Pattie Maes from the MIT Media lab gave a TED talk this year about technology developed by one of her students, Pranav Mistry. The basic idea is that a person wears a device around the neck consisting of a camera, a projector, a small computer, all with wireless (cell phone) connectivity to the network. She argues that by augmenting our perceptions with information can give us a “sixth sense” that will help us lead more productive and fulfilling lives.
I am about to start a significant research and writing activity with a co-worker. We will have to organize a bunch of documents, take and share notes, do some searching, etc. The tool should allow us to group and organize notes associated with each document, and perhaps generate some overviews of the collection.
I am looking for recommendations, including pros and cons. We would consider spending a bit of money on this, but obviously free is better. On the other hand, a well-designed, usable interface is worth some investment. Also, I would prefer simplicity to functionality.
The area of collaborative search has experienced significant growth over the past couple of years in the number of research groups interested in the topic, and in the number of research papers being published in proceedings of respected conferences.
Interestingly, there is also a rash of “best paper” awards for this work. In chronological order of publication, the following papers related to collaborative search have received “best paper” designations.
Congratulations to all the authors, and please let me know if I forgot to list your paper!
In their recent ECIR paper, Joho et al. explored the effectiveness of several mediation techniques around relevance feedback in supporting collaborative search. They ran simulations based on TREC HARD topics queries elicited in an earlier study, and found that certain techniques were effective at increasing recall during (simulated) search sessions consisting of 20 queries.
Giles Crouch wrote recently about social search vs. general search, pointing out that people often search for information in their social network vs. in a general index such a Google or Yahoo! While we need to distinguish the cases when people search their social network for information about the network per se vs. information that the network refers to, there are circumstances when people make explicit decisions about where to search. It seems to me that there are several reasons why people may prefer not to use generic search in certain cases. Continue Reading
Late last year Hideo Joho, David Hannah and Joemon M. Jose published a paper that described an experiment in collaborative exploratory search. They compared teams of pairs of searchers in three conditions — independent (not collaborative), collaborative without communication, and collaborative with communication. This paper is interesting for several reasons, not least of which is that it made an attempt to quantify the effects of collaboration on search performance, an important subject that has not yet received adequate attention.
At CHI 2009 this year, Sharoda Paul presented a paper she co-wrote with Merrie Morris that explores how sensemaking can be managed in a collaborative search environment. They created CoSense, an interface that augments SearchTogether with several tools that facilitate awareness and information sharing among collaborators. Tools include interactive query timelines, statistics on individual queries and term use, chat history, and a workspace for annotating search results.
There was a good crop of papers at CHI 2009 this year, and I didn’t get to see them all. I did see a few that were particularly interesting, including “Learning How: The Search for Craft Knowledge on the Internet” by Torrey, Churchill, and McDonald. The paper describes and analyzes search activities by people involved in various crafts. This work is interesting to me because in a way it very clearly separates exploratory search from other kinds of online searching.
This is a bit of a rant. Bear with me.
We are working on a whiteboard capture and retrieval project (more blogging on this later). The goal is to capture whiteboard images in some unobtrusive manner and then store and index them for future retrieval and browsing. We currently capture with a video camera, but thought it would be good to be agnostic with respect to the source of capture.
mimio makes a whiteboard ink capture tool that uses an IR receiver to track positions of pens on the whiteboard. You still use the same dry-erase markers, but house them in an IR-transmitting enclosure. We thought that would be perfect to tell us when and where inking was taking place.
The prolonged silence on this blog was due to my presence at CHI 2009, with its impoverished internet connectivity. It was a good conference none the less, one of the highlights of which was the Video Showcase program. I am sure other videos from this program will soon appear on YouTube, but for now, here’s the first one they showed:
It won First Place in its category (Best use of Jonathan Grudin’s head, or some such), and is truly funny.
Disclaimer: I didn’t have anything to do with the creation of this video, although I had been involved in building some digital ink interfaces in the 90s. The video was created by the following people:
Michael Bernstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paul André, University of Southampton
Kurt Luther, Georgia Institute of Technology
Erin Treacy Solovey, Tufts University
Erika Poole, Georgia Institute of Technology
Sharoda A. Paul, Pennsylvania State University
Shaun K. Kane, University of Washington
Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research