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
The NSF is funding postdoc positions through the new Computing Innovation Fellows Project. Four of us here at FXPAL are offering our services as mentors. Work with
If you received your Ph.D. (or completed all of the requirements) between May 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009, and have expertise relevant to one of these areas, please contact us! To be eligible for the program, you do not have to be a U.S. citizen (though U.S. citizens are given preference).
Act quickly! Applications are due June 9th.
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).
I am curious to play with Microsoft’s Kumo when it comes out. It looks from the screenshot in this CNET article like they’re trying to come up with some aspects to the search, which should make it easier to make sense of large results sets. I am a bit surprised that there isn’t more hype about it, compared, say, with what Wolfram | Alpha was able to generate.
The other interesting bit is how the PowerSet technology will be integrated and what its ultimate impact will be. My interest is not only technical but also personal, as a several of the PowerSet technical staff had worked at FXPAL a few years ago. They’ll probably appreciate the confusion this name is likely to cause us here at FXPAL in the near future.
I just poked around and found an interesting Health search site that’s part of Microsoft Live. Although the blank landing page is a sharp blow to the senses coming from the nice Manatees currently inhabiting the Live Search page, once you enter a query, the interface is actually quite pleasant. I haven’t played with it for real, but it seems to populate some aspects (Conditions, Personal Health, Drugs & Substances, Alternative Medicine, and Nutrition, with others available through a link), organizes some featured content along with a set of links to medical sites, allows search results and searches to be saved, and shows some ads.