This is the third post by Jeremy and me in a series on collaborative information seeking. The first was an introduction to the space, and the second dealt with the topic of collaborative intent. This post deals with synchronization of data that underlies the collaboration. While it is possible to collaborate in searching for information without tool support by exchanging URLs or documents directly, more interesting interactions are possible when they are mediated by the search system.

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Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Given that I’ve named my child after Ms. Lovelace, I feel obligated and honored to take part in the pledge to “highlight [a] women in technology” that I look up to.

While I’ve many present and past fabulous female colleagues, if I’m to choose one to write about it’s a no-brainer.

Jennifer Mankoff is an associate processor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University. Jen was my graduate advisor at Berkeley, seeing me through a master’s and PhD. Perhaps “nurse” is a better word, as she not only worked tirelessly with me to improve my abilities but at times literally cared for me when I was ill.

Jen is a whirling dervish. A good Samaritan. A force of nature.

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Ada Lovelace Day is today, March 24.

There’s a movement afoot to celebrate by blogging about women in technology and the sciences. More than 1500 bloggers have signed up; you can see the results listed here.

Here’s my contribution: Women in Industrial Research Labs.

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to raise a glass of virtual bubbly to all the amazing women scientists and researchers in the industrial research labs I’ve worked in… especially the ones who inspired and mentored (and hired) me.  More below the fold – but first:

Pop! hisssss…gurggurgle… Continue Reading

A quick reminder of this event in Palo Alto this evening. Tonight’s event is a joint program of SDForum Virtual World SIG and the SDForum Tech Women’s Program featuring a panel of women who build, create, and work in virtual worlds ranging from NASA to games to Second Life. Directions here.

FXPAL has a YouTube page where we publish various videos of research systems. Right now, the following recent projects have one or more vidoes on the site

• Introduction to FXPAL, by Larry Rowe, our President Continue Reading

Shortly before my son was born, I had attended a lecture about  multilingualism and children. The talk backed my desire to raise him bi-lingually with some practical advice.  Much of the lecture revolved around the book Raising Multilingual Children by Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. The book is about children’s abilities to learn languages; it is based on several cases studies of bi- or multi-lingual children (including the author’s), and backed up with considerable research.

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Recently, a new class of search applications that support collaborative information seeking has emerged. In these systems, users work in small groups with a shared information need, rather than relying on large numbers of anonymous users with potentially diverging information needs. One clear way to distinguish different social search activities has been proposed by Colum Foley. In his PhD thesis, he characterizes search systems on two dimensions, “Sharing of Knowledge” and “Division of labor.”  Sharing of knowledge separates all social search systems from traditional single-user approaches, while division of labor separates social search from collaborative search.

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This is Part 2 of (at least) 5 in a series of posts about Collaborative Information Seeking.  Part 1 is found here.

The most important dimension for distinguishing between various types of collaboration is the intent with which users of a system approach each other for the collaboration.

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In his recent post, Daniel Tunkelang issued a call for renewed interest in recall as a measure of performance of information retrieval systems, particularly for exploratory search tasks. It is interesting to note that there are several possible ways to measure recall and precision for interactive tasks, and which measure you should use depends on what aspect of the entire human-computer system you are interested in.

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Daniel Tunkelang’s recent post on Twitter search got me thinking about what an HCIR geek would do, which produced the following random thoughts.

First, we should start with tasks. What kinds of information do people want to find in tweet streams? Do they want to find a document that’s been referenced? Do they want information about an event? Are they interested in finding a community of interest? What other useful tasks are there with respect to this stream?

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