FXPAL Blog

About: Gene Golovchinsky

Website

http://www.fxpal.com/?p=gene

Profile

Sr. Research Scientist at FXPAL. Interested in information seeking, dynamic hypertext, collaborative search, e-books, freeform digital ink annotation, human-computer interaction, photography, wine, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Follow me on Twitter at @HCIR_GeneG

Posts by Gene Golovchinsky:

• HCIR intern, 2012 edition, 25 Jan 2012 in human-computer interaction&Information seeking&internships

  It’s intern season again! I am looking for a PhD student well-versed in persuasive/affective computing/captology literature to participate in a research project related to improving the quality of interaction in information seeking environments. The goal of the project is to explore how to increase people’s engagement with systems while performing exploratory search. We would like to improve [...]

• Tracking, 06 Dec 2011 in privacy&social impact of technology

  Imagine the (legitimate) outcry if a local municipality, a State government, or the Federal government in the US deployed an infrastructure that would systematically identify and track people as they went about their daily lives, without a viable option to opt out. While the US has laws that govern when and how data about individuals [...]

• Collaborative search on the rise?, 05 Dec 2011 in collaborative search&Information seeking

  I am seeing an interesting not-quite-yet-a-trend on the emergence of collaborative search tools. I am not talking about research tools such as SearchTogether or Coagmento, but of real companies started for the purpose of putting out a search tool that supports explicit collaboration. The two recent entries in this category of which I am aware are [...]

• A quick study of Scholar-ly Citation, 02 Dec 2011 in human-computer interaction&Information seeking

  Google recently unveiled Citations, its extension to Google Scholar that helps people to organize the papers and patents they wrote and to keep track of citations to them. You can edit metadata that wasn’t parsed correctly, merge or split references, connect to co-authors’ citation pages, etc. Cool stuff. When it comes to using this tool [...]

• Recall vs. Precision, 14 Nov 2011 in Information seeking

  Stephen Robertson’s talk at the CIKM 2011 Industry event caused me to think about recall and precision again. Over the last decade precision-oriented searches have become synonymous with web searches, while recall has been relegated to narrow verticals. But is precision@5 or NCDG@1 really the right way to measure the effectiveness of interactive search? If [...]

• HCIR 2011 keynote, 10 Nov 2011 in Information seeking

  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 [...]

• Looking for volunteers for collaborative search study, 02 Sep 2011 in collaborative search&CSCW&human-computer interaction&Information seeking

  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 [...]

• The curious case of the software patent, 30 Aug 2011 in culture/society&social impact of technology

  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 [...]

• Dealing with censorship and other nonsense, 03 Aug 2011 in culture/society&scientific publishing&social impact of technology

  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, [...]

• Censoring conferences, 27 Jul 2011 in culture/society&scientific publishing&social impact of technology

  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 [...]