iBingo features two or more users performing collaborative information seeking tasks, using mobile devices, Apple iPod iTouch in our case. The novelty in our work is that the system, called iBingo, mediates the collaborative searches among the users and performs a realtime division of labour among co-searchers so users are presented with documents which are both unique and tailored to the individual. This enables each user to explore unique subsets of the retrieved information space. We demonstrate iBingo mobile collabo-rative search on a video collection from TRECVid 2007

Byrne, Daragh

Foley, Colum

Jones, Gareth J.F.

Smeaton, Alan F.

English

Name not available

Mobile, Ubiquitous Information Seeking, as a Group:The iBingo Collaborative Video Retrieval SystemAlan F. Smeaton and Colum FoleyCLARITY Centre for Sensor Web TechnologiesDublin City UniversityGlasnevin, Dublin 9, IrelandAlan.Smeaton@dcu.ieDaragh Byrne and Gareth J.F. JonesCentre for Digital Video ProcessingDublin City UniversityGlasnevin, Dublin 9, IrelandGareth.Jones@computing.dcu.ieABSTRACTiBingo features two or more users performing collaborativeinformation seeking tasks, using mobile devices, Apple iPodiTouch in our case. The novelty in our work is that thesystem, called iBingo, mediates the collaborative searchesamong the users and performs a realtime division of labouramong co-searchers so users are presented with documentswhich are both unique and tailored to the individual. Thisenables each user to explore unique subsets of the retrievedinformation space. We demonstrate iBingo mobile collabo-rative search on a video collection from TRECVid 2007.Categories and Subject DescriptorsH.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Mul-timedia Information Systems; H.3.3 [Information Searchand Retrieval]: Search ProcessGeneral TermsAlgorithms, Design, Human Factors1. INTRODUCTIONAs computing and digital technologies in general haveevolved, we have always sought, and usually found, applica-tions which support the social side of our nature. Computernetworks are used to support email, chat and other commu-nications among people, and the world wide web has nowgrown to offer social networking through MySpace, Face-Book and others. These forms of networked communicationtend to facilitate inter-personal interactions over large geo-graphic distances and are often asynchronous. However, of-ten our preferred socialising is both realtime and co-present.A special report in The Economist in April 2008 on mo-bile telecommunicaitons [?] argued that a world of ubiqui-tous wireless access to information is almost upon us and ischanging the way we work, live, love and relate to places andto each other. The article observed the emergence of bedouinbehaviour among people as we work and socialise, hoppingPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, torepublish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specificpermission and/or a fee.MobiQuitous 2008 July 21 - 25, 2008, Dublin, IrelandCopyright 2008 ACM 978-963-9799-21-9 ...$5.00.from one wireless access point to another. It argued that thisnomadism is good for re-enforcing our in-groups (of people),our close circle of friends, family and co-workers, but at theexpense of our interaction with strangers whom we increas-ingly shun as we focus inwards on our own in-groups.When we interact in groups, one of the things we regu-larly do is search to find information, and we do this bothin social and in work settings. “Did Al Pacino star in themovie Scarface ?”, “What is on TV tonight ?”, “Where canI find a good recipe for soda bread ?”. We’re constantlyasking questions of each other and more often than not weanswer those questions from among our social circle. “Yeah,he played the lead role, Tony Montana”, “Nothing much, ex-cept a movie later” and “Oh I have one at home” are typicalreplies. Nowadays, with ubiquitous access to online infor-mation as an assumed norm, when we cannot answer thesequestions we have the internet on our mobile devices to helpus.At present, most search systems are designed to supportsingle-user searching in a stateless manner, i.e. with no con-tinuum between one query and a user’s follow-on or sub-sequent queries. Several systems such as I-SPY [?] havegone beyond that to leverage a user’s or a group’s collectionof searches and relevance judgments but again the supportis for a single searcher, working alone. In scenarios where agroup of collocated people wish to do a shared online search,together, usually just one person does the searching and theothers watch or provide input. If more than one device isavailable and more than one person searches then they doso independently as the system doesn’t support synchro-nised collaborative search in any way. Although there maybe verbal synchronisation within the group, without suffi-cient coordination of collaborating users’ search processes,users may find themselves replicating the efforts of their co-searchers.In our work we have developed approaches to support-ing synchronised collaborative information retrieval wherethe “wisdom of the crowd”, or more correctly the wisdom ofthe group of co-searchers, is leveraged to the benefit of thegroup’s information need. This benefit includes eliminatingredundancy and repetition among co-searchers and increas-ing efficiency. Our system, called iBingo, allows users onmobile devices (Apple iPod Touch) to synchronously searchto satisfy a common, shared information need, and it is de-scribed in the next section.2. THE IBINGO MOBILE COLLABORA-TIVE SEARCH SYSTEMIn iBingo, co-searchers can work independently to locaterelevant information, however their indications of relevanceare exploited to the benefit of the group. iBingo also allowsusers to explore different facets of the shared informationneed by enabling each user to freely explore separate infor-mation “trails” during their search. In the iBingo demon-stration system, we apply techniques of division of labouramong co-searchers, wherein the system which mediates thesearch, and will decide which of the returned search itemsare to be presented to each co-searcher.Initially the division of labour coordination policies seek toprovide all co-located searchers with a set of highly relevantand diverse results. Then as an individual searcher locatesrelevant items and begins to pursue an information trail,the collaborative engine will adjust the result set providedto this user in order to provide high recall. Judged relevantitems are used to seed the information trail for this userand as such the system returns as many highly similar itemsfrom the collection to this user. In addition the collaborativeengine uses this information to coordinate each collaboratinguser’s activities to ensure they each explore different facetsof the information space. In this way we can maximise theeffectiveness of the group search and ensure good coverageof the collection.iBingo as shown in Figure 1, allows two or more co-searchers, each one using an iPod Touch, to communicatewirelessly with a central mediating server (a laptop com-puter) which performs searching on a corpus of around 50hours of broadcast TV video taken from the TRECVid 2007search collection [?]. A mediating layer within iBingomakescalls to a multimedia search engine which supports textsearching against closed captions and speech recognised text,as well as a variety of image-based search types. The searchengine functionality is described in [?].USERS INTERACT WITHUSERS INTERACT WITHUSERS INTERACT WITHIR Module Search EngineUsers iPod Touch Search SystemComputerSTARTSEARCHALLOCATES RESULTS & JUDGEMENTS TO USERSINITIATES  SEARCHQUERIESGETS RESULTS FROM THEiBingo Search System OverviewFigure 1: The iBingo mobile collaborative searchsystemIn our demonstration system, a collocated group search isinitiated via a laptop interface, after which the search is con-trolled by users using Apple iPod Touch devices, although inreality an iPod could easily be used to initiate the search. Inthe demonstration, the laptop provides an overview of theprogress of the collaborative search for observers to viewand in particular, the laptop displays all the relevant itemsfound while also displaying the documents currently beingexamined by each collaborating user. This shared displaycan also allow users to monitor progress of the search. Asthe system uses wireless communication between the iPodsand the laptop, users do not need to be beside the centralserver but can move about in a freeform fashion.The results of the initial search, which are multimediavideo shots, are then presented to each co-searcher who makerelevance judgments independently of each other. As theserelevance judgments are made and fed back into the system,the collaborative layer of iBingo intelligently reformulatesthe query and re-ranks as yet unseen video shots accordingto the division of labour policy. The net effect of havingthe system coordinate the collaborative search is that co-searchers are free to interact with each other about issues ofthe retrieved items and not about synchronising their search.Consequently, communication within the collocated groupshifts from discussions about coordinating the search taskto conversations on the results of the process.At the moment, mobile internet enabled devices such asthe iPod Touch offer unique portable platforms to effectivelysupport groups wanting to search together. Shared tabletopsand public displays are gaining popularity and prevalenceat the moment. These novel interactive surfaces includingMERL’s DiamondTouch [?] and Microsoft’s Surface, of-fer new opportunities for supporting synchronous collocatedcollaborative search. The techniques developed within theiBingo system will then easily transfer to those other plat-forms.AcknowledgmentThis work is supported by Science Foundation Ireland undergrant 03/IN.3/I361 and by the Irish Research Council forScience Engineering and Technology.

Mobile, ubiquitous information seeking, as a group:\ud
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Mobile, ubiquitous information seeking, as a group:
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Mobile, ubiquitous information seeking, as a group:

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Mobile, ubiquitous information seeking, as a group: the iBingo collaborative video retrieval system

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