The 2011 ACM / IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2011) will take place June 13-17, 2011 in Ottawa, Canada. The JCDL conference series brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the application of technology to libraries and librarianship.

The theme for JCDL 2011 is “Digital Libraries: Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Research Data”, in recognition of the changes the digital age is now bringing to scholarship, broadly writ. Publishing models are changing, along with the breadth of digital material that must be managed coherently in the context of users forcing the move from information silos to a landscape of interconnected systems supporting scholarship for both research and education.

Important dates: Full Papers, Workshops, Tutorials, and Panels submissions are due by January 23, 2011 at 8pm PST (GMT -8); Short Papers, Posters, Demonstrations submissions are due by February 6, 2011 at 8pm PST (GMT -8); Doctoral Consortium Abstracts submissions are due by March 21, 2011.

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Somebody named ITALONSOG posted a video that describes the motivation and some of the approach to real-time video capture implemented in NudgeCam, which John Adcock wrote about earlier. The video, set to Usher’s OMG (feat. Will.I.Am), consists of stills with Spanish text and some nifty “high-tech” backgrounds, and features a mug shot of FXPALer John Doherty.

I don’t know if this means the technology is going viral, but it does seem to have some popular appeal.

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For the upcoming rebuttals of CHI, it might be useful to understand what the reviewers really mean when writing their reviews. This year as I read with interest the reviews of my fellow reviewers, maybe due to my growing experience, or maybe because of the late hour reviewing, I started to see something new in the reviews: the hidden messages. Below is a collection of this years’ CHI, CSCW and past years’ CHI review’s opening remarks with possible interpretations.

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Here are the slides from our talk at CIKM 2010 last week. More details on reverted indexing can be found in an earlier post and on the FXPAL site, the full paper is available here, and the previous post describes why the technique works. The contribution of the paper can be summarized as follows:

We treat query result sets as unstructured text “documents” — and index them.

Jeremy Pickens contributed to this post.

Jeremy did a great job of presenting our Reverted Indexing paper, but the short session made it difficult to answer all questions and comments thoroughly. For example, William Webber wrote up a post summarizing our work, in which he observed

The authors surmise that the reverted index is more effective because it suggests more selective expansion terms, and they reproduce example term sets as evidence. This explanation is convincing enough as far as it goes; but what is not explained is why the reverted index’s expansion terms are more selective. The reason is not obvious. A single-term reverted index is not much more than a weighted direct index, mapping from documents to the terms that occur in them

I would like to address his comments because this is a key aspect of Reverted Indexing.

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Sue Dumais of MSR gave an excellent keynote address at CIKM last week, in which she emphasized the temporal nature of collections used for information retrieval and of the way people access information on the web. This was by far the most user-oriented talk at the conference that I attended, and a refreshing change from the vast array of machine learning papers in the rest of the conference.

The slides from the talk will be available on her site, but are substantially similar to her ECDL 2010 keynote talk. In short, Sue described how collections and documents change over time, and how people’s patterns of visiting web sites change in response to content evolution. She also introduced a new browser plugin for Internet Explorer called Diff-IE that helps people understand changes to the web sites they visit.

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Jamie Callan of CMU gave an interesting and thought-provoking keynote talk at CIKM 2010. While traditionally search engines have been used in a more or less direct manner to identify useful documents that the user would then (manually) incorporate into other tasks, Jamie suggested a new class of applications that would use search engines for the purposes of identifying documents or parts of documents in some collection, but then would apply this information in pursuit of some other, more specialized, task.

While the notion of using a search engine as a component of another system is not particularly novel, the kinds of requirements that his proposed use imposes on search engines would certainly push the envelope.

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I had an interesting an informative (if internet-free) day at the PaIR workshop at CIKM today. One the highlights was a keynote by Marti Hearst, who is currently the Chief IT Strategist for the USPTO. She outlined many improvements to the the USPTO IT infrastructure that are in the works, scheduled for rollout some time in 2013.

It was interesting to hear the details of the user-centered design process that she is orchestrating to understand the limitations of the existing tools and to guide the redesign with input from patent examiners and supervisors. Some of the planned improvements include a unified interface to various functions that are currently not well-integrated, automated suggestions for queries and terms of art for applications being reviewed, the ability to tag, annotate and share annotations on all sorts of documents, the ability to search over all material (including the annotations), etc.

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I wonder what Google is up to. They’ve announced that Froyo is not designed for tablets, and rumor has it that Honeycomb, the preferred Android tablet flavor (honeycomb a flavor? oh well), won’t ship until some time 2011. Of course there’s the also the possibility of Google Chrome tablets.

The message this sends to hardware vendors, software vendors, and consumers is that Google doesn’t have a coherent plan, and that cannot help anyone but Apple.

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Tweetdeck recently published an interesting summary of their testing efforts for a Twitter client for Android. The short post enumerates the set of hardware and operating system versions they had to contend with in testing their software. I counted about 250 different devices and over 100 versions of the OS in the Tweetdeck charts in a population of 36K beta-testers, many of whom, admittedly, are early adopters who are more likely to use wacky devices and odd versions of the OS. But still, that’s a lot of potential wierdness.  This proliferation of versions and configurations can be seen as a sign of the vitality of the platform, but it is also suggestive of some potential problems.

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