In a recent post, James Landay compared Dan Bricklin’s note-taking app with a research project called NotePals done at FXPAL during a summer internship by Richard Davis, James’ student. The idea behind both is that writing on a small device (or with poor spatial resolution) is hard, but if you write large and then scale down the ink, you get much more legible results.

Dan’s iPad app works great for this purpose, and with only a little practice one can get really proficient with it. I’ve used it as my primary sketching tool on the iPad, including for sketching interface designs. I wish I could import background images into it for sketching on, but otherwise it’s a nice basic tool. The same idea — write on a zoomed out image & then shrink the ink — works great on the iAnnotate app as well, although the interaction is not really optimized for that the way that Briklin’s app is.

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The Memex concept

One of the highlights of this year’s Hypertext conference (which I missed) was Andrew Dillon‘s opening keynote. He is a great speaker—the Irish accent doesn’t hurt—and it would have been great to see  it. Perhaps a recording will materialize eventually. In the meantime, there is the written version that reviews the state of Hypertext research 65 years after some of its tenets were articulated by Vannevar Bush in the famous “As We May Think” article in the Atlantic.

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The impact of academic computer-human interaction research on the real world has been debated repeatedly over the last few years. The criticism is that HCI research isn’t that relevant, and that really innovative interfaces (such as Apple’s iPhone) are designed by outsiders, without input from HCI researchers. My sense is that things are not so dire, that there is a trickle-down effect, and that practitioners do pay attention to research results when those results are packaged effectively.

But the criticism is not completely without merit, and only a few systems described in the CHI and UIST literature (to take two academic examples) actually make it into product. On the other hand, one finds examples of transformative work (e.g., Tim Berners-Lee’s framework for the World Wide Web) being rejected by top-tier conferences.

Thus it gives me great pleasure to point to an academic success that is also succeeding in the real world. I am talking about ShapeWriter.

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Last week, I went to a SF Bay Area ACM Chapter talk by Peter Binfield and Sara Wood of PLoS, which they covered the motivation for establishing the PLoS journals, and talked about some of the challenges of running this operation. PLoS is a non-profit publisher of scientific and medical information that arose out a desire to reduce journal subscription costs to academic libraries.

PLoS publishes six specialized open-source journals, and one additional uber-journal, PLoS-One, that includes everything else. While they refer to themselves in print (and in the talk) as publishers of scientific research literature, they in fact appear to be focused more narrowly on the biomedical literature.

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This post was co-authored with Jeremy Pickens

The RescueTime blog, in a piece titled Google is eating Microsoft’s lunch, one tasty bite at a time, showed a comparative usage analysis between Microsoft Office tools and various Google tools such as Gmail, Google Docs, etc. Based on an analysis of their several hundred thousand users, they claim that the use of Microsoft tools had declined whereas the use of Google tools increased.

There are a bunch of problems with this analysis.

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I read newspapers (seriously, print newspapers) as they pile up around my house.  A nice thing about such piles is they don’t admit order, producing serendipitous juxtapositions (I should credit my children at this point). The data-driven life is an article by a Wired writer that looks into wearable computing and how the ability to outfit oneself with sensors might better inform decisions and behavioral strategies. By my reading, it was a basically positive take on the application of technology to help people live better lives on their own terms, whatever they might be.

Next I came across Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price which took a fairly negative slant, ranging somewhere between blaming technology for diminishing our quality of life and attributing to it irreversible neurological damage. Continue Reading

While poking around on the USPTO and Google to try to figure out how to get single PDF documents for my indexing project, I discovered that the Google advanced search interface won’t retrieve any documents based on the inventor field. I run the searches three ways: by typing an author’s name into the Google patent search box, by typing it into the advanced search form on Google, and by entering it into the USPTO’s advanced search form. I expect the first set of results to be the largest as it may include hits where the inventor is referenced by some other patent, but the second two should return the same number of hits. The results for a couple of searches are shown below; you can run your vanity search yourself.

I don’t know if this is a metadata problem (along the lines of the Google books metadata issues that came up in the context of Google Books), or if it is a UI/front end issue. In any case, it seems odd that testing didn’t catch this bug.

The BooksOnline ’10 workshop will be held on October 26, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers with interests related to various aspects online reading, including digital collections, user experience, and design and technology. See the Call for Papers for a more detailed description of relevant topics. The workshop is organized by Gabriella Kazai (Microsoft Research, UK) and Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh).

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Since Google announced its distribution of patents, I have been poking around the data trying to understand what’s in there and starting to index it for retrieval. The first challenge I’ve had to deal with is data formats. The second is how to display documents to users efficiently.

The full text of the patents is available in ZIP files, one file per week, based on the date patents were granted. The files cover patents issued from 1976 to (as of this writing) the first week of 2010. In addition to the text, they contain all manner of metadata such as when the patent was filed, who the inventors and assignees were, etc. Interestingly, the zipped up files are in two different formats: patents from 2001 on are in XML, while earlier ones are in a funky ad hoc text format.

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Traces of Gold, by Chris Culy

Chris Culy, who worked on discourse parsing at FXPAL a number of years ago, is now in Italy working as a Senior Researcher and the Language Technologies Technical Officer at the Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism. He oversees language-related software development and leads a research project on linguistic data visualization. But the real excitement is that he has a solo art show, Revisualizing the visual, opening today.  His work combines his  interest in photography with his  interest in how information is structured and perceived. The software he has written to support his work transforms colors into shapes or uses color information to create rambling colorful paths based on the image. To create effective artworks, Chris carefully chooses the original photograph and tunes the algorithms to it. Don’t miss the video that shows some of this process in action!