FXPAL Blog

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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The BooksOnline’10 workshop to be held in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference in Toronto this fall will include keynote addresses by James Crawford (Google Books) and by John Ockerbloom (University of Pennsylvania). It will also feature the following papers, which will ultimately appear in the ACM Digital Library.

• HCI Design Principles for eReaders. Jennifer Pearson (Swansea University), George Buchanan (City University) and Harold Thimbleby (Swansea University)
• The sBook: Towards Social and Personalized Learning Experiences. Myriam Ribière, Jérome Picault and Sylvain Squedin (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France)
• Real-Time Document Collaboration Using iPads. Jennifer Pearson (Swansea University) and George Buchanan (City University)
• Ebooks Children Would Want to Read and Engage with. Monica Landoni (University of Lugano)
• A System for the Collaborative Reading of Digital Books with the Partially Sighted. W. Xavier Snelgrove and Ronald M. Baecker (University of Toronto)
• Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Building Upon Research Foundations to Understand Books and Reading in the Digital Age. Ray Siemens and Julie Meloni (University of Victoria)
• Working with First Nations: On-Demand Book Service. Nadia Caidi and Margaret Lam (University of Toronto)
• Biblioteca de Livros Digitais: The Privileged Space of a Transliterate Experience. Fernanda Bonacho (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
• The Active Reading Task for Evaluating E-books. Monica Landoni (University of Lugano)

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The 3rd workshop on Patent Information Retrieval (PAIR 2010) will be held in conjunction with CIKM 2010 on October 26th. Patents pose specific challenges with respect to information retrieval, and thus it’s unsurprising that the topic should receive focused attention in a series of workshops. What’s particularly interesting about this workshop is that rather than focusing solely on technical issues, its CFP specifically invites participation from patent retrieval practitioners:

We encourage IP professionals to present their special information needs and IR&KM researchers to present relevant technical ideas, for example for high recall search in prior art searching.

I really like this grounded approach to a complex problem space. Bringing together researchers are domain experts should benefit both groups: researchers should be able to draw on specific use cases and get a better understanding of searchers’ information needs, while patent search domain experts can get exposure to new tools and interfaces. I would love to see this approach repeated for other domains that involve information seeking such as medicine, law, and intelligence analysis, etc.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to attend it and the BooksOnline’10 workshop at the same time.

The BooksOnline ‘10 workshop will be held on October 26, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers with interests related to various aspects online reading, including digital collections, user experience, and design and technology. See the Call for Papers for a more detailed description of relevant topics. The workshop is organized by Gabriella Kazai (Microsoft Research, UK) and Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh).

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Traditional models of academic publishing have been under attack from a number of directions, with factors such as the decreasing cost of publication and dissemination leading to the proliferation of online journals and alternative publishing models. One such alternative, straddling the border between  blog and refereed publication, is Not Relevant, a web site recently created by Ian Soboroff as a venue for publishing and discussing work related to information retrieval that might have been rejected by traditional publication venues.

The goal of Not Relevant is to provide a novel dissemination venue for research in information retrieval, particularly when that research does not fit well in existing channels. Not Relevant strives for open dissemination of research, to put that research into the wild quickly, and to foster open and public discussion of that research.

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If you are doing research in interactive information retrieval, information seeking, collaborative search, and the like (that is, you’re concerned with what users do when they look for information), you might consider submitting  paper to IIiX 2010.

IIiX will explore the relationships between the contexts that affect information retrieval and information seeking, how these contexts impact information behavior, and how knowledge of information contexts and information behaviors can help design truly interactive information systems.

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Collaborative and cooperative aspects of information storage, seeking and retrieval have become a hot topic in recent years e.g. [1,2,4]. The acknowledgment that information seeking is a collaborative activity is part of a trend toward foregrounding the social in system design [5].

We wrote this in the introduction of a SIGGROUP report on a CSCW 1998 workshop on, you guessed it, Collaborative and Co-operative Information Seeking in Digital Information Environments. Plus ça change. The workshop was organized by Elizabeth Churchill, Joe Sullivan, Dave Snowdon and me. It is interesting to go back and read the position papers submitted by Mark Ackerman, Andrew Cohen, Jesus Favela, Mark Ginsburg,  Tom Gross, Timothy Koschmann, Joseph McCarthy, Alan Munro, Kevin Palfreyman,  Volker Paulsen, Alfredo Sanchez, Stefan Scholze, John Thomas, Michael Twidale, Volker Wulf, and Guillermo Zeballos.

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I’ve attended many Hypertext conferences in the past, and have spent a number of years at UofT, so it’s a double pleasure to point out that the Hypertext 2010 conference will be held at the University of Toronto June 13-16. The conference will cover topics including social computing, adaptive hypermedia, and hypertext in education and communication. The deadline for submission in January 18, 2010. For more info, please see the CFP.

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Merrie Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are organizing a second workshop on collaborative information seeking to be held in conjunction with CSCW2010 on Feb 7, 2010. More details on an earlier post about the workshop, and on the workshop site itself. Look over the position papers from the first workshop (some of which will be published in an IP&M Special Issue soon), and submit one yourself!

Looking forward to lots of good discussion!

Jeremy and I have been blogging about collaborative search for a while, and it is our pleasure to announce that Merrie Morris and we are organizing another workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking. The first workshop was held in 2008 in conjunction with the JCDL 2008 conference. We had a many interesting presentations and a lot of discussion about systems, algorithms, and evaluation.You can find the proceedings from the workshop on arXiv.org (metadata and papers) and on the workshop web site.

It’s time to revisit this topic, this time in conjunction with the CSCW 2010 conference. The workshop call for participation is here. Our goal is

to bring together researchers with backgrounds in CSCW, social computing, information retrieval, library sciences and HCI to discuss the research challenges associated with the emerging field of collaborative information seeking.

To participate, please submit a 2-4 page position paper in the ACM format by November 20th. The workshop will take place in February, in Savannah, Georgia. Hope to see you there!