ReBoard architecture (from a ReBoard image)

Over the last year or so, Scott Carter, Jacob Biehl, and I have built and deployed an interesting system for managing whiteboard content. The system, ReBoard, consists of a camera that takes pictures of a traditional (or electronic, if you wanted) whiteboard when whiteboard content changes. The images captured by the camera are cleaned up by adjusting contrast and correcting for skew, and then saved into a database along with a bunch of metadata that identifies the changed region, the time and place the image was taken, and whether the content was likely created as a collaboration. Once captured, images can be shared with others and can be annotated by adding tags and notes.

Continue Reading

There is an interesting discussion on Panos Ipeirotis’s blog about open-access publishing, and the ACM. He argues that the ACM should grant open access to its digital library because ACM’s stated goal is “Advancing Computing as a Science and a Profession,” and that this would be an effective way to do so. I’ve always thought that the ACM digital library fees were unnecessary. Like Panos, I don’t know what ACM’s expenses are, but I do know that conferences are profit centers, and that too many non-profitable years can lead to trouble for the sponsoring SIGs. Given that

• conferences make money from attendees,
• all typesetting costs are borne by authors these days,
• conferences are starting to abandon print proceedings (or to charge extra for them)

what is the rationale for charging for subsequent access to these papers? Continue Reading

A couple of weeks ago I attended the SIAM/ACM Joint Conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling and heard a lovely talk by Richard Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld and his wife Elaine Cohen were this year’s Bézier award winners for their work in computer aided geometric design (CAGD). He spoke about his correspondence with Bézier and showed us many of the letters they sent back and forth in the early days of CAD/CAM, with their many hand drawn diagrams and the typed text with the math symbols added in by hand. I spent the time marveling at how they managed to have an effective collaboration over such an impoverished communication channel. But even with all of the wonderful 3D rendering capabilities we have today, it is still hard to communicate about 3D objects and spaces over a distance. Having a visual rendering is not sufficient. Spatial reasoning requires more. Riesenfeld mentioned Bézier’s view that “touch is more discriminative than eyes.”

This theme reminded me that I’ve been meaning to describe and send to the math factory folks  a suggestion for an exhibit in the math museum. Instead, I’ll first write about it here.

Continue Reading

A while ago, Google introduced Google Squared, an attempt to help people keep track of different aspects in their search results. I think that it’s an interesting HCIR idea that still lacks a good implementation, as I’ve written here and here. Recently, Google introduced a means of adding results informed by the searcher’s social network, which Google has dubbed “Social Circle.” I spent some time playing with it, and found it lacking.

Continue Reading

I just attended ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing to present a paper on image annotation in the workshop on Large Scale Multimedia Retrieval and Mining. The multimedia research community is grappling with a dramatic increase in the scale of its information management problems in an era of rapid growth in user-generated content and negligible distribution costs (i.e. YouTube and flickr).  The workshop itself devoted attention to both retrieval and mining, while the content track of the main conference seemed to be dominated by search applications.

When the observation is made that tagged multimedia data is now freely and abundantly available, it’s usually to motivate papers on media search rather than annotation.  This is in part due to the challenges of adapting established model-based annotation methods to large media collections and large tag sets.  Alternatively, search-based annotation achieves scalability at the expense of accuracy, at least in comparison to model-based approaches.    Our workshop paper looked to combine the efficiency of search-based approaches with the accuracy afforded by model-based classification. Continue Reading

Last week I was in DC at the HCIR 2009 workshop organized by Bill Kules, Daniel Tunkelang, and Ryen White. This was the third workshop in the series, and by far the biggest and most diverse in terms of attendees. Proceedings are available online. Daniel and Max Wilson have already given pretty good coverage to what happened at the workshop, so I will focus on my impressions, starting with Ben Shneiderman‘s keynote.

Continue Reading

A while ago I wrote about Evgeny Morozov’s Stanford talk (“Authoritarian Governments in Cyberspace”) about the use of social networking and other technology by authoritarian governments. While the Stanford talk was in some ways similar to his TED talk, it had more content and a slightly different focus. For those interested in the details, here’s a link to the slides.

While the slides were meant to illustrate rather than to echo the talk, they draw considerably on sources available on the web that could be followed up with a simple search.  It will be interesting to watch this space over the next few years as technology evolves and as governments get even more sophisticated.  While much of the effort that Morozov documents is aimed at controlling citizens of these regimes, the core competencies involved are also central to cyber-warfare.

FXPAL’s Pantheia system enables users to create virtual models by ‘marking up’ a physical scene with pre-printed visual markers and then taking pictures. The meanings associated with the markers come from a markup language that enables users to specify geometric, appearance, or interactive aspects of the model that are then used by the system to construct the model.  Our “Marking up the World” video appeared at ACM Multimedia this week. In the video you can see how our system works, our viewer features, and a selection of the spaces and objects we have used the system to reconstruct.

Thanks much to Qiong Liu for presenting it, and to John Doherty for putting it together from our clips and for narrating it. The geometric reconstruction work I spoke about last week as part of the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures series was inspired by the issues we discovered while building the system. For more details on our work, see the paper we presented at CGVR ’09 Interactive Models from Images of a Static Scene.

I am giving a talk today at NIST on collaborative search. Abstract:

In the library sciences, information seeking has long been recognized as a collaborative activity, and recent work has attempted to model group information seeking behavior. Until recently, technological support for group-based information seeking has been limited to collaborative filtering and “social search” applications. In the past two years, however, a new kind of technologically-mediated collaborative search has been demonstrated in systems such as SearchTogether and Cerchiamo. This approach is more closely grounded in the library science interpretation of collaboration: rather than inferring commonality of interest through similarity of queries (social search), the new approach assumes an explicitly-shared information need for a group. This allows the system to focus on mediating the collaboration rather than detecting its presence. In this talk, we describe a model that captures both user behavior and system architecture, describe its relationship to other models of information seeking, and use it to classify existing multi-user search systems. We also describe implications this model has for design and evaluation of new collaborative information seeking systems.

Slides:

There are references in the slides.

Volker Roth left FXPAL last year to become a professor at Freie Universität Berlin. There he leads the Secure Identity Research Group, which takes a user centered approach to addressing security and privacy issues related to mobile devices, cloud computing, and the internet.

He and his group have gotten press recently due to a well-publicized celebration of the opening of their new building. There are some great photos of Volker at this opening on the  Bundesdruckerei web site (Bundesdruckerei endowed the position Volker filled and provides other support for the group).  On the same site is a picture of Volker hobnobbing with Horst Köhler, the president of Germany, and his wife! It is great to see Volker thriving.