferation of sites lead to less interaction between fields rather than more. I’ll be curious to see how the usage patterns play out over time.

The fourth HCIR workshop was held this past weekend at Rutgers University in conjunction with the IIiX 2010 conference. This was, in my opinion, the best workshop of the four so far. Part of the strength of the workshop has been the range of presentations, covering more mature work in traditional 30 minute presentations, a poster and demo session, and, new this year, reports from the HCIR search challenge.

From the web site:

The aims of the challenge are to encourage researchers and practitioners to build and demonstrate information access systems satisfying at least one of the following:

• Not only deliver relevant documents, but provide facilities for making meaning with those documents.
• Increase user responsibility as well as control; that is, the systems require and reward human effort.
• Offer the flexibility to adapt to user knowledge / sophistication / information need.
• Are engaging and fun to use.

Participants would be given access to the New York Times annotated corpus which consists of 1.8 million articles published in the Times between 1987 and 2007, and they would be expected do something interesting in searching or browsing this collection.

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