HCIR 2011 took place almost three weeks ago, but I am just getting caught up after a week at CIKM 2011 and an actual almost-no-internet-access vacation. I wanted to start off my reflections on HCIR with a summary of Gary Marchionini‘s keynote, titled “HCIR: Now the Tricky Part.” Gary coined the term “HCIR” and has been a persuasive advocate of the concepts represented by the term. The talk used three case studies of HCIR projects as a lens to focus the audience’s attention on one of the main challenges of HCIR: how to evaluate the systems we build.

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We are about to deploy an experimental system for searching through CiteSeer data. The system, Querium, is designed to support collaborative, session-based search. This means that it will keep track of your searches, help you make sense of what you’ve already seen, and help you to collaborate with your colleagues. The short video shown below (recorded on a slightly older version of the system) will give you a hint about what it’s like to use Querium.

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Many people have asked me why I decided to write a book. A better questions is: “When you realized that writing the book was going to be orders of magnitude harder and take much longer than you thought it would, what made you decide to continue writing the book?”

My co-author, Wolfgang Polak, and I recently received a book review of the sort that is the dream of every author. A dream review is, of course, positive. But more importantly, it praises the aspects of the book that were most important to the author – the reasons the author kept going after other books on the subject came out and the author had a more reasonable (but still too optimistic) estimate of the vast amount of  effort it would take to finish it. (The review appeared in Computing Reviews, but is behind a paywall. Excerpts appear on the book’s Amazon and MIT press web pages.)

In our case,  one of the things that kept us going Continue Reading

Critiques of software patents is all the rage lately, from bloggers like Daniel Tunkelang to the NPR. The list of problems with them includes that they stifle innovation, that they are tools to beat up small companies and startups, and that they are simply trading cards that big corporations use to protect each other at everyone else’s expense. So why are software patents different from other patents? Why aren’t people arguing about scrapping the patent system entirely?

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a debate-style talk featuring Bob Zeidman (pro) and Prof. Edward A. Lee (con) about software patents hosted by the Computer History Museum, which I found quite helpful in understanding the issues. The motion under consideration was “Software patents encourage innovation.”

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The discussion on my previous post has raised some interesting and valid points regarding holding conferences in countries like China that block some (or all) internet traffic. Given that the conference has an audience that extends beyond the location of the conference, how can this audience be served in the presence of country-sponsored firewalls? Specifically, how can we get access to the Twitter stream and to other media being generated by the conference?

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A number of ACM groups have recently made decisions to hold their conferences in China. The list of major conferences includes CSCW2011, SIGIR2011,  Ubicomp 2011, and ICSE 2011, just to name a few. This seems like a strange trend. The purpose of academic conferences is to disseminate ideas in an open and public manner, and thus the argument has been made that taking these conferences to China will help expose China and Chinese researchers to these Western ideals. Yet what we see conference after conference are the restrictions that China imposes on electronic communication.

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We are organizing a third workshop on collaborative information retrieval, this time in conjunction with CIKM 2011. The first workshop, held in conjunction with JCDL 2008, focused on definitional issues, models for collaboration, and use cases. The second workshop, held in conjunction with CSCW2010, explored communication and awareness as related to collaborative search. This third workshop will focus on system building, algorithms, and user interfaces for collaboration.

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Interest in lecture webcasting has been picking up. As noted in earlier blog posts, TalkMiner has received some good publicity recently. Now, I am mentioned in a U.S. News & World Report article about the webcasting system I built at U.C. Berkeley.

Our book, Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction, has been out for a little over a month. So far, it has received as much attention from weaving blogs as science blogs, due to the card-woven bands on the cover.

MIT press takes pride in their cover designs, but warns authors that  “schedules rarely allow for individual consultation between designers and authors.” They do, however, ask authors to fill out a detailed questionnaire that includes questions asking for the authors’ thoughts with respect to a cover. It was the third question “What would you like the viewer to think or feel when they see the cover?” that prompted me to think that a fabric with abstract, colorful designs would suggest a “gentle” introduction to an abstract and colorful subject. Continue Reading

As Miles wrote yesterday, our paper was accepted to SIGIR 2011. The idea that time has an impact in ranking documents is not new; the problem seems to be to know when to take it into consideration. For example, while Li and Croft showed improvements in ranking when incorporating the notion of recency, we found that the algorithm degrades performance of non-temporal queries. (This is obvious, in a sense: if a ranking algorithm is biased toward more recent documents, and recency is not important for a given query, it will de-emphasize otherwise well-matching documents, thereby reducing MAP.)

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