The Enterprise Search Summit is taking place right now, and I am sorry to be missing it. The program looks quite interesting, including keynotes by Marti Hearst and Peter Morville, among others. Marti’s talk this morning, related to her recent book on information retrieval, was summarized by Daniel Tunkelang on his blog. While she did touch on topics covered in her book, including some of the collaborative search work done here at FXPAL, she has shifted her focus somewhat to address the more social issues around information seeking. While I don’t the details of her presentation, she did mention similar topics when she participated at a recent panel on search at the WWW2010 conference. The twitter streams from both events capture her “socialize vs. personalize” comments. (Since Twitter search sunsets quickly, here are the TwapperKeeper archives for #ess10 and the www2010 Search Is Dead panel.)

Peter Morville should be an interesting speaker on information retrieval-related topics, some of which he covers in his books Search Patterns and Ambient Findability. I wrote about some of his ideas earlier, but am curious to hear how he is presenting his work.

I hope that both talks are recorded and made available on the web.

Update: Daniel Tunkelang’s summary of Peter Morville’s talk

On Monday I attended a crowd-sourcing Meetup with the funny (and as it turned out inaccurate) title of The Distributed Distributed Work Meetup. The idea was to hear talks about various crowd-sourcing topics from speakers in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and New York. Technology didn’t cooperate, and were left to our own devices, which meant to eat, drink, and listen to fascinating and provocative talk by Alek Felstiner on a range of legal questions surrounding crowd-sourcing platforms such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT).

I cannot do justice to the legal issues, in part because so many of them remain unresolved. I will, however, report on a number of questions raised during the talk and on some of the potential precedents for this kind of work. One reason to discuss this topic is that there are some concerns that the Turkers are being exploited by those who pay for the work, as the value of the work to the company sometimes seems much higher than the rate the worker is paid.

Yet many people chose to do this work freely, and seem to enjoy doing it, and certainly there are many companies and individuals, profit-oriented and academic, who benefit from this service. The questions raised in this talk bore on the legal relationship between the organizations or individuals requesting work and those providing it.

Continue Reading

This weekend, I came across FindBugs, an interesting application that analyzes Java programs for potential bugs.  It was created by William Pugh at the University of Maryland, who is a four-time JavaOne Rock Star.  Google, for example,  has used his tool for finding problems in their Java code.

FindBugs made plenty of suggestions for some code I’ve been working on, and some of them looked like things that I should fix.  I found one thing in particular of interest.  I’ve been using the following pattern for the lazy instantiation of singletons:

Continue Reading

As a follow-up to my review of iAnnotate, I did a quick exploration of drawing apps available for the iPad to understand the limitations of ink handling on the device. I tried five free annotation apps that were identified by the query “draw free for ipad.” These included Draw Free for iPad, PaperDesk LITE for iPad, Adobe Ideas 1.0 for iPad, Draw for iPad, and Doodle Buddy for iPad.

These apps were structured either around the canvas or the notepad metaphor, and supported a range of colors, inks, and effects. My only test was to select the thinnest ink the tool allowed, and to try to write a short phrase on each one. The test was purely visual, but then it’s the visual impact that I am interested in.

Continue Reading

Yesterday I attended an evening presentation session of student projects created in several courses related to HCI at UC Berkeley. The show was organized by Bjoern Hartmann and Maneesh Agrawala, and featured presentations by teams from four courses from three different disciplines: CS, SIMS, and  Art/Anthropology. Each presentation took 2.5 minutes, and there were over 30 presentations total. Most of the work was around the design of mobile applications, and some creative constraints (e.g., don’t design for students; focus on specific populations) stipulated at the beginning of the projects ensured a great diversity of designs.

I cannot possibly do justice to the effort and to the results here, but fortunately all presentations and many associated videos are available online. Some presentations stood out, however, and deserve special mention.

Continue Reading

The capture of whiteboard images, while required for systems such as ReBoard, is not particularly interesting these days from a research perspective. What’s more interesting (and what’s interesting to us about ReBoard) is how this captured information can be used.

We’ve been using video cameras as network-accessible Axis digital still cameras for ReBoard, and they produce reasonable, but by no means great, images. They work pretty well in our offices, where they can be mounted on the opposite wall, and calibrated to image the whiteboard. We run the captured images through a process that corrects the distortion and extracts the whiteboard region, and then shove the images (both the original and the distorted one)  into a database. Works great.

But what happens when the whiteboard moves?

Continue Reading

Recently I tried an experiment with one of our iPads to read and review a journal submission using the iAnnotate application. For the purposes of review, I had to read and comment on the draft, and then write up the review. I approached the problem much like I would had I been reading on paper, which included highlighting important, controversial or confusing passages, writing comments and reactions in the margins, and flipping around the document. These were all activities we had supported in XLibris, and I was curious how the iPad would stack up.

The short of it is: loading documents: OK; readability: Great; inking: poor; highlighting: poor; text annotations: OK; within-document navigation: so-so; between-document navigation: OK. Overall: good for reading, not good for active reading.

Continue Reading

I am pleased to learn (and to pass on) that an annual award has been created for a fourth-year University of Toronto engineering student “for the imaginative and successful application of the principles of human factors to the design of a medical device.” This award is established by the family of John W. Senders in honor of his 90th birthday.

John Senders is a Professor Emeritus from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Toronto, and sports a CV equal to that of a dozen other researchers. He continues to lecture and consult, and shows no signs of quitting his imaginative and successful ways.

Microsoft appears to have killed the Courier concept before that two-screen device ever became a reality. It’s not clear what factors led to the decision, but on some level it’s a shame. Endgadget called it the “one of the finest unicorns that ever unicorned across our screens.” The two-screen nature of the device, while attractive in principle, may not have been as useful in real life. What was undoubtedly useful was the application suite demonstrated in their vision videos that seamlessly integrated a range of activities.

Continue Reading

Yesterday, the WWW 2010 conference featured a panel with representatives of Yahoo! (Andrei Broder – Fellow and VP, Search & Computational Advertising, Yahoo! Research), Bing (Barney Pell – Partner, Search Strategist for Bing, Microsoft), Google (Andrew Tomkins – Director of Engineering at Google Research), and academia (Marti Hearst – Professor, School of Information, University of California-Berkeley) on the current state of search on the web. The title was meant to be provocative, but I doubt that anyone in the room thought that this was a solved problem. I wasn’t at the conference, but was able to follow it on Twitter and through a video feed kindly provided by Wayne Sutton. A persistent recording of the event is available through qik by Kevin Marks, although the audio is rather faint. (Wayne’s feed had great audio, but the panelists were sitting down, and were blocked by the podium!)

The panel covered a lot of ground, and some of this has already been summarized by Jeff Dalton on his blog. In short, the big search engines are moving beyond the top 10 links and exploring additional capabilities — both in the ranking algorithms and in the style of interaction — to satisfy a broader range of information needs.

Continue Reading