Designing Search: Tutorial at the IRF Conference

Just a quick shout out that on July 1st I’ll be presenting a tutorial at the IRF Conference in Vienna. This is part of a day of tutorials that precedes the main conference. I’ve not been to the IRF conference before, so am looking forward to it. Also I like the look of the tutorial immediately preceding mine – I’m tempted to arrive early and gatecrash it

My tutorial will be slightly longer than usual this time, as I’ll be including a new exercise that I piloted at ECIR in April (which I’m pleased to say went down rather well). I’m keeping it a secret for now – if I told you how it works it would spoil the experience – but I’ve appended the abstract below (and the full description is available from the conference website).

Read Full Post »

Text Analytics Summit Europe – highlights and reflections

Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending the Text Analytics Summit Europe at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. Some of you may of course recognise this hotel as the base for Justin Bieber’s recent visit to London, but sadly (or is that fortunately?) he didn’t join us. Next time, maybe…

Still, the event was highly enjoyable, and served as visible testament of increasing maturity in the industry. When I did my PhD in natural language processing some *cough* years ago there really wasn’t a lot happening outside of academia – the best you’d get in mentioning ‘NLP’ to someone was an assumption that you’d fallen victim to some new age psychobabble. So it’s great to see the discipline finally ‘going mainstream’ and enjoying attention from a healthy cross section of society. Sadly I wasn’t able to attend the whole event, but  here’s a few of the standouts for me:

Read Full Post »

Search Solutions 2011: Highlights and Reflections

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of co-chairing the 5^th Search Solutions conference, held at BCS London in Covent Garden. As in previous years we had an eclectic mix of presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging applications in search and information retrieval. But new for this year was the tutorial programme: a selection of practical training courses reflecting current topics and state-of-the-art methods in search and information retrieval.

In hindsight, I can confide that this was something of a gamble: the idea of a tutorial programme came to our attention very late, and we had no idea whether we’d attract sufficient attendees (particularly given the modest size of the event compared to, say, ECIR or CIKM). However, in the end both tutorials were fully booked; a strong signal that we should consider a similar arrangement next year (perhaps even with a more extensive programme, e.g. four tutorials rather than two).

So, onto the event itself. Various folks have written summaries of the whole event (e.g. Charlie Hull’s), so I’ll just pick out a few highlights here.

Read Full Post »

A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search (slideshow)

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting a paper at Enterprise Search Europe on a Taxonomy of Enterprise Search. This was the first time that the Enterprise Search Summit had found its way this side of the Atlantic, and I’m pleased to say it was a great success (due in no small part to the efforts the conference chair, Martin White).

The paper was essentially a research-driven piece, reporting on some empirical work into studying the search strategies and tactics that users commonly employ across a range of enterprise search contexts. As such, it mirrors Andrei Broder’s classic 2002 paper (A Taxonomy of Web Search), which addresses a broadly similar goal within the domain of web search. However, we used a more qualitative, user-oriented data source, and also extended the analysis to present some initial implications into how the findings could be applied in the design of search and discovery experiences.

After the event, Martin confided in me how unusual it would be to see such a paper at the New York event, intimating that there would be little room in the program for such a piece. That conversation and a subsequent exchange with Daniel Tunkelang at the CIKM Industry Event got me thinking: is the search industry playing its part in building an effective dialogue between researchers and practitioners? Could it do more? Is the job of disseminating and promoting the benefits and outcomes of IR research purely the responsibility of academics and researchers?

I hope to explore this issue further in a subsequent post. For now, here are the slides from the event. The associated paper is also available in a previous post and as a pdf from the HCIR conference website.

Related Posts:

1. A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search and Discovery
2. Findability is just So Last Year
3. Designing the Search Experience (tutorial at Search Solutions 2011)
4. A Taxonomy of Search Strategies and their Design Implications 
5. Search Solutions 2011: London, November 16

Read Full Post »

Search Solutions 2011: London, November 16

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for early bird registrations ends on Monday, i.e. October 31st. Full details of the confirmed programme (including the fishbowl session) are appended below.

SEARCH SOLUTIONS 2011

Wednesday 16th November

BCS London HQ, Covent Garden

*** Early Bird Registration ends: Monday, October 31st***

Search Solutions is a special one-day event dedicated to the latest innovations in web & enterprise search. In contrast to other major industry events, Search Solutions aims to be highly interactive, with attendance strictly limited. The programme includes presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging applications in search and information retrieval.

