Marti Hearst‘s new book, Search User Interfaces, is out, as Daniel Tunkelang reported earlier. The book covers a range of topics related to interaction around information seeking, including topics such as design, evaluation, models of information seeking, query reformulation, etc. It also discusses emerging trends: Mobile Search Interfaces, Multimedia (although this field has arguably been around long enough to no longer be emerging), Social Search, and natural-language queries. The Social Search section discusses collaborative filtering, recommendation systems, and collaborative search, describing several systems along the full range of depth of mediation.

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Once a month I drive up to Oakland to attend the SF Bay Groovy and Grails Meetup organized by Chris Richardson. It’s a fun group of people and conversation covers a lot of ground. During Monday’s meeting we chatted about Scala, among other things, and how it was good for pattern matching in exactly the way that object-oriented solutions weren’t.

Chris gave the example of dispatching requests in a web server by matching URI patterns to discover what internal methods to call to handle requests. Scala’s switch statement allows a URI to be split into a list of tokens (as do many other languages) and then makes it easy to match against this list, even if the list is not homogeneous. It furthermore makes the matching values available to the closure handling the case, making it more expressive than (for example) Java.

This made me reflect on when pattern matching is used versus more explicit representations of structure. For example, when making a function call, we rely on an explicit (simple) declared structure rather than on a sequential examination of possible patterns to decide what function to call. (Overloaded methods don’t really require serious pattern matching.) So pattern matching is typically used when the input is poorly structured, natural language processing being a good example. While the utility of using plain text URIs as a lingua franca among heterogeneous systems is compelling, but I found it ironic that, in a sense, that the URI, the basis of internet communication, winds up being treated more like natural language than a function call.

[“ubuntu”] describes humanity as “being-with-others” and prescribes what “being-with-others” should be all about. Ubuntu emphasises sharing, consensus, and togetherness.

according to ubuntu.com. Over the last two days I have experienced a palpable lack of togetherness with this beast in an attempt to explore the world beyond Windows. I have some Grails/Java code that I wanted to try running on a linux box rather than on Windows (on which I had no problem getting it to work). Grails is a dynamic language that requires run-time compiler support, so it must use the JDK rather than the JRE.

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In their JCDL 2009 paper titled “Cost and Benefit Analysis of Mediated Enterprise Search” Wu et al. described a cost-benefit analysis of call center activity. The goal was to understand when an experts should help “consultants” who are handling phone calls from customers. The idea was that experts could make improvements in search results of queries run by consultants by identifying useful documents; the challenge is to make effective use of the more expensive experts’ time.

This seems like a great opportunity to implement a collaborative search interface that would mediate the collaboration between the people handling the phone calls and the technical experts. In addition to screen sharing (to help the expert understand the problem), the system might provide the expert with additional tools to facilitate searches and to reuse previously-found results.

Last week we had two interesting visitors who each gave talks in the area of tangible computing. (Briefly, tangible computing explores ways of interacting with computers using real-world physical objects; much more info can be found online including at the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab). FXPAL has done a number of tangible interface projects over the years, including the PostBits project, the Convertible Podium, and others.

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Looks like I missed a good paper at JCDL 2009: A Polyrepresentational Approach to Interactive Query Expansion by Diriye, Blandford and Tombros. As with many good ideas, this paper describes an approach that is obviously useful once described, but one I had not come across before.

Manual query expansion can be useful when relevance feedback fails because it doesn’t know why a person found a document relevant, but people are often reluctant to use the suggestions offered by information seeking systems. This paper offers a new twist on these recommended terms: When suggesting query terms for expanding a user’s queries, they show terms with some representation of the context in which they occur. Evaluation showed that this contextual information allowed users to understand query terms better, and that it improved their ability to make relevance judgments with respect to documents that contained the suggested terms.

In Cerchiamo, we offered users term suggestions based on relevance judgments made by search partners. While the suggested terms were useful for identifying other relevant documents, they weren’t always used. It’s likely that term recommendation in collaborative search situations would benefit from these techniques even more than in the standalone search because in the collaborative search case term recommendations may be based on documents that a searcher has never seen.

I attended JCDL 2009 this week, and had the opportunity to do some live tweeting of several papers and panel sessions. It was an interesting experience that I thought was worth summarizing here. Overall, it was difficult to get the messages right, it was a challenge to listen and type at the same time, the 140 character constraint was an issue some of the time, and my tweeting had a couple of effects on my Twitter network. And of course there is the question of utility of this endeavor.

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Bill Kules and Robert Capra have an interesting poster at JCDL 2009. “Designing Exploratory Search Tasks for User Studies of Information Seeking Support Systems” describes a study that evaluated an algorithm for determining whether a search task makes a good exploratory or known-item search candidate. They evaluated their approach by having 18 study participants run candidate queries (four exploratory and two known-item). After performing the specified searches, participants answered the questions about

1. Familiarity with the topic
2. Topic difficulty
3. Their confidence that the task was fulfilled
4. The degree to which answering the question required finding multiple documents
5. The extent that the person’s understanding of the topic changed during the session

The study reported the following significant differences between the two conditions: People said that they found exploratory tasks more difficult, they had lower confidence that the task was fulfilled, they had to find multiple documents to fulfill the request, and their goals changed during the search session.

This is a nice summary of the distinctions between exploratory search and known-item or navigational searches, and underscores the need to build interfaces that support the differences among these tasks.

Update:  The poster one page description is now online, as is the poster handout.

No, really, it’s on the TV schedule this time (a couple of weeks ago the show got pre-empted for a pledge drive): You can get a look at our Virtual Factory and some of our molecular dynamics animations on “The Science of Chocolate” which is showing tonight 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 tonight, June 16 at 7:30PM on KQED, Channel 9; will repeat at 1:30 AM Wednesday June 17; and should also commence streaming on the KQED web site as of tomorrow. It looks like the “Science of Chocolate ” story is one of two stories in this show.

On June 18th, I am chairing the morning papers session at JCDL 2009. The session includes three full and to short papers covering a wide and interesting swath of research. The first two look at how content is tagged and created, the second two describe experiences around designing for mobile access to digital libraries, and the last paper presents empirical results of a study of a faceted search interface for exploratory search.

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