I dodged being empaneled on a jury, and I made it to IBM Almaden to attend most of NPUC. I did miss the talk by Brad Myers, which I’ll have to view on video, but got to see most of the other presentations and the poster/demo session. One demo I found particularly interesting was Mira Dontcheva‘s Blueprint work. Blueprint is an Eclipse plugin for Flex programming that allows people to search for snippets of code directly from the IDE, and displays them in an overlay or side bar. Blueprint makes it possible to search the web with an interface similar to the typical auto-complete functionality. Furthermore, because it understands Flex syntax, its ranking should more accurate than a regular full-text index that happens to contain code. When you select a search result, Blueprint inserts it into your code, and automatically annotates the code to include the URL at which the snippet was found so that you can re-visit that page later.

Adobe Blueprint screenshot

Continue Reading

In his comment to an earlier post, Miles Efron reiterated the usefulness of the various TREC competitions to fostering IR research. I agree with him (and with others) that TREC has certainly been a good incubator both in its annual competition and in follow-on studies that use its data in other ways.  And, as Miles points out,we have seen a proliferation of collections: everything from the original newspaper articles to blogs, video, large corpora, etc.

Continue Reading