The SDForum Virtual World SIG (which I co-chair with Bob Ketner of The Tech and Eilif Trondsen of SRI-BI) will feature a look at Nokia’s augmented reality work next Monday, August 24, in Palo Alto. Details and directions are here.

Kari Pulli, Research Fellow and Radek Grzeszczuk, Principal Scientist at Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, will present an inside look at some of their augmented reality work and speculate on possibilities for both near- and long-term.

Location
Pillsbury Winthrop Office Silicon Valley
2475 Hanover Street
Palo Alto, CA 94304-1114
(http://www.pillsburylaw.com)

Online
Online media to be linked from
http://www.virtualworldsig.com at time of event.

Agenda
6:30 PM Registration and Networking
7:00 PM -8:40 PM Presentations

My declaration of the difficulty of the solution to a challenge posed by Eleanor was premature. The problem was difficult, but apparently not impossible to solve. I wrote the previous post before Francine found a solution using classic berrypicking techniques, further confirming the utility of using more search engines than just Google to increase the diversity of results. Of course now that she has linked to that page (particularly in such a prominent blog :-) )  Google may promote it in its ranking and make that result more findable. (I am not sure about the no-follow restriction on comment links, but none the less the likelihood of someone else linking or bookmarking that page has just increased.) Francine’s discovery through exploratory search thereby increases the odds that others will now find that document through Social Search.

Yesterday Eleanor posted a great example of a difficult exploratory search. The goal was to answer a question, but not only was it difficult to figure out how to articulate the search effectively, but also it was not clear whether the answer even exists. The difficulty of articulation stems from the fact that even in combination, the terms that Eleanor used to characterize the information need retrieved documents that were similar to the desired information, but were lacking some key aspect.

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Some friends of mine believe that “search” has been solved. They explain that they can almost always find what they are looking for, and quickly, using keyword search. My life is much more frustrating! There are all sorts of things I look for and can’t find. An additional source of frustration is that I don’t know when to give up, when to conclude that what I’m looking for isn’t there.

Recently I had this experience with a question I thought would make a good blog challenge:

Does there exist a polyhedron such that all of its faces are nonconvex?

If you can think up a proof or example, please post your answer in the comments section, but with “Spoiler alert:” at its start. If you find an answer through a web search, give us the URL and tell us your search strategy. A URL pointing to discussion of this exact question would also be acceptable, even if the discussion doesn’t provide an answer.

I’d like to give a prize, and thought about various prizes (a Tcho chocolate bar? treating the winner to coffee? …) but decided in true blog spirit to ask for suggestions for an appropriate prize.

P.S. I thought about defining  terms such as “polyhedron” and “nonconvex” here.  But since this is a search and/or geometry challenge, any readers who do not know the meaning of these 3D geometry terms can still participate. I would be particularly delighted if someone who did not understand the question initially was able to find a solution.

Update: An answer has been found. Congratulations, Francine. However I realize I mixed up two searches, and this one isn’t as hard as I thought I remembered.

This has been a busy summer for the ReBoard project: Scott Carter, Jake Biehl and I spent a bunch of time building and debugging our code, and  Wunder-intern Stacy ran a great study for us, looking at how people use their office whiteboards before and after we deployed our system. We’ll be blogging more about some of the interesting details in the coming months, but I wanted to touch on a topic that occurred to me as we’re working on the CHI 2010 submission.

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Lucky me. I a few months ago I won a ticket to Google I/O by posting a comment on Techcrunch.

Google gave each attendee an Android phone; the new ones are due out this August. The phone came with a one-month SIM card from T-Mobile, including 3G connectivity. It initially looked like a cheap iPhone: the touchscreen doesn’t respond well while scrolling web pages (I still don’t know if it’s a bad hardware or slow software, or a combination), the soft-keyboard is slightly too small and suffers from the same problem as scrolling pages.

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One effective way to understand where to put paved paths is to look at places where the grass has been trodden. Twitter has adopted this approach by offering a minimal interface and looking at how people use it.The idea was to allow basic messaging, and not to worry too much about fancy functionality. The tweeters responded by overlaying a number of conventions onto the simple message body. RT, the equivalent of forwarding in e-mail, is a popular convention for cascading news along the social graph, and is one of the central mechanisms responsible for the effectiveness of Twitter as a news dissemination channel.

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I’ve been going on and on in blog posts and in comments about the business of reviewing papers as a socially useful activity (given the right incentives) and how the reviews themselves should be rated to identify effective reviewers. The idea behind is not new—Amazon implemented something like this a long time ago—but it is useful to understand it better. This article by Jared Spool offers a good account of the history, the mechanics, and the effect.

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The ACM Digital Library is a great resource for our community, and ACM continues to improve the services it offers through the Portal, recently adding an Endeca-built guided browsing interface. The digital library offering is lacking, however, in important ways. Its interface is stuck in the 20th century in that it provides access to materials, but does not support information sharing and collaboration among the people using it. I don’t mean (for once!) collaboration in the sense of collaborative search; I mean that it is not possible to comment on articles or to rate them. The only feedback one can provide is to chose to download a paper, or to cite it in one of your own publications. Both offer some evidence of an article’s impact, but the measures are not nuanced, anonymous, and lack of download or citation frequency may not reflect the merits of the work.

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I’ve been using SciRate for 2 1/2 years. I began using it with certain expectations, but my actual use has differed from those  expectations.

The simplest and most used feature of SciRate is its “Scites” button. With one click, SciRate members can vote for a paper. Initially I wasn’t sure how I should use this feature. What did my vote mean? Should I only vote for a paper I had read? Did it mean I could vouch for its correctness? Eventually my selfishness kicked in. SciRate made it easy for me to see what papers I had scited. And sciting a paper was so light-weight that it became the easiest way for me to mark papers that I wanted to come back to later. I don’t always come back to those papers, but I frequently use my list on SciRate to find a paper whose abstract I vaguely remember reading, or to find a set of papers it would be fun to read over the weekend.

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