Synchronous collaborative information retrieval: techniques and evaluation

Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval refers to systems that support multiple users searching together at the same time in order to satisfy a shared information need. To date most SCIR systems have focussed on providing various awareness tools in order to enable collaborating users to coordinate the search task. However, requiring users to both search and coordinate the group activity may prove too demanding. On the other hand without effective coordination policies the group search may not be effective. In this paper we propose and evaluate novel system-mediated techniques for coordinating a group search. These techniques allow for an effective division of labour across the group whereby each group member can explore a subset of the search space.We also propose and evaluate techniques to support automated sharing of knowledge across searchers in SCIR, through novel collaborative and complementary relevance feedback techniques. In order to evaluate these techniques, we propose a framework for SCIR evaluation based on simulations. To populate these simulations we extract data from TREC interactive search logs. This work represent the first simulations of SCIR to date and the first such use of this TREC data

Division of labour and sharing of knowledge for synchronous collaborative information retrieval

Synchronous collaborative information retrieval (SCIR) is concerned with supporting two or more users who search together at the same time in order to satisfy a shared information need. SCIR systems represent a paradigmatic shift in the way we view information retrieval, moving from an individual to a group process and as such the development of novel IR techniques is needed to support this. In this article we present what we believe are two key concepts for the development of effective SCIR namely division of labour (DoL) and sharing of knowledge (SoK). Together these concepts enable coordinated SCIR such that redundancy across group members is reduced whilst enabling each group member to benefit from the discoveries of their collaborators. In this article we outline techniques from state-of-the-art SCIR systems which support these two concepts, primarily through the provision of awareness widgets. We then outline some of our own work into system-mediated techniques for division of labour and sharing of knowledge in SCIR. Finally we conclude with a discussion on some possible future trends for these two coordination techniques

Combining relevance information in a synchronous collaborative information retrieval environment

Traditionally information retrieval (IR) research has focussed on a single user interaction modality, where a user searches to satisfy an information need. Recent advances in both web technologies, such as the sociable web of Web 2.0, and computer hardware, such as tabletop interface devices, have enabled multiple users to collaborate on many computer-related tasks. Due to these advances there is an increasing need to support two or more users searching together at the same time, in order to satisfy a shared information need, which we refer to as Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval. Synchronous Collaborative Information Retrieval (SCIR) represents a significant paradigmatic shift from traditional IR systems. In order to support an effective SCIR search, new techniques are required to coordinate users' activities. In this chapter we explore the effectiveness of a sharing of knowledge policy on a collaborating group. Sharing of knowledge refers to the process of passing relevance information across users, if one user finds items of relevance to the search task then the group should benefit in the form of improved ranked lists returned to each searcher. In order to evaluate the proposed techniques we simulate two users searching together through an incremental feedback system. The simulation assumes that users decide on an initial query with which to begin the collaborative search and proceed through the search by providing relevance judgments to the system and receiving a new ranked list. In order to populate these simulations we extract data from the interaction logs of various experimental IR systems from previous Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) workshops

CrowdHiLite: A Peer Review Service to Support Serious Reading on the Screen

The advent of smart devices and consumerisation of IT has produced a significant and permanent shift away from print-based reading to digital reading. This, in turn, has changed people’s reading behaviours and suggests that adapted mechanisms should be considered to support digital reading. It is particularly important for novice readers who need to read in-depth scientific literature in their chosen field. In this paper, we propose CrowdHiLite, a novel service architecture that allows expert readers to provide suggestion on individual readers’ highlights to support their reading on the screen through the use of crowdsourcing technique. A demonstration was also provided to show how it would work in real world. A preliminary experiment comparing novice readers’ reading performance with expert rated highlights and normal highlights on the same document found improved reading efficiency and comprehension with the former

TangiWheel: A widget for manipulating collections on tabletop displays supporting hybrid Input modality

