The complete list of accepted SIGIR papers were announced yesterday:

http://members.unine.ch/jacques.savoy/Events/SIGIR.html

I think there is a much larger diversity this year in topics, a trend that has been growing in recent years.  In fact, the only topic with more than a single session is clustering. A couple of titles that personally look intriguing include:

Assessing the Scenic Route:  Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs
White Ryen (Microsoft Research Redmond), Huang Jeff (University of Washington)

Relevance and Ranking in Online Dating Systems
Diaz Fernando, Metzler Donald, Amer-Yahia Sihem (Yahoo! Labs)

Comparing User Preferences, for Relevance and Diversity with Test Collection Outputs
Sanderson Mark, Paramita Monica Lestari, Clough Paul, Kanoulas Evangelos (University of Sheffield)

Evaluating Verbose Query Processing Techniques
Huston Samuel, Croft Bruce (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

In particular, the question of “going the scenic route” is one that deserves much more study.  Information Retrieval is most often concerns with effectiveness and efficiency.  The straight path to relevance.  As well it should be.  But there are other valuable goals that are just as much a part of information seeking such as serendipity, diversity, and, well, scenery.  It becomes interesting, and difficult to evaluate, when the goal rather than the process is exploration.

The information seeking community seems to be experiencing a renewed interest in session-based approaches to information seeking after years of focusing on single-query interaction. Yesterday at CHI2010, Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, and Zhiwei Guan reported on a study of searchers’ behavior. Rather than looking at single-query performance, they analyzed searchers’ query reformulation tactics to characterize difficult vs. easy search tasks. They found a variety of indicators that correlate with users’ difficulties in articulating efficient queries. This work is important as it hints at the possibility that web search engines can diagnose user behavior and alter the interaction with users to facilitate their search process.

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Yesterday Miles Efron and I presented our work on Twitter search at the CHI 2010 microblogging workshop.We distinguished between macro- and micro-level research on  Twitter, and then focused on Twitter search from the end-user’s perspective. We talked about the role that test collections should play in evaluation of search interfaces. The slides are shown below.

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“Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-view Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding.” Just watch it:

This is a PR2 robot from Willow Garage, being used in a project led by Berkeley grad student Jeremy Maitlin-Shepard. (The paper on the folding application is here.) The PR2 and its cousin the Texai have visited us at FXPAL; we’re hoping to improve our acquaintance soon (stay tuned!).

The very interesting approach taken by the roboticists at Willow Garage is to encourage the development of the robotics community through open source development. They also loan their hardware to other research labs on a case-by-case basis, again to encourage development on their ROS platform.

What is ROS? From the Willow Garage site:

ROS, Willow Garage’s software platform, stands for two things: Robot Operating System, a loose analogy to a computer operating system, and Robot Open Source. All of the software in development at Willow Garage is released under a BSD license at code.ros.org/gf/projects/ros. It is completely open source and free for others to use, change and commercialize upon — our primary goal is to enable code reuse in robotics research and development. Willow Garage is strongly committed to developing open source and reusable software. With the help of an international robotics community, we’ve also released all of the software we are building on ROS at code.ros.org in the “ros-pkg” and “wg-ros-pkg” projects.

Twitter is a trending topic in HCI research these days. The ICWSM conference is awash with interesting papers on mining and analyzing the Twitter stream, and the upcoming CHI 2010 microblogging workshop promises to be full of interesting discussion on a range of topics around how people use Twitter to communicate.

One of the established ways of studying Twitter use is to collect samples of tweets (e.g., see here) to perform statistical and social network analysis to understand the patterns latent in the tweets. This makes for interesting and (furthermore) publishable research.

On the other hand, the focus on large datasets and aggregate behavior forgets about individual. Not about the individual as a person who contributes tweets to the larger collection, but about the individual who needs to use Twitter to meet his or her information needs.

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In many ways, the iPad represents very different point in the design space of hand-held devices for reading. Whereas the Kindle is geared toward a low-power, book-like experience, the iPad is positioned closer to high end (but currently too heavy) slate computers. It is designed for richer interaction, for color, for animation and video, all the things that were discarded in the Kindle design for the sake of a longer battery life and less weight.

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One of the ongoing debates I have with some of my co-workers are whether web apps are going to take over the majority of applications that users interact with on a daily basis, or whether the future will remain in the hands of internet-enabled desktop apps. I maintain that desktop apps with integrated connectivity are the future.  Many of my co-workers place their trust in software that only runs in the cloud.

So what is a web app?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_app Continue Reading

The work honored with the paper award at the ECIR 2010 conference described an experiment that assessed the effectiveness of a case-based reasoning mechanism for suggesting possible actions for users engaged in an exploratory search task. The authors constructed DAFFODIL, a sophisticated interface for issuing queries, for saving documents, and for suggesting potentially useful query expansion terms. They performed a preliminary evaluation of the system on three search tasks, and compared subjects’ performance and behavior patterns with and without system-generated suggestions.

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Reading images is a quite common task; radiologists looks at X-rays, airport screeners scan suitcases, and astronomers inspect images from telescopes. In many of these visual search tasks, the outcome is important. We don’t want the airport screens to miss a weapon, or the radiologist to miss any lesions. In a paper we presented at the recent Eye Tracking Research and Application Symposium (ETRA 2010), we looked into how information of where people have looked can be used to guide them to parts of images not yet examined.

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Starting in the fall of 2010, Seton Hill University (not to be confused with Seton Hall University) is going to be equipping its students with iPads. It’s not clear from the description on the web site what the students are expected to do with these devices, or what educational advantage the iPads are likely to impart beyond the laptops the students will also receive.

But is the iPad the right tool?

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