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.
What does it mean to collaborate while searching?
There are many different ways to characterize collaborative information seeking, many dimensions on which collaborative search systems can be categorized.
For the past few years Jeremy Pickens and I have been thinking that our model of collaborative exploratory search needs some further explication. Or maybe we’re just trying to understand it better ourselves. We have found that to explain what our model is, we have to simultaneously explain what our model is not. This has led to numerous discussions not only about the various dimensions of collaboration, but also about the relative importance among those dimensions for distinguishing between systems.
Our paper on conference room automation got accepted to CHI 2009. We describe the DICE system and report on about a year’s worth of use during its deployment at FXPAL. The system uses a task-based user interface to manage meetings in technologically-enhanced conference rooms. Unlike AMX or Crestron systems, it integrates with the file system and supports multiple speakers. Each speaker can specify how the room should be configured independently, and the system manages the transitions between speakers.
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.
Recently, I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions about exploratory search on this blog and in comments on The Noisy Channel. One way to look at exploratory search (and there are many others!) is to separate issues of interaction from issues of retrieval. The two are complementary: for example, recently Daniel Tunkelang posted about using sets rather than ranked lists as a way of representing search results. This has implications on one hand for how the retrieval engine identifies promising documents, and on the other for how results are to be communicated to the user, and how the user should interact with them.
Last June, Gary Marchionini hosted a workshop on Information Seeking Support Systems, which I was privileged to attend. The workshop brought together researchers from industry and academia for two days of stimulating discussion about systems, models of information seeking, and evaluation. One of the results of the workshop was a Special Issue of IEEE Computer that Gary and Ryen White edited.
We published a position paper at the workshop, and followed up with an article for the special issue, out today. We look broadly at collaboration in information seeking, including some motivating scenarios of use, a model of the design space, and a short discussion of roles.
This is the same issue that Daniel mentions in his post.
Update: IEEE says they are undergoing a “software changeover”, and expect the TOC to be up early next week.
Update 2: The online copy is now available from IEEE and on our web site.
Maribeth and Scott are collaborating with Saadi Lahlou on a special issue of the International Journal of Web Based Communities. This special issue grows out of a series of workshops at the UbiComp and CSCW conferences for a community of people interested in technologies that support meetings as well as how those technologies are changing our notion of what a meeting is. We see a deep interest in this community in understanding, augmenting, and challenging meeting practices and group collaborations across a variety of media spaces and contexts.
Please see the CFP web page for more information.
The upcoming CHI 2009 conference will be the 20th consecutive CHI I have attended. My first CHI was in 1990, where I discovered the field of Human-Computer interaction, a term I had not come across in my undergraduate education as an electrical engineer.
One of the most memorable experiences at CHI was a tutorial on “Hypertext” taught by Bob Glushko. The concept was fascinating, and Bob was a good teacher. He did, however, say one thing that struck me as a challenge. He talked about nodes, links, and anchors, and said that to build hypertext systems, you needed a “graphics display and a mouse.” At the time, I was working at UCLA in the Office of Academic Computing (OAC) as a consultant and programmer. UCLA was an IBM shop, and we had a bunch of 24×80 green-on-black IBM 3178 (and equivalent) terminals. No mouse, no windows, no graphics. But we had something called ISPF, which allowed the program to read the cursor location on the screen, and VSAM with which I built a crude inverted index of our local online help.
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.
One of my ongoing information retrieval interests revolves around the relationship between the search engine user and the search engine advertiser. In a search engine that is supported by advertising, there is a natural conflict of interest that exists between the users and the advertisers. Users want to find the information that is most relevant to themselves and advertisers want the users to see the information that is most financially rewarding to the advertiser. These two sets of information do not always overlap.