In this paper we present TangiWheel, a collection manipulation widget for tabletop displays. Our implementation is flexible, allowing either multi-touch or interaction, or even a hybrid scheme to better suit user choice and convenience. Different TangiWheel aspects and features are compared with other existing widgets for collection manipulation. The study reveals that TangiWheel is the first proposal to support a hybrid input modality with large resemblance levels between touch and tangible interaction styles. Several experiments were conducted to evaluate the techniques used in each input scheme for a better understanding of tangible surface interfaces in complex tasks performed by a single user (e.g., involving a typical master-slave exploration pattern). The results show that tangibles perform significantly better than fingers, despite dealing with a greater number of interactions, in situations that require a large number of acquisitions and basic manipulation tasks such as establishing location and orientation. However, when users have to perform multiple exploration and selection operations that do not require previous basic manipulation tasks, for instance when collections are fixed in the interface layout, touch input is significantly better in terms of required time and number of actions. Finally, when a more elastic collection layout or more complex additional insertion or displacement operations are needed, the hybrid and tangible approaches clearly outperform finger-based interactions.. ©2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC & Science Press, ChinaThe work is supported by the Ministry of Education of Spain under Grant No. TSI2010-20488. 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Proliferation Security Initiative \u2714

In September 2013 Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Rebecca Hersman requested that the Naval War College conduct a PSI table top game in May 2014 in conjunction with a meeting of the PSI Operational Experts Group (OEG). It was specifically requested that the game explore critical challenges and opportunities in counter- proliferation interdiction, and identify capacity building tools that may be shared with the broader PSI community

Brainstorming und Mind-Mapping im Multi-Device-Kontext. Konzeption und prototypische Implementierung für Multi-Touch-Tabletop und Smartphone

Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt die Konzeption und prototypische Implemen­tierung einer Anwendung zur elektronischen Unterstützung von Brainstorming- und Mind-Mapping-Sitzungen an einem multitouchfähigen Tabletop mit Smart­phones. Während der Tabletop durch seine große, horizontal ausgerichtete Oberfläche die kollaborative Erstellung und Strukturierung von Ideen in Gruppen unterstützt, werden Smartphones einen zusätzlichen Eingabekanal zur Verfügung stellen sowie Individualarbeit fördern. Somit wird zunächst einerseits die Motivation für die Verwirklichung einer Anwendung zum Brainstorming und Mind- Mapping am Tabletop und andererseits das Potential einer Ergänzung eines sol­chen Systems durch zusätzliche private Geräte im Sinne der Multi-Device-Inter­aktion erläutert werden. Um eine geeignete theoretische Basis zu schaffen, wird darüber hinaus ein detaillierter Überblick über die Entwicklung der Tabletop­technologie in den letzten Jahren und den dabei zentralen Forschungs- und Pro­blemfeldern im Kontext der Entwicklung von Benutzerschnittstellen für Tabletopsysteme gegeben. Zudem werden schließlich auch im Rahmen der Arbeit relevante Aspekte der Multi-Device-Interaktion skizziert. Diesem theoretisch ausgerichteten Teil der Arbeit folgt schließlich eine Beschreibung der Entwicklung des Anwendungskonzepts und der dabei formulierten Anforderungen und Designzielen, welche in Form eines ersten, papierbasierten Prototypen visualisiert werden. Aufbauend auf diesen konzeptuellen Überlegungen wird schließlich die konkrete technische Umsetzung der Anwendung Multi/Touch/Device Mind­ Mapper in Form eines High-Level-Prototypen auf Basis des MT4j-Frameworks (Tabletop) und des Android-Betriebssystems (Smartphone) beleuchtet. Eine Dis­kussion dieses finalen Prototypen und erster praktischer Erfahrungen sowie ein Ausblick auf Erweiterungsmöglichkeiten des Systems und über den Rahmen der Arbeit hinaus gehende Fragestellungen schließen die Arbeit ab. Schlussendlich kann gezeigt werden, dass die im Rahmen des Anwendungskonzept definierten Anforderungen mit Hilfe der verwendeten Frameworks bis auf wenige Ausnahmen erfolgreich umgesetzt werden konnten. Darüber hinaus kann der Anwendung durch die aus dem Testbetrieb gewonnenen Erkenntnisse eine grundsätzli­ che Praktikabilität attestiert, ebenso konnten einige Ansatzpunkte für weitere Verbesserungen und Tests aufgedeckt werden

Cruiser and PhoTable: Exploring Tabletop User Interface Software for Digital Photograph Sharing and Story Capture

Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation