While traveling I have been doing more work on my iPad, some of which I had previously done on paper or on my laptop. I’ve been reading and reviewing conference papers, making UI design sketches, and writing longer chunks of text such as this blog. The experience has been informative, but not altogether positive.
For about 20 years the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been entertaining science fiction fans with funny commentaries of bad movies. The concept is strangely simple: mad scientists (at various times: Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl) have launched a man (Joel Hodgeson and later Michael J. Nelson) into space and are forcing him to watch the worst movies ever made. To keep his sanity, the unfortunate spaceman and his robot friends (at various times: Beaulieu, Weinstein, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett and Jim Mallon) make fun of these movies. The original show was canceled about 10 years ago but most of the people involved are still riffing on cheesy movies – “the worst they can find”.
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.
For those of us with a passing (or greater) interest in algorithms, last week was particularly interesting: Vinay Deolalikar circulated a paper that attempted to prove P≠NP. This is one of the great unsolved problems in Computer Science, and its solution has some important implications for real-world problems such as keeping your money in your bank account.
I won’t attempt a summary of the proof, and will limit myself to social commentary.
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!
According to a story in Palo Alto Online, the Stanford Medical school will be rolling out iPads to its incoming class. Apparently, the devices will be used to hold electronic versions of medical textbooks. The article quotes Dr. Prober, an associate dean with the Stanford medical school. It’s interesting to note that this program doesn’t appear to be based on any real insight into how medical students learn; instead, the standard enumeration of putative advantages of multimedia are trotted out, including “virtual cadavers for dissection labs.” Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear from the article whether the iPads will do anything but display textbooks (no specific app for doing that is mentioned, however).
In today’s business and academic circles it’s rare to see a presentation that doesn’t involve PowerPoint (or its Mac cousin, Keynote). For better or for worse, we’ve grown accustomed to the visual cueing and pacing functions that these tools provide, both as audience members and as presenters. This mode of presenting has become so entrenched that all manner of problems have been ascribed to over-reliance on these kinds of presentations.
Thus its interesting to see attempts at innovation in this space. In particular, I am thinking of Prezi, a recent startup that is pushing a more interactive, hierarchical presentation model in which you can move from overview to details and back in smooth transitions, and rather than structuring your presentation around a single narrative, you can define multiple aspects that can be explored interactively. In addition, Prezi has neat-o animated transitions among the views you define.
So does this mean that Microsoft’s stranglehold on presentation software is at and end?
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The BooksOnline’10 workshop to be held in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference in Toronto this fall will include keynote addresses by James Crawford (Google Books) and by John Ockerbloom (University of Pennsylvania). It will also feature the following papers, which will ultimately appear in the ACM Digital Library.