I’ve written about Google Instant before, but Daniel Tunkelang’s recent post triggered some additional reactions. Daniel writes that Instant is good because

Users spend less–and hopefully no time–in a limbo where they don’t know if the system has understood the information-seeking intent they have expressed as a query.

thus, the argument goes that by saving the user a few hundred milliseconds (and the need to press the Enter key), users will be better off because they will get feedback on the queries they run more quickly, and thus will be able to find the things that they are looking for more quickly.

I am not sure that the accountants and the psychologists would necessarily agree, in this case.

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I’ve been re-reading a paper by Joho et al. that explored the effectiveness of a number of strategies with respect to collaborative search. The paper finds that

…looking at the top 20 documents in more queries was more effective than looking at the top, say, 100 documents in one fifth the number of queries.

This finding, supported by some of the observations by Vakkari, suggests that encouraging users (working individually or collaboratively) to issue multiple queries, and supporting them in subsequent sense-making activities should improve overall effectiveness of the search process.

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An excellent article on FXPAL’s NudgeCam application recently appeared in MIT’s Technology Review. NudgeCam encapsulates standard video capture heuristics, such as how to frame a face and good brightness characteristics, in order to provide guidance to users as they are taking video, using image analysis techniques such as face recognition,  as to how to adjust the camera to improve the video capture.

For its size, FXPAL has surprising breadth and variety of expertise. The NudgeCam work resulted from a collaboration between Scott Carter, whose expertise is in mobile and ubiquitous computing,  and John Doherty, our multimedia specialist, who knows all the standard video capture heuristics and many more. John Adcock brought image analysis techniques to the team, and 2009 FXPAL summer intern Stacy Branham contributed her human-computer interaction expertise.

A different application, also developed at FXPAL, supports rephotography in an industrial setting. Rephotography is the art of taking a photograph from the same location and angle as a previous photograph. Continue Reading

According to ubergizmo.com, Dell demonstrated an iPad-sized tablet device with a fold-out keyboard that runs Windows 7 at the Intel developer forum. While convertible tablets running a Windows OS are nothing new, it’s a bit surprising that Dell is starting to market one right now to compete with the iPad.

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Traditional interactive information retrieval systems function by creating inverted lists, or term indexes. For every term in the vocabulary, a list is created that contains the documents in which that term occurs and its relative frequency within each document. Retrieval algorithms then use these term frequencies alongside other collection statistics to identify the matching documents for a query.

In a paper to be published at CIKM 2010, Jeremy Pickens, Matt Cooper and  I describe a way of using the inverted index to associate document ids with the queries that retrieve them. Our approach combines the inverted index with the notion of retrievability to create an efficient query expansion algorithm that is useful for a number of applications, including relevance feedback. We call this kind of index a reverted index because rather than mapping terms onto documents, it maps document ids onto queries that retrieved the associated documents.

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Firefox 4 beta is a nice browser. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks, and prefer it over the earlier versions. It seems a bit more stable, and has some nice features around tabs that are worth switching for. Unfortunately, there are also some drawbacks to the current version.

One example that’s been on my mind recently has to do with trimming text to fit a container. Firefox 3 and earlier versions supported a nice (from the layout perspective) feature that allowed a combination of CSS properties to specify that text should be displayed to fit the width a div, and anything that didn’t fit should just be skipped. This made it possible to display variable amounts of text without worrying about misalignment and overflow. The CSS required to achieve this was pretty simple:

-moz-binding: url('/css/ellipsis-xbl.xml#ellipsis');
text-overflow: hidden;
white-space: nowrap;


Now, with version 4 of Firefox, this feature has been removed. While there are apparently sound reasons for doing this, the manner in which the change was executed was not ideal.

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There’s a provocative little story in this month’s CACM, written by Greg Bear, an award-winning Science Fiction author. It paints a rather bleak picture of a techno-dystopia with a nasty social angle. The picture may seem paranoid, but it’s also easy to see how parts of it are making their way into our present-day reality. What measures can (should) we take to avoid this future?

And what of other societies, where Big Brother can leverage all of this technology as well?

(Apologies for the link to the story: ACM membership is required.)

So I fired up IE-8 and I tried Google Instant. It’s fast: as fast as I can type, it’s showing me search results. Mind you the results aren’t always sensible, but they are delivered quickly. It works great for short queries such as looking for a popular sense of some word. In this case, it saves me the trouble of hitting enter. Nice, but not earth-shattering.

When I am looking for something less obvious, it guesses wrong. For example, the query “information processing and management” (an academic journal) first produced a set of results for the partial string “”inform” that match informatica.com. Nice, but not the journal. After I typed “information,” it showed me the wikipedia page for “information” (oh the irony) and a bunch of other links highly-associated with the term. But no journal. “information proc” produced a bunch of hits on “information processing.” Better, but not what I am after. Completing the second word and pressing the space bar yielded a number of links to “information processing theory,” which also happens to be the top query suggestion. But no journal. Only when I typed “information processing and” did I get the results I wanted.

So what are we to make of this new addition to Google’s bag of tricks?

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Daniel Tukelang wrote an interesting review/commentary on Clifford Nass and Corina Yen‘s new book on affective computing, where they cite many examples that biasing results toward one’s expectations can improve users’ satisfaction with the results. Another class of responses (that is also well-documented in the affective computing literature) is the tendency for people to anthropomorphize computers.

Daniel’s conclusion is that it’s relatively straightforward to use these techniques to deceive people, to subvert personalization, to mislead rather that to inform. I’ve got two reactions to this work, one related to system design, and one more specifically to information seeking.

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While many of the systems we build at FXPAL are either deployed internally or transferred to our parent company, in some cases we get to deploy them in the real world. This week, we released TalkMiner, a system for indexing and searching video of lecture broadcasts. We’ve indexed broadcasts from a variety of sources, including the U.C. Berkeley webcast.berkeley site, the blip.tv site, and various channels on YouTube, including Google Tech Talks, Stanford University, MIT Open Courseware, O’Reilly Media, TED Talks, and NPTEL Indian Institute of Technology.

But all of these videos are already indexed by web search engines, you say; why do we need TalkMiner?

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