A while ago I wrote about the general threats to one’s privacy posed by search engine histories. It appears that the threat is more than theoretical, as researchers at INRIA and UCI have shown recently. They were able to exploit security weaknesses in the Google Web History used to generate personalized suggestions through what they termed a “Historiographer” attack.

Google appears to be taking the researchers’ warnings seriously, and has modified some of its services to use HTTPS. Not all aspects have yet been secured, however.

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The use of Twitter at conferences seems to be growing, and I think we are beginning to see some limitations of the current tool suite with respect to making use of tweets at a conference in real time. At CHI 2010 I was not able to participate much in live-tweeting because I did not want to carry my heavy Thinkpad T61 around all day, and my iPhone wasn’t up to the task. While the iPhone was adequate for checking e-mail and using the CHI 2010 schedule app, the battery would run down by the end of the day of intermittent use. Furthermore, the screen wasn’t large enough to take notes, type tweets in a timely manner, and to keep up with the stream of tweets from other attendees. In fact, in some cases it seemed that people who were following the conference remotely had a better grasp of the breadth of activity in the sessions than I did at the conference.
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Stacy Branham who was an intern with us last summer gave an excellent talk at CHI 2010 about the study that she ran of how people use ReBoard. I’ve written about the study before, and the papers are available here and here. But the slides are interesting in their own right, and tell a complementary story.

First, there are the CHI Madness slides:

Let the slides auto-advance for the best effect.

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Paper still plays an important role in many tasks even in this age of computers. This phenomenon can be attributed to paper’s unique advantages in display quality, spatial arrangement flexibility, instant accessibility and robustness, which the existing computers can hardly beat. However, paper lacks computational capability and does not render dynamic information. In contrast, cell phones are becoming powerful in computation and communication, providing a convenient access to dynamic information and digital services. Nevertheless, cell phones are constrained by their limited screen size, relatively lower display quality and cumbersome input methods. Combining the merits of paper and cell phones for rich GUI-like interactions on paper has become an active research area.

Here at FXPAL, the Paper UI group currently focuses on cell phone-based interfaces and their supporting techniques to link paper documents to digital information and enable rich digital interactions on physical paper through content-based image recognition algorithms. We started  research in this area several years ago (see our project page for more details), and our recent on-going projects include EMM and PACER.

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A lot of people (like me) will use the iPad as an e-reader, among other things. It’s a good opportunity to play around with what a e-book actually can be, since the iPad offers things that Kindle can’t (color, animation…). I vote for more like this, please:

It’s in the iTunes store here.

The complete list of accepted SIGIR papers were announced yesterday:

http://members.unine.ch/jacques.savoy/Events/SIGIR.html

I think there is a much larger diversity this year in topics, a trend that has been growing in recent years.  In fact, the only topic with more than a single session is clustering. A couple of titles that personally look intriguing include:

Assessing the Scenic Route:  Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs
White Ryen (Microsoft Research Redmond), Huang Jeff (University of Washington)

Relevance and Ranking in Online Dating Systems
Diaz Fernando, Metzler Donald, Amer-Yahia Sihem (Yahoo! Labs)

Comparing User Preferences, for Relevance and Diversity with Test Collection Outputs
Sanderson Mark, Paramita Monica Lestari, Clough Paul, Kanoulas Evangelos (University of Sheffield)

Evaluating Verbose Query Processing Techniques
Huston Samuel, Croft Bruce (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

In particular, the question of “going the scenic route” is one that deserves much more study.  Information Retrieval is most often concerns with effectiveness and efficiency.  The straight path to relevance.  As well it should be.  But there are other valuable goals that are just as much a part of information seeking such as serendipity, diversity, and, well, scenery.  It becomes interesting, and difficult to evaluate, when the goal rather than the process is exploration.

The information seeking community seems to be experiencing a renewed interest in session-based approaches to information seeking after years of focusing on single-query interaction. Yesterday at CHI2010, Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, and Zhiwei Guan reported on a study of searchers’ behavior. Rather than looking at single-query performance, they analyzed searchers’ query reformulation tactics to characterize difficult vs. easy search tasks. They found a variety of indicators that correlate with users’ difficulties in articulating efficient queries. This work is important as it hints at the possibility that web search engines can diagnose user behavior and alter the interaction with users to facilitate their search process.

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Yesterday Miles Efron and I presented our work on Twitter search at the CHI 2010 microblogging workshop.We distinguished between macro- and micro-level research on  Twitter, and then focused on Twitter search from the end-user’s perspective. We talked about the role that test collections should play in evaluation of search interfaces. The slides are shown below.

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“Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-view Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding.” Just watch it:

This is a PR2 robot from Willow Garage, being used in a project led by Berkeley grad student Jeremy Maitlin-Shepard. (The paper on the folding application is here.) The PR2 and its cousin the Texai have visited us at FXPAL; we’re hoping to improve our acquaintance soon (stay tuned!).

The very interesting approach taken by the roboticists at Willow Garage is to encourage the development of the robotics community through open source development. They also loan their hardware to other research labs on a case-by-case basis, again to encourage development on their ROS platform.

What is ROS? From the Willow Garage site:

ROS, Willow Garage’s software platform, stands for two things: Robot Operating System, a loose analogy to a computer operating system, and Robot Open Source. All of the software in development at Willow Garage is released under a BSD license at code.ros.org/gf/projects/ros. It is completely open source and free for others to use, change and commercialize upon — our primary goal is to enable code reuse in robotics research and development. Willow Garage is strongly committed to developing open source and reusable software. With the help of an international robotics community, we’ve also released all of the software we are building on ROS at code.ros.org in the “ros-pkg” and “wg-ros-pkg” projects.

Twitter is a trending topic in HCI research these days. The ICWSM conference is awash with interesting papers on mining and analyzing the Twitter stream, and the upcoming CHI 2010 microblogging workshop promises to be full of interesting discussion on a range of topics around how people use Twitter to communicate.

One of the established ways of studying Twitter use is to collect samples of tweets (e.g., see here) to perform statistical and social network analysis to understand the patterns latent in the tweets. This makes for interesting and (furthermore) publishable research.

On the other hand, the focus on large datasets and aggregate behavior forgets about individual. Not about the individual as a person who contributes tweets to the larger collection, but about the individual who needs to use Twitter to meet his or her information needs.

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