In his resent post, Daniel Tunkelang was cautiously optimistic about Google’s forays into HCIR, suggesting that Google’s “baby steps” are leading in the right direction. I agree that it would be a great innovation if Google weaned itself (or allowed its users the option) off the single ranked list precision-oriented search paradigm, and made it easier to explore the results in a variety of ways.
The PARC Forum last week featured Timothy Childs of TCHO with a cameo appearance by (ahem) me. The talk was part of a “Risk Takers” series at the PARC Forums, hosted by Linda Jacobson (who Timothy and I both knew from Web3D long ago – small world!).
The talk was primarily about TCHO’s re-invention of the chocolate production process, starting with the cacao farmers in countries like Peru and Ghana. The FXPAL/TCHO collaboration, which focuses on applying emerging technologies in a real-world industrial setting (the chocolate factory) is discussed starting at about 23:00 in the streamed video.
Sadly, though we do a lot of multi-modal media and interface work here, we are not yet equipped to provide chocolate tastings on this blog.
Noto bene: you might want to FF past some start-up kerfuffle (recalcitrant new laptop, USB drive troubles, projector connector troubles, finally solved by Ed Chi to the rescue with just the right cable). Talk really starts around 1:30.
Theobromine molecule
There is an interesting trend on the web (that I may be the last one to notice) of tools to save your search results. The purpose of these tools to is to do what bookmarks where invented to do, but to do so more effectively. The idea is that by putting useful or representative pieces of the pages you found onto some page or set of pages, you can get back to them easily, share them with others, etc. The number of such tools is growing. There is the Google Notebook, of course. And the Yahoo! Search Pad and EverNote. And now something called Snipi. Continue Reading
Caught at CHI 2009
There is a great line in a paper by Reddy and Jansen about search:
information seeking is just as much about producing new knowledge–a creative and inventive activity–as it is about finding extant information.
This breaks out beautifully in terms of the dichotomy about finding and exploring: finding is the canonical “known item search” so well executed by Google and Yahoo!, whereas exploring is about creating new knowledge. Exploring is a much more complex activity, that cannot be boiled down to a short input text box for input and a ranked list of documents for output. It’s probably too late to change terminology, but this distinction is important to keep in mind when designing information seeking interfaces.
In Google’s 2008 annual letter, Sergey Brinn writes “Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant.” This seemingly cautious statement reveals Google’s narrow focus on precision-oriented search. It is plausible that as systems get better and better at understanding the searcher’s intent, they will be more likely to identify useful documents. Sergey’s take on search is that in his childhood he “could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds.”
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:
| Words | Fees |
|---|---|
| 5 – 25 | $12.50 |
| 26 – 50 | $17.50 |
| 51 – 100 | $25.00 |
| 101 – 250 | $50.00 |
| 251 and up | $100.00 |
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!
If you’d like a look inside a high-tech chocolate factory, as well as an update on what’s been going on with the FXPAL/TCHO research collaboration (hey! you got chocolate on my research!), Timothy Childs of TCHO and I are giving a talk at the PARC Forum tomorrow, May 7, at 4 PM. The PARC Forum is open to the public; directions are here.
Daniel Tunkelang, among others, has pointed out (here and here) that Wolfram | Alpha is making its life (and potentially its users’) more difficult by focusing on an NLP interface. Instead, they should expose their data through YQL to leverage all of the development happening in that platform. This would allow mashups to leverage Wolfram | Alpha content and provide the context disambiguation that will make the data more useful with less interaction.
While some licensing issues related to the volume of requests may need to be resolved, it seems plausible that the two technologies will complement each other and increase their respective value.