A group from SMR asia is working on modeling threaded discussions. Threaded discussions pervade IMs, chat rooms, web forums, and mailing lists. They’re hierarchical. This group wants to mine the semantics (discover the topics) and the structure (author-reply relationships). The applications include spam blocking, reply constructions (figuring out which specific posts other posts are replying [...]
(Liveblogged from SIGIR’09 Boston)
In the first session of the first day of SIGIR’09 Boston, three papers presented approaches at using implicit user actions (activities) for improving information retrieval precision. Here is a brief summary:
Queries from Activities in Daily Living – Takuya Maekawa (NTT Japan) presented work describing using RFID sensors embedded in devices in [...]
Mark Carman presented on the paper in the title. They’re interested in studying personalization, but for that they need personalized relevance judgements. Query logs are a great source of that information but aren’t available due to privacy concerns. So they started looking at whether tag data (public) could be used as a substitute for query [...]
User-centered design has long championed the use of personas as a concrete way to conceptualize the amorphous concept of the ‘user’. Personas force all the designers to focus on particular well-formed individuals rather than some notion of The User that they silently disagree on [1].
This year at CHI, John Zimmerman at CMU presented a paper [...]
I had been meaning for a few weeks to read an alt.chi paper published in the CHI 09 proceedings called ‘Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI.’ Written by Michael Massimi and Andrea Charise at the U of Toronto, the title had caught my eye and then a bit of buzz surrounding it really [...]
This year Wendy Mackay, Aurélien Tabard and I held a workshop for examining interaction challenges surrounding time, in particular time as a component of temporal data sets. Our interest in this topic was brought about by the observation that low-cost storage, cheap sensing technologies, the Web and high speed networking have started to bring us [...]
Wednesday morning Katrina, Michael, Greg and I presented our paper, “Note to Self: Examining Personal Information Keeping in a Lightweight Note-Taking Tool”, to a packed room at noon in the “Personal and Public Information” track at CHI2009 . This paper describes our first study that we conducted with our List.it note taking tool in September [...]
[Sketchy guy from high school] added you as a friend on Facebook. We need to confirm that you know [sketchy guy from high school] in order for you to be friends on Facebook. Confirm, or ignore?
Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios presented the largest regression analysis at CHI, and it was focused on just this situation. [...]
Moira Burke at al. from facebook studied what led new users to post more over time—in terms of feedback from those how saw their posts, how broadly they were distributed, etc. They counted what happened over someone’s first two weeks on facebook and predicted what would happen over the next 3 months. They considered variables [...]
Stephen Voida presented “It Feels Better than Filing: Everyday work experiences in an activity-based computing system”. ABC deprecates the folder hierarchy in favor of a mechanism for associating files (and other objects) with specific activities. The user specifies which activity they are undertaking, and the system materializes the items ssociated with that activity. Activity [...]