Timothy Childs of TCHO and I will be giving a talk at ETech on our virtual world/mixed reality collaboration around the TCHO chocolate factory. We’re up at 5:05 PM on Tuesday, March 10, in the Fairmont San Jose‘s Crystal Ballroom. Non-virtual chocolate may be involved.
See more about this research collaboration in this earlier blog post.
The ACM Digital Libary is an invaluable research resource for a wide range of academic disciplines. I would find it hard to write papers without it. Invaluable as it is, it could be more valuable still by supporting not just use by its subscribers, but also research by its subscribers.
Max Wilson recently commented on an article by Zhang et al on time series analysis of search logs. (Thanks to Daniel for the web link.) This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while, in particular for finding evidence of exploratory search in the logs. Max notes that the average session length is just under three interactions, and concludes that this really amounts to a single query/selection interaction. If that’s so, then the average behavior characterized in the Zhang paper is not in fact exploratory.
I was looking forward to reading the paper, but my excitement was short-lived:
The second generation Kindle is about to be released. With a current 230,000 titles available, and new titles being added continuously, it is designed to appeal to the (well-heeled) reader on the go. The Sony PRS-505 also offers a similar reading experience, although with fewer available titles. It’s not clear, however, whether these devices represent the arrival in the mainstream of the electronic book, or just another evolutionary niche, like the Softbook™, Rocket eBook™, Palm, Newton, and other devices that preceeded them over the last twenty years.
What happens when high-tech chocolate company meets high-tech research lab? FXPAL is investigating virtual and mixed reality systems for collaboration and control in industrial settings. We are working with TCHO Inc., a chocolate start-up in San Francisco, to build and instrument virtual representations of a real, working factory and its processes.
The TCHO Factory floor, in the Qwaq Forums virtual environment
Introducing our collaborator: TCHO of San Francisco is a new kind of chocolate company, combining innovative methods and a sense of social mission with a commitment to creating obsessively good dark chocolate. Founded by a Space Shuttle technologist and a grizzled chocolate industry veteran, TCHO’s aim is to create a direct, transparent connection between cacao farmers and consumers, illuminating – and sometimes reinventing – the chocolate production process at every step to the benefit of everyone concerned.
For a process as complex as making great chocolate, this kind of clarity and accuracy is vital. We see this collaboration as a way to apply emerging technologies in clarifying end-to-end industrial production processes. It’s also interesting from a consumer’s perspective: a way to innovate in bringing people closer to the products they consume, through combining industrial process data with social applications like virtual worlds.
We’re experimenting with new technologies for fine-grained monitoring, mobile process control, and real/virtual collaborations based on real users and real-world problems in manufacturing industries. In the process, we are finding new applications for existing technologies, as well as insight into real-world needs in globally distributed systems and ways to use new technologies to map complex, real world processes.
As our work progresses, we’ll add more specific updates here on the FXPAL blog.
Meredith Ringel Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are editing a Special Issue of Information Processing & Management on Collaborative Information Seeking. Our goal is to bring together papers that describe explicit (intentional) collaboration during various aspects of online information seeking. In contract to recommendation or collaborative filtering work, we are looking for work that describes small groups of people working toward a common goal.
The deadline for submission is May 8, 2009.
More details on the call are available here.
Most popular web search engines are optimized for precision—getting that useful document in the in the top five or ten hits so that the user doesn’t have to page through the results to find it. This works well for known-item search (finding an address of a restaurant, a birthday of a movie star, etc.) and for searches that rely on combinations of keywords.
But some kinds of information needs don’t fit that pattern well. Sometimes the information being sought is spread over multiple documents, sometimes people need to find multiple instances of documents that match some query to compare or contrast them, etc. The task becomes more recall- rather than precision-oriented. Furthermore, these searches may be repeated over time, as the user finds information that causes the information need to change. Medical information seeking is one obvious such example. Are there others?