The Apple marketing machine has shifted gears, releasing several videos of iPads running different applications before the upcoming product launch. The larger screen is undoubtedly an improvement over the iPhone-sized display, but the interactivity has not improved with this device. Sure you can resize photos, move slides around and read more text without paging, but in its essence, this is just an iPhone on steroids.

I was struck by this picture, published by TechCrunch, and its contrast to a shot of XLibris that we took about ten years ago.

iPad with Evernote app, circa 2010

XLibris on a slate, circa 1999

There is a big difference in hardware, and in software. The 2010 hardware is much more capable; the software has focused touch rather than then pen. Is touch better, because we’re more used to fingers than pens, and because pens are easy to lose? I don’t think so, for the reason illustrated below.

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There are generally two types of tags for linking digital content and paper documents. Marker-based tags and RFIDs employ a modification of the printed document. Content-based solutions remove the physical tag entirely and link using features of the existing printed matter. Chunyuan, Laurent, Gene, Qiong, and I recently published a paper in IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine that explores the two tag types’ use and design trade-offs by comparing our experiences developing and evaluating two systems  that use marker-based tagging — DynamInk and PapierCraft — with two systems that utilize content-based tagging — Pacer and ReBoard. In the paper, we situate these four systems in the design space of interactive paper systems and discuss lessons we learned from creating and deploying each technology.

Take a look!

The success of de-anonymization efforts, as discussed here, suggests that older anonymization methods no longer work, especially in light of the large amount of publicly available data that can serve as auxiliary information. The quest to find suitable replacements for these methods is ongoing. As one starting point in this broader quest, we need useful definitions of privacy.

It has proven surprisingly difficult to find pragmatic definitions of privacy, definitions that capture a coherent aspect of privacy, are workable in the sense that it is possible to protect privacy defined in this way, and are sufficiently formal to provide means for determining if a method protects this type of privacy and, if so, how well.

The best attempt to date is the notion of differential privacy. Continue Reading

Some ACM conferences such as CHI offer authors an opportunity to flag material misconceptions in reviewers’ perceptions of submitted papers prior to rendering a final accept/reject decision. SIGIR is not one of them. Its reviewers are free from any checks on their accuracy from the authors, and, to judge by the reviews of our submission, from the program committee as well.

Consider this: We wrote a paper on a novel IR framework which we believe has the potential to greatly increase the efficacy of interactive Information Retrieval systems. The topic we tackled is (not surprisingly) related to issues we often discuss on this and on the IRGupf blog, including HCIR, Interactive IR, Exploratory Search, and Collaborative Search.  In short, these are all areas that could be well served by an algorithmic framework that supports greater interactivity.

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Yesterday Google announced that their bookmarks can now be shared. So far, so social media. What’s interesting about it is the motivating scenario:

Sharing lists can help you collaborate with your friends on common interests or activities. Let’s say you’re planning a group trip to Paris. With a list, everyone can contribute useful links and resources, such as packing lists, hotel links, flight information and attractions.

The key characteristic that distinguishes this scenario from typical “ask (or mine) your social network” types of search is that here you and your friends have a shared information need, and you are all contributing your efforts and expertise toward that goal. The system doesn’t have to figure out that you all are planning a trip to Paris together — that would be a hard inference to make. Rather, you tell it, explicitly, what you’re doing, and it helps you work on that information need together.

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I will be chairing the session on exploratory search at CHI 2010. The session, which features a best paper award winner and a best paper nominee, will take place Monday morning after the opening plenary session. The session consists of three papers:

Reactive Information Foraging for Evolving Goals
by Joseph Lawrance, Margaret Burnett, Rachel Bellamy, Christopher Bogart, and Calvin Swart

How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?
Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, and Zhiwei Guan

Effects of Popularity and Quality on the Usage of Query Suggestions during Information Search
Diane Kelly, Amber Cushing, Maureen Dostert, Xi Niu, and Karl Gyllstrom

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Aruna Balakrishnan, Tara Matthews and Tom Moran have a paper at CHI 2010 that examines how people used Lotus Activities to structure their interaction with digital artifacts and to help them collaborate. They observed 22 participants over the course of a couple of years to characterize their use of this tool.

Their findings bear interesting similarities to our CHI 2010 paper that described the use of various communication technologies in the workplace. Continue Reading

The militant wing of the Visualization Brigades recently published its manifesto, shown on the right. The War on PowerPoint is escalating, and at this pace, threatens to overtake the War on Drugs in the near future. What are we to do? Is minimalism the most effective way to convey information, as Tufte preaches? Or is Tufte’s argument backed by nothing but his personal sensibilities, rather than hard evidence? An upcoming CHI 2010 paper (one of the CHI 2010 best paper award winners) argues that elaboration is not all bad (or perhaps that not all elaboration is bad).

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In the aftermath of the recent SXSW event, Alexandra Samuel wrote on the HBR blog about five unsolved problems facing Social Media. She enumerated contact list overload, search overload, information overload, brand overload, and apathy overload. It’s not clear to me, however, whether these are pressing issues, and whether universal solutions to them would constitute an improvement over the current chaos.

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Many people in the CHI community are aware of the range of problems associated with the CHI conference review process that tries to cram 1,300 or more submissions through a rather small reviewer pool with the goal of selecting the interesting and the important, while filtering out  inappropriate or unfinished work. Needless to say, the process is often imperfect.

There have been many laments and calls for change (e.g., here, here, here), and some recent positive changes in way to conference is run.

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