FXPAL Blog

The IIiX conference series (the latest installment of which took place recently at Rutgers University) arose from IRiX (Information Retrieval In conteXt) workshops (2004, 2005) held in conjunction with SIGIR 2004 and 2005. The workshops were organized by what I think of as the Scandinavian contingent of the IR community — the likes of Peter Ingwersen, Kalervo Järvelin, Pia Borlund, Birger Larsen and others — who collectively represented a more user-centered (as opposed to system-centered) approach to studying information retrieval. Yes, others were involved, but it still seems that the Scandinavians somehow inspired and led the movement. Given the success of the workshops, they organized the IIiX conference series to create a more formal venue for these topics.

One of the highlights of the 2010 conference was a debate between the system camp and the user camp about the value of simulating users. (See Saturday August 21 in the program.) This was a reprise of the theme of a workshop held at this year’s SIGIR conference, this time on the other side’s turf.

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Daniel Russell wrote up a nice summary of my search for the origins of Daniel  Tunkelang’s name. Daniel R. drew two lessons from the exercise: one, that social search (although I would say the social was bordering on the collaborative, in this case) can be effective because it integrates insights of multiple people; and two, that some domain knowledge helped me navigate the search results more effectively.

I’d like to expand his second point a bit.

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The fourth HCIR workshop was held this past weekend at Rutgers University in conjunction with the IIiX 2010 conference. This was, in my opinion, the best workshop of the four so far. Part of the strength of the workshop has been the range of presentations, covering more mature work in traditional 30 minute presentations, a poster and demo session, and, new this year, reports from the HCIR search challenge.

From the web site:

The aims of the challenge are to encourage researchers and practitioners to build and demonstrate information access systems satisfying at least one of the following:

• Not only deliver relevant documents, but provide facilities for making meaning with those documents.
• Increase user responsibility as well as control; that is, the systems require and reward human effort.
• Offer the flexibility to adapt to user knowledge / sophistication / information need.
• Are engaging and fun to use.

Participants would be given access to the New York Times annotated corpus which consists of 1.8 million articles published in the Times between 1987 and 2007, and they would be expected do something interesting in searching or browsing this collection.

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Here are the slides of the presentation I gave at the IIiX 2010 conference. I presented work done in collaboration with Jeremy Pickens on session-based search. The paper is here; the talk highlights some of the theoretical considerations and gives some examples of the new interface we’re building.

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The IIiX 2010 Doctoral Consortium was a rather intense ten hours filled with great ideas and discussion. We had 11 students and six advisers, representing a broad range of universities and areas of interest related to information seeking. Each student made a 20-25 minute presentation, followed by questions from the advisers and from other students; in addition, there were two 45 minute one-one-one sessions during which students received feedback from an adviser, and also from another student.

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On Jon Elsas’s suggestion, I dug into Ancestry.com’s genealogy web site & did some searching for my wife’s and my ancestors. In additional to the personal and historical interest, I was curious to learn about the data and the data sets from an information seeking perspective.

Ancestry.com federates thousands of databases and archives of varying size, purpose and quality. They provide an interface for searching the data, for saving results, for building up family trees, and for connecting with other people.

Searching this collection presents a range of challenges both for the system designers and for its users.

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The IIiX2010 conference is coming up, and it promises to be a great week. For me it will start with the Doctoral Consortium, followed by the conference proper, and capped off by the HCIR workshop. I’ve sat in on some doctoral consortia in the past, but this will be my first fully-fledged one. I am looking forward to the presentations and the discussion, and I will be blogging about the various presentations in the coming week.

I don’t expect to get much sleep!

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I’ve had occasion to perform genealogical searches for my family as well as for others. Genealogical searches can be rewarding, but more often than not you wind up with nothing. So when starting on such searches one expects that little can be found; only one’s optimism determines whether to continue searching.

This weekend, my optimism paid off. Probably.

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Frequently, particularly when searching for work related to possibly novel research ideas I or others at FXPAL have had, it is not easy to determine when to stop searching. This dilemma comes up any time anyone is searching for something we are not sure exists.  After doing N searches, and finding nothing, how certain can we be that it isn’t there?

An unusual example of an existence search came up as I was doing background research for my review of N. David Mermin’s book Quantum Computer Science that was recently published in ACM SIGACT News. As part of the review, I wanted to give a sense for the extent that Mermin’s thoughts and writings have influenced scholarly and popular thought on quantum mechanics. I thought I remembered that he was the originator of the “Shut up and calculate” interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I wanted to fact check before putting it in my review. Would this search be a hard or easy one?
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This recent XKCD cartoon made me think of Miles Efron’s project on language change and information retrieval. Perhaps the tools he develops will help scholars in the future parse what we declaim to our tweeps.