If you are doing research in interactive information retrieval, information seeking, collaborative search, and the like (that is, you’re concerned with what users do when they look for information), you might consider submitting  paper to IIiX 2010.

IIiX will explore the relationships between the contexts that affect information retrieval and information seeking, how these contexts impact information behavior, and how knowledge of information contexts and information behaviors can help design truly interactive information systems.

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This is one in a series of posts advertising internship positions at FXPAL for the summer of 2010. A listing of all internship positions currently posted is available here.

The focus of Human-Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) is to help people find and make sense of the information that satisfies their evolving information needs, and to do so with an emphasis on interaction and not just on clever algorithms that attempt to approximate users’ intent. Over the past couple of years, we have developed some novel information retrieval algorithms such as collaborative search. While we have evaluated the work in various ways (e.g., evaluating algorithms offline and testing with people on artificial information needs), we have not tested them on people with real information needs.

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Recently, I decided to upgrade my laptop. After some research, I chose the Lenovo ThinkPad W500. Not much seems to have changed in two years, as it looks almost identical to my old Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. I felt that with the new decade upon us, it was time to move from Windows XP to Windows 7. While setting up the new laptop, I ran into many problems with VPN, Wi-Fi, and usable RAM.

I figured that I would carry over the settings from the old laptop using Windows Easy Transfer. After setting everything up, I couldn’t get VPN to work. It had worked briefly before I installed the old settings and joined the domain. After unsuccessfully trying to figure out why the IPSec virtual adapter wouldn’t load, I decided to blame it on the transfer of my old settings.

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This is the third of a series of posts advertising internship positions at FXPAL for the summer of 2010.  A listing of all blog posts about our 2010 internship positions is available here.

Significant privacy issues arise when personal data is stored and analyzed. This issue is exacerbated when part or all of the storage and analysis is outsourced to a third party. To support such analysis in an awareness system, while addressing the privacy concerns, we are building into our system a facility that supports computation of simple statistics on encrypted data. This facility can be extended in a number of ways to support a greater variety of computations. There are a wealth of research questions related to designing such a system to support the types of computations useful to our application while choosing the best tradeoffs in terms of storage, bandwidth, division of labor between the third party and the clients, computation time at encryption, time to compute the statistics, and time to decrypt.

Prospective candidates should be enrolled in a PhD program and have significant experience in privacy and security, particularly computation on or search of encrypted data.

The intern will be hosted by Eleanor Rieffel.  For more information on the FXPAL internship program, please visit our web site.

Update: This intern slot has been filled.

This is one in a series of posts advertising internship positions at FXPAL for the summer of 2010. A listing of all internship positions currently posted is available here.

Making a decision can be difficult. From choosing the right camera to
finding a place to live, people are faced with a dizzying array of
choices on one hand and commentary (in the form of blog posts, reviews, etc.) about their different options on the other. But little scaffolding connects the two. We are interested in how to make those connections in order to help people make decisions using innovative data mining and search techniques integrated with rich, interactive visualizations.

Specifically, this project will involve building a data mining system
capable of extracting useful summaries and metadata from consumer
reviews, and a walk-up-and-use visual interface that makes use of these data to help users browse collections. It is expected that the intern will be responsible for a subset of the system that is tailored to their interests. The intern will be expected to contribute to a paper suitable for IUI or a similar conference that describes the system and their experience designing it.

Prospective candidates should be enrolled in a PhD program and should have some experience with data mining and GUI design. Experience with information retrieval is a plus. Please contact Scott Carter if you are interested in this position. For more information on the FXPAL internship program, please visit our web site.

A multinational team announced on January 7th that they, together with hundreds of computers, running for two years, carrying out about 2^67 instructions, factored RSA-768.  For more details, see their paper. They suggest that this result should encourage everyone to follow NIST’s recommendation to phase out 1024-bit RSA keys.

Update: This intern slot has been filled.

This is the first of a series of posts advertising internship positions at FXPAL for the summer of 2010. Other posts will follow next week. A listing of all internship positions currently posted is available here.

Effective communication among workers is the backbone of any successful organization. It is essential for enabling people to build common ground, to create and develop new ideas, and to develop the complex interpersonal relationships that are critical in helping workers share and combine expertise.

To explore this space, we have been building MyUnity, a new system that aids workers in building group awareness. The system uses multiple sources, both automatic and user-provided, to report colleagues’ location, availability, current tasks, and preferred communication channels. Information is aggregated, fused and presented as a simple presence state for each worker. Workers can independently control what information is collected by the system, allowing them to participate in the system without compromising their privacy.

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At CES 2010 this year, Microsoft talked about Ray Kurzweil’s Blio Reader, a piece of software designed to display and interact with books on a desktop PC, a laptop, or a tablet computer. The idea,  similar to Microsoft’s Reader software from about ten years ago, is to forego the low-power bistable display-style computers (e.g., Kindle, Nook, etc.) and leverage people’s existing (or new) PCs for reading and interacting with books. All in all, it’s probably the right way to go for several reasons:

• You don’t force people to buy yet another devices and carry yet another charger,
• You don’t worry about the book form-factor unless the person wants to get a slate, and
• You can take advantage of powerful CPUs and capable displays that can actually bring interactivity to reading.

And of to top it off, this software will be free. Who wouldn’t want that?

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Collaborative and cooperative aspects of information storage, seeking and retrieval have become a hot topic in recent years e.g. [1,2,4]. The acknowledgment that information seeking is a collaborative activity is part of a trend toward foregrounding the social in system design [5].

We wrote this in the introduction of a SIGGROUP report on a CSCW 1998 workshop on, you guessed it, Collaborative and Co-operative Information Seeking in Digital Information Environments. Plus ça change. The workshop was organized by Elizabeth Churchill, Joe Sullivan, Dave Snowdon and me. It is interesting to go back and read the position papers submitted by Mark Ackerman, Andrew Cohen, Jesus Favela, Mark Ginsburg,  Tom Gross, Timothy Koschmann, Joseph McCarthy, Alan Munro, Kevin Palfreyman,  Volker Paulsen, Alfredo Sanchez, Stefan Scholze, John Thomas, Michael Twidale, Volker Wulf, and Guillermo Zeballos.

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