FXPAL Blog

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.

(more…)

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!

(more…)

The Enterprise Search Summit is taking place right now, and I am sorry to be missing it. The program looks quite interesting, including keynotes by Marti Hearst and Peter Morville, among others. Marti’s talk this morning, related to her recent book on information retrieval, was summarized by Daniel Tunkelang on his blog. While she did touch on topics covered in her book, including some of the collaborative search work done here at FXPAL, she has shifted her focus somewhat to address the more social issues around information seeking. While I don’t the details of her presentation, she did mention similar topics when she participated at a recent panel on search at the WWW2010 conference. The twitter streams from both events capture her “socialize vs. personalize” comments. (Since Twitter search sunsets quickly, here are the TwapperKeeper archives for #ess10 and the www2010 Search Is Dead panel.)

Peter Morville should be an interesting speaker on information retrieval-related topics, some of which he covers in his books Search Patterns and Ambient Findability. I wrote about some of his ideas earlier, but am curious to hear how he is presenting his work.

I hope that both talks are recorded and made available on the web.

Update: Daniel Tunkelang’s summary of Peter Morville’s talk

For the language geeks out there, this month’s SDForum Emerging Technology SIG looks interesting.

A panel of experts faces off over the relative strengths and weaknesses of three emerging languages – Clojure, Scala, and Go - and one “benchmark” language - Ruby. Details:

(more…)

We had a record crop of position papers for the Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) workshop we’re organizing at CSCW 2010. Underscoring the ubiquity of collaboration in information seeking, the position papers address everything from health care to emergency response to SecondLife to the information seeking ecology within the enterprise. The papers clustered out into several broad categories, although some papers could have been easily classified in more than one way.

(more…)

The recent earthquake in Haiti has attracted attention from Twitter users and researchers. Twitter has been used to collect donations, to contact people on the ground, to coordinate relief efforts, etc. Recently, U. Colorado’s EPIC Group proposed a hash-tag-based syntax on top of Twitter messages to help automate the parsing of actionable messages, and to do so effectively and reliably. This is a noble effort, but as Manas Tungare points out, the proposed syntax is too complex for its intended users, who have more pressing issues than dealing with hash tags.

(more…)

Sorry for being AWOP (away without posts).   We upgraded the underlying OS on this server, and in the process we made the machine non-bootable.  It was booting from a logical volume, which is illogical.  And after the upgrade, not a valid drive.   And since this isn’t “mission critical”, we didn’t have a hot spare.   So, this is now the backup of Wordpress restored to a wiped-clean and re-installed machine.   I think it is close to back-to-normal.  Never upgrade a machine if you don’t remember exactly how and why it was set up the way it was (random chance or old poor decisions?).  Thanks to my anonymous colleagues for fixing it.

(more…)

A quick pointer to a workshop sponsored by SDForum’s Virtual Worlds SIG  (which I co-chair along with Bob Ketner of The Tech and  Eilif Trondsen of SRI-BI):

The “Virtual Worlds in 2020″ Workshop
Palo Alto, CA
Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009

From the program description:
This is the 3rd annual “Future of Virtual Worlds” session – the Virtual Worlds in 2020 Workshop. This year it’s an interactive workshop where you can bring ideas, input, and questions for a rare, long term view of virtual worlds, at the Virtual Worlds SIG.

In just a few weeks we enter a new decade equipped with abilities that existed only in science fiction a few years ago. Although plans for using using graphical, collaborative virtual worlds predate the internet itself by many years, many advances in productivity remain unclaimed. It’s time now to take a look ahead. This workshop will produce a set of inputs showing what might be possible – along with a list of challenges to be overcome along the way over the next decade. (more…)

An NSF-funded cloud computing event is coming to the Bay Area.

In October 2007, Google and IBM announced the first pilot phase of the Academic Cloud Computing Initiative (ACCI), which granted several prominent U.S. universities access to a large computer cluster running Hadoop, an open source distributed computing platform inspired by Google’s file system and MapReduce programming model. In February 2008, the ACCI partnered with the National Science Foundation to provide grant funding to academic researchers interested in exploring large-data applications that could take advantage of this infrastructure. This resulted in the creation of the Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program led by Dr. Jim French, which currently funds 14 projects. See this NSF Press Release for a short description of all the projects funded under the CLuE program.

The event will be held on October 5th in the Computer History Museum (the current home of the Babbage Difference Engine No2 Serial #2), and will feature a great lineup of researchers reporting on their accomplishments in a variety of disciplines, including indexing for search, data processing, machine translation, text processing, databases, visualization, and other cloud computing topics. You can get more details about the schedule and the speakers here, and click here to register.

ECDL 2009 is taking place this week, and those of us who could not make it to Corfu will have to settle for the island experience of the Second (Life) Kind. Just as JCDL 2009 did earlier this summer, the ECDL 2009 Poster Session is available for viewing online through SecondLife. The real Poster Session will take place Monday, September 28th,  (7-9pm EET, 12:00-14:00 EST, 9-11am PDT), with a parallel session in SecondLife that will continue long after the real one ends.

The complete list of posters is available here; I am looking forward to “Improving annotations in digital documents,” “Searching in a book,” and “Workspace narrative exploration: overcoming interruption-caused context loss in information seeking tasks.”

There are some interesting papers at ECDL as well, including

• “Annotation search: the FAST way” by Nicola Ferro
• “Chance encounters in the digital library” by Elaine Toms and Lori Mccay-Peet
• “Comparing Google to Ask-a-librarian service for answering factual and topical questions” by Pertti Vakkari and Mari Taneli
• “Evaluation in context” by Jaap Kamps, Mounia Lalmas and Birger Larsen
• “Exploratory web searching with dynamic taxonomies and results clustering” by Panagiotis Papadakos, Stella Kopidaki, Nikos Armenatzoglou and Yannis Tzitzikas