In a recent Bits column, Nick Bilton wrote about a Microsoft patent application that claims a curling page transition when flipping pages on a touch display. Very much the sort of thing you find on the iBooks app on the iPad, and on other applications. Very much the sort of thing that Ian Witten’s group has been writing about for years. I am not an expert on patents, but it seems to me that various aspects claimed by the Microsoft patent can be found in the following papers:

• Chu, Y., Witten, I. H., Lobb, R., and Bainbridge, D. 2003. How to turn the page. In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Houston, Texas, May 27 – 31, 2003). International Conference on Digital Libraries. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 186-188.

• Chu, Y., Bainbridge, D., Jones, M., and Witten, I. H. 2004. Realistic books: a bizarre homage to an obsolete medium?. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Tuscon, AZ, USA, June 07 – 11, 2004). JCDL ’04. ACM, New York, NY, 78-86.

• Liesaputra, V., Witten, I. H., and Bainbridge, D. 2007. Lightweight realistic books: the greenstone connection. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 18 – 23, 2007). JCDL ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 502-502.

• Liesaputra, V. and Ian, W. H. 2008. Seeking information in realistic books: a user study. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Pittsburgh PA, PA, USA, June 16 – 20, 2008). JCDL ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 29-38.

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Tom Simonite of Technology Review interviewed me about the breakthrough in fully homomorphic encryption that I blogged about here. I very much enjoyed talking with him, and was pleased to see that he wrote a good article on the subject: Computing with Secrets, but Keeping them Safe: A cryptographic method could see cloud services work with sensitive data without ever decrypting it. He quotes me a couple of times on the second page of the article and generously gives me the last word.

I’ve been surprised at how little has been written about this breakthrough, little enough that my blog post continues to be among the top 20 hits for a number of related queries. The field is definitely hot, with DARPA recently announcing two related solicitations, DARPA-RA-10-80 and DARPA-BAA-10-81, on PROgramming Computation on EncryptEd Data (PROCEED). The first solicits research proposals for development of new mathematical foundations for efficient computation on encrypted data via fully homomorphic encryption. The second solicitation is broader, with the goal of developing practical methods for computation on encrypted data without decrypting the data and modern programming languages to describe these computations.

I am trying to understand how Google patent search works, and am encountering some quite odd behavior. I am not talking about the inventor search bug (which is still un-fixed), but about Boolean logic.

If I run the query [“information retrieval”], the system retrieves 323 documents. Similarly, [“dynamic hypertext”] retrieves 368 documents. The combination, [“information retrieval” “dynamic hypertext”] yields 16. Putting a plus in front of either quoted phrase does not affect the results. So far, this seems reasonable.

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Recently, I came across an interesting article on students’ attitudes to reading online vs. in textbooks. The article appeared  in the Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Esther Wojcicki, a teacher, relates her students’ reactions to being asked to read online. She reports that

…early in the school year many of these students had written a fiery editorial about e-textbooks in their social studies classes. In part it read, “… online textbooks hinder study habits and force the use of computers. … and are detrimental to learning and inconvenient.” The editorial concluded with these words: “If the school wishes to cultivate the use of e-books, it should at the very least offer students the option to continue using the old, hardcover books.”

The teacher thought that six months of use of online reading devices (she doesn’t say which, but I am assuming that a Kindle device was involved, since she says that this happened before the iPad was released) would accustom students to the new medium. She was wrong.

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This may be old news to some of the true social media junkies, but thanks to Gentry Underwood’s PARC forum today, I saw a great video analogy for the Facebook interaction style. Enjoy.

The video is made by a British comedy group called Idiots of Ants; the pun becomes evident when the group’s name is pronounced with a British accent.

Exploratory search often takes place over time. Searchers may run multiple queries to understand the collection, to refine their information needs, or to explore various aspects of the topic of interest. Many web search engines keep a history of a user’s actions: Bing makes that history readily available for backtracking, and all major search engines presumably use the click-through history of search results to affect subsequent searches. Yahoo Search Pad diagnoses exploratory search situations and switches to a more elaborate note-taking mode to help users manage the found information.

But none of these approaches makes it easy for a searcher to manage an on-going exploratory search. So what could be done differently? We explore this topic in a paper we’ll be presenting at the IIiX 2010 conference this August. Our paper reviews the literature on session-based search, and proposes a framework for designing interactions around information seeking. This framework uses the structure of the process of exploratory search to help searchers reflect on their actions and on the retrieved results. It treats queries, terms, metadata, documents, sets of queries, and sets of documents as first-class objects that the user can manipulate, and describes how information seeking context can be preserved across these transitions.

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To try to understand the software limitations of inking on the iPad, I had earlier described an ad hoc writing experiment I had conducted on some free iPad applications designed for drawing. The goal was to understand whether the software imposed any fundamental limitations on marking on an iPad using a finger or a stylus. Because the device is designed to be operated with a finger, there seem to be some hardware-based limitations on the size of the tip of the stylus that prevent the kind of fine-grained visual feedback one needs to write. My conclusion at the time was that there was something wrong with the way applications got stroke data from the device that made all of them track so poorly.

It appears that I was over-generalizing. First, given the capabilities of the iPad platform to download and render video,  it seems unlikely that the hardware is not capable of providing events fast enough; the question was really about the software. A reader of this blog pointed out that I had missed the Penultimate app, and this app was apparently quite good at handling ink. I had indeed not tested it because at the time I was testing only free apps.

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J. Nathan Matias pointed me to Mark Bernstein’s paper (‘paper’ is an inadequate label for the work) on literary criticism and hypertext, which Mark presented at the recent Hypertext 2010 conference. It’s a great piece of writing that ably defends the literary tradition from the Barbarians of mechanical evaluation. My summary of the paper cannot do it justice, what with its 93(!) references, quotes from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, and Mark’s typical wit (“We cannot make feature films about vertebrate paleontology or test-driven software development; too few people are interested. The same audiences profitably support numerous books.”) The paper has a visual companion in the form of a SlideShare deck; the one aspect that appears not to have been preserved (for posterity and for those with limited travel budgets) is a recording of the actual presentation.

The comment that lead me to the paper seemed to offer it as a counter-example to Andrew Dillon’s thesis about methodological failures of the hypertext community to assess its impact on education. I don’t see it.

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Artificial intelligence has always struck me as a fittingly modest name, as I emphasize the artifice over the intelligence. Watson, a question-answering system has recently been playing Jeopardy against humans to test the “DeepQA hypothesis”:

The DeepQA hypothesis is that by complementing classic knowledge-based approaches with recent advances in NLP, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning to interpret and reason over huge volumes of widely accessible naturally encoded knowledge (or “unstructured knowledge”) we can build effective and adaptable open-domain QA systems. While they may not be able to formally prove an answer is correct in purely logical terms, they can build confidence based on a combination of reasoning methods that operate directly on a combination of the raw natural language, automatically extracted entities, relations and available structured and semi-structured knowledge available from for example the Semantic Web.

As a researcher, I’m excited at the milestone this represents.

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I am trying to understand the capabilities of existing iPad applications with respect to active reading. In this spirit, I have reviewed iAnnotate, and have written about e-books in general. Mekentosj Papers is a Mac application for managing academic papers; a version of it has been ported to the iPad. The idea is that you can use it to find papers you need to read, read them, and also manage their re-finding. The app fails on all accounts.

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