I’m taking Bing for a spin. I’ve changed my default search engine to Bing, and am going to give a try. I am not particularly interested to see if it has better ranking than Google. It probably won’t matter but for a few cases anyway.
What I am more interested in are the various navigational and finding aids that have been incorporated into the search engine’s interface. So far, I’ve seen the following interesting aspects: Continue Reading
Just out last week: a survey report from Erica and Sam Driver of ThinkBalm on the business value of immersive internet technologies and applications. By “immersive internet” they mean a culture developing around a media-rich cloud of emerging technologies including virtual worlds, mobile devices, social apps, the semantic web, and gaming.
Key findings are nicely summarized here. This report supports our own findings at FXPAL in experimenting with different uses of several different virtual world platforms: “The most common barriers to adoption are target users having inadequate hardware, corporate security restrictions, and getting users interested in the technology.”
You can get a look at our Virtual Factory and some of our molecular dynamics animations on “The Science of Chocolate” which is showing tomorrow night on Channel 9 (in the Bay Area) as part of the KQED Quest series. The story is focused on the hows and whys of chocolate making, not on our Virtual Factory project, but it’s still fun to see some of our work on the air.
Model of a theobromine molecule
All these 3D models and animations were created by FXPAL’s resident Art Guy, Tony Dunnigan, with Sagar Gattepally handling the virtual world construction; the video embedded in-world was shot by John Doherty.
The show is on tomorrow night, June 2nd at 7:30PM on KQED, Channel 9; and will also commence streaming on the KQED web site as of tomorrow.
UPDATE: oops, this show was pre-empted for pledge programming! This Quest segment is re-scheduled for June 16 at 7:30 PM.
Heads-up: we’ll be at SIGGRAPH 2009, giving both a long talk and a poster on our Virtual Factory project. SIGGRAPH is in New Orleans this coming August 3 – 7. This work is a result of a research collaboration between FXPAL and TCHO Inc., a chocolate maker in San Francisco.
Virtual Factory in Multiverse
Just announced is an interesting new platform from Google, around shared collaboration environments. Explicitly-shared environments.
A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more…Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
Now, add a search layer into this rich, shared space, and you’ll have something quite akin to Merrie Morris’ SearchTogether system, which combines real-time awareness with a collaboratively authored results and note set. Put some algorithmic mediation under that, and you’ll have some of the projects that we’ve been working over the past few years here at FXPAL, which uses real-time actions and behaviors of multiple, explicitly collaborating team members to alter and inform the information that each individual sees. We think that the ability to put jointly-relevant information on the same real-time page, but also let users explicitly work together in the finding and discovery of that information, is and will continue to be an extremely useful application.
Looks like this space is heating up.
Jeremy‘s got an interesting post and discussion on his IR Gupf blog about the process of improving search results. The gist of the discussion is that the process of tweaking search engine performance leads to a local optimum, and cannot be used to discover new interfaces and interaction techniques to support information seeking.
Exploratory search is like adding a search suspension, search tires, a manual search transmission, search bucket seats, and search steering wheel to your search engine. And, of course, search cup holders.
Google recently announced its 2009 Google Fellowship recipients, and I was pleased to find a name I recognize among them. Nicholas Chen (University of Maryland) won the fellowship for HCI. Nick’s been doing very interesting research on multi-screen reading devices (check out this CHI 2008 video) and pen-based computing. Congrats to Nick on this impressive achievement! It’s great to see this interesting part of the HCI field being highlighted in this fashion.
It is ironic, however, that there is no award for research in anything resembling information seeking support systems. There are awards for research areas such as cloud computing, machine vision, distributed systems, and natural language processing, but nothing integrative that could be used to improve information seeking interfaces. Sigh.
It’s my pleasure to announce that the final report to the NSF on the workshop on Information Seeking Support Systems (ISSS) so ably organized by Gary Marchionini and Ryen White has been published. The report covers many aspects that define this research area and distinguish it from both Information Retrieval and Human-Computer Interaction fields.
Three kinds of challenges are defined and preliminary steps toward meeting the challenges are presented in this report: robust models of human‐information interaction; new tools, techniques, and services to support the full range of information seeking activities; and techniques and methods to evaluate information seeking across communities, platforms, sources, and time. Special attention is given to collaborative information seeking and the need for industry‐academic collaboration.
It was a wonderful experience to have two days of discussion of these and other topics with so many smart people, and I am happy to have contributed to the workshop organization and to the writing of the report. Finally, I am delighted that collaborative information seeking is featured as an important aspect of the field. We hope that this report will inspire others to take on the outstanding challenges and will encourage the NSF to understand the significance of this work for our society.
The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2009 program is up. The conference will take place June 15-19 in Austin, TX. It looks to be a good conference, featuring two keynote speakers: Christine Borgman, Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA and Gerhard Fischer, Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
There is a new wrinkle to the Poster Session: In addition to the physical posters at the conference site, there will be a parallel Second Life session that will allow remote participation from those who were not able to make it to the conference. Once the (virtual) poster selection is finalized, instructions on how to get to it through Second Life will be posted on the conference web site (and echoed here).