In many ways, the iPad represents very different point in the design space of hand-held devices for reading. Whereas the Kindle is geared toward a low-power, book-like experience, the iPad is positioned closer to high end (but currently too heavy) slate computers. It is designed for richer interaction, for color, for animation and video, all the things that were discarded in the Kindle design for the sake of a longer battery life and less weight.
The work honored with the paper award at the ECIR 2010 conference described an experiment that assessed the effectiveness of a case-based reasoning mechanism for suggesting possible actions for users engaged in an exploratory search task. The authors constructed DAFFODIL, a sophisticated interface for issuing queries, for saving documents, and for suggesting potentially useful query expansion terms. They performed a preliminary evaluation of the system on three search tasks, and compared subjects’ performance and behavior patterns with and without system-generated suggestions.
Starting in the fall of 2010, Seton Hill University (not to be confused with Seton Hall University) is going to be equipping its students with iPads. It’s not clear from the description on the web site what the students are expected to do with these devices, or what educational advantage the iPads are likely to impart beyond the laptops the students will also receive.
But is the iPad the right tool?
The Apple marketing machine has shifted gears, releasing several videos of iPads running different applications before the upcoming product launch. The larger screen is undoubtedly an improvement over the iPhone-sized display, but the interactivity has not improved with this device. Sure you can resize photos, move slides around and read more text without paging, but in its essence, this is just an iPhone on steroids.
I was struck by this picture, published by TechCrunch, and its contrast to a shot of XLibris that we took about ten years ago.
 iPad with Evernote app, circa 2010 |
 XLibris on a slate, circa 1999 |
There is a big difference in hardware, and in software. The 2010 hardware is much more capable; the software has focused touch rather than then pen. Is touch better, because we’re more used to fingers than pens, and because pens are easy to lose? I don’t think so, for the reason illustrated below.
There are generally two types of tags for linking digital content and paper documents. Marker-based tags and RFIDs employ a modification of the printed document. Content-based solutions remove the physical tag entirely and link using features of the existing printed matter. Chunyuan, Laurent, Gene, Qiong, and I recently published a paper in IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine that explores the two tag types’ use and design trade-offs by comparing our experiences developing and evaluating two systems that use marker-based tagging — DynamInk and PapierCraft — with two systems that utilize content-based tagging — Pacer and ReBoard. In the paper, we situate these four systems in the design space of interactive paper systems and discuss lessons we learned from creating and deploying each technology.
The success of de-anonymization efforts, as discussed here, suggests that older anonymization methods no longer work, especially in light of the large amount of publicly available data that can serve as auxiliary information. The quest to find suitable replacements for these methods is ongoing. As one starting point in this broader quest, we need useful definitions of privacy.
It has proven surprisingly difficult to find pragmatic definitions of privacy, definitions that capture a coherent aspect of privacy, are workable in the sense that it is possible to protect privacy defined in this way, and are sufficiently formal to provide means for determining if a method protects this type of privacy and, if so, how well.
The best attempt to date is the notion of differential privacy. Continue Reading
Yesterday Google announced that their bookmarks can now be shared. So far, so social media. What’s interesting about it is the motivating scenario:
Sharing lists can help you collaborate with your friends on common interests or activities. Let’s say you’re planning a group trip to Paris. With a list, everyone can contribute useful links and resources, such as packing lists, hotel links, flight information and attractions.
The key characteristic that distinguishes this scenario from typical “ask (or mine) your social network” types of search is that here you and your friends have a shared information need, and you are all contributing your efforts and expertise toward that goal. The system doesn’t have to figure out that you all are planning a trip to Paris together — that would be a hard inference to make. Rather, you tell it, explicitly, what you’re doing, and it helps you work on that information need together.
Aruna Balakrishnan, Tara Matthews and Tom Moran have a paper at CHI 2010 that examines how people used Lotus Activities to structure their interaction with digital artifacts and to help them collaborate. They observed 22 participants over the course of a couple of years to characterize their use of this tool.
Their findings bear interesting similarities to our CHI 2010 paper that described the use of various communication technologies in the workplace. Continue Reading
In the aftermath of the recent SXSW event, Alexandra Samuel wrote on the HBR blog about five unsolved problems facing Social Media. She enumerated contact list overload, search overload, information overload, brand overload, and apathy overload. It’s not clear to me, however, whether these are pressing issues, and whether universal solutions to them would constitute an improvement over the current chaos.
On Friday Netflix canceled the sequel to its Netflix prize due to privacy concerns. The announcement of the cancellation has had a mixed reception from both researchers and the public. Narayanan and Shmatikov, the researchers who exposed the privacy issues in the original Netflix prize competition data, write “Today is a sad day. It is also a day of hope.”
The Netflix prize data example is probably the third most famous example of de-anonymization of data that was released with the explicit claim that the data had been anonymized. These examples differ from the privacy breaches discussed by Maribeth Back in her post on ChatRoulette or the issues with Google Buzz discussed as part of Gene Golovchinsky’s post “What’s private on the Web?” . Those examples made sensitive information available directly. In the case of the following three de-anonymization attacks, the data itself was “anonymized,” but researchers were able, with the addition of publicly available auxiliary information, de-anonymize much of the data.