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 Economist is running a (moderated) public debate on copyright that should be interesting to those involved in electronic publishing, particularly on the Web. In light of recent attempts by the AP to implement a rather draconian copyright policy this is an issue worth following. AP has tried going after some bloggers and artists, so far without much success. Nonetheless, their published fees for online quoting of excerpts of their content are absurd:

I don’t mean to imply that they aren’t allowed to protect their intellectual property, particularly in unambiguous (albeit funny) situations, but if these kinds of fees are enforced, it will be prohibitively expensive for most publishers to even mention the titles of AP articles!

I can only hope that the solution that emerges from The Economist debate is a compromise rather than a polarized outcome like the DMCA.

Andreas Girgensohn

Our very own Andreas Girgensohn recently returned from WWW 2009 in Madrid, where he presented a in the developers’ track on efficient web-browser sharing, and a co-taught a tutorial with Alison Lee on developing mobile web applications.

In the aftermath of his appearance he’s popped up in the blogosphere being quoted about the significance of the iPhone as a mobile web platform in an article along with other luminaries such as Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners Lee. (link)

Keeping good company, Andreas!

FXPAL has a YouTube page where we publish various videos of research systems. Right now, the following recent projects have one or more vidoes on the site

• Introduction to FXPAL, by Larry Rowe, our President Continue Reading

A while back, I saw some reports that Microsoft was using Kumo as the name for an experimental search system.  Recently there have been more reports that this is the case, or that perhaps the name will be used for some other product.  It has been my experience that the deployment of Kumos, whether they be clouds or spiders, needs to be carefully planned.

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SDForum’s Virtual World SIG  (which I co-chair) and Women in Technology SIG celebrate Ada Lovelace Day by holding a joint SIG meeting featuring a panel of women who build, create, and work in virtual worlds. Panelists come from both industry and academia,  and will discuss their work in virtual worlds.

The SIG is Monday, March 23, from 7 – 8:30 PM; networking (and pizza) starts around 6.  It’s held at the Pillsbury-Winthrop offices in Palo Alto, off Page Mill Road. It’s free for SDForum members, $15 non-members.

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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.

It’s February again, and FXPAL is looking for summer interns!

We have a variety of interesting projects, including image processing, 3d environments, collaboration, mobile computing, and whiteboard capture. We are looking for summer graduate student interns to work with us to design and evaluate cool technology, to invent new stuff, and, of course, to publish. Plus you get to spend a summer in California!

Send resumes to interns (at) fxpal (dot) com