NOTE: Search Solutions now offers a Tutorial Programme on Tuesday 15th November.

Programme

09:30 – 10:00 Registration and coffee

SESSION 1: THE CHANGING FACE OF SEARCH

• 10:00 – 10:10 Introduction
• 10:10 – 10:35 John Tait, Principal, johntait.net Ltd, Using Physical Quantities in Finding Similar Documents
• 10:35 – 11:00 Lewis Crawford, Web Archiving Programme Technical Lead, British Library, Analytics and Access to the UK Web Archive
• 11:00 – 11:25 Toby Mostyn, CTO, Polecat, Search for Public Conversations

11:25 – 12:00 BREAK

SESSION 2: WEB SEARCH CHALLENGES

• 12:00 – 12:25 Ricardo Baeza-Yates, VP Research, Yahoo!, Beyond the Ten Blue Links
• 12:25 – 12:50 Gabriella Kazai, Research Consultant, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Crowdsourcing Search Relevance

12:50 – 14:00 LUNCH

SESSION 3: ENTERPRISE SEARCH

• 14:00 – 14:25 Marianne Sweeney, Principal, Daedalus Information Systems, Successful Enterprise Search by Design
• 14:25 – 14:50 Matt Taylor, General Manager, Funnelback, Search Experience Management – Techniques for Search Success
• 14:50 – 15:15 Iain Fletcher, VP Marketing, Search Technologies, A New Content Processing Framework for Search Applications

15:15 – 15:45 BREAK

SESSION 4: BEYOND SEARCH: CONTENT ANALYSIS

• 15:45 – 16:10 Jarred McGinnis, Research Manager, Press Association, The Press Association Approach to Search and News
• 16:10 – 16:35 Ian Kegel, Technical Group Leader, British Telecom, Broadband TV and Recommendation: Improving the customer experience
• 16:35 – 17:00 Kristian Norling, Senior FIndability Consultant, Findwise, Information Flow on the intranet at Region Västra Götaland

Fishbowl Session:

• 17:00 – 17:30 Hot topics in search. Want to discuss your own hot topic? Join in, it’s a fishbowl session!

17:30 – 20:00 DRINKS RECEPTION

The event will also be followed by the IRSG AGM (from 18:00).

Location

Search Solutions is organised by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS and is held at the BCS Central London Office:

BCS, 1st Floor
The Davidson Building
5 Southampton Street
London, WC2E 7HA Map

Registration

Registration fees (including VAT at 20%) are as follows:

Early Bird Rates (until 23:59 on 31-Oct-2011)

• BCS member rate: £99
• Non-member rate: £129
• Student rate: £99

Normal Rates (from 01-Nov-2011)

• BCS member rate: £119
• Non-member rate: £149
• Student rate: £99

Registration fees include lunch and a copy of the proceedings. Tea and coffee will also be available throughout the day followed by a drinks reception in the evening.

For details of the tutorial programme and pricing, please refer to the Search Solutions Tutorials page.

Please register via BCS Online Registration.

Related Posts:

1. Designing the Search Experience (tutorial at Search Solutions 2011)
2. Search Solutions 2011: lineup announced!
3. Search Solutions 2010: Reactions & Reflections
4. ECIR Industry Day – lineup announced
5. Search Solutions 2010: Topics & Titles

Read Full Post »

Designing the Search Experience (tutorial at Search Solutions 2011)

Last week I announced the line-up for Search Solutions 2011, to be held at BCS London on Weds November 16. But this year, for the first time, we’re also offering a Tutorial Programme, which will run the day before (November 15). This year’s programme consists of two half day-tutorials:

• 09:00-12:30 Information Retrieval & Data Analytics, (Dr. Jun Wang, UCL)
• 13:30-17:00 Designing the Search Experience, (Dr. Tony Russell-Rose, UXLabs and City University London)

You can register for either or both tutorials, and there is a discount available if you register for Search Solutions at the same time. Jun Wang will be providing further details of the first tutorial on his blog, and I’ve appended further details of mine below. Full details of pricing and registration are available on the Search Solutions website. Hope to see you there!

Overview

This tutorial explores the fundamental concepts and principles of User-Centred Design for information search and discovery and demonstrates how to apply them in a range of practical contexts. Participants will learn how to differentiate between various types of search behaviour, develop an understanding of the key dimensions within the search user experience, and discover how to apply UI design patterns to commercial search applications. The session concludes with a group exercise applying these skills to a range of practical design challenges.

Objectives

The aim of this tutorial is to deliver a learning experience grounded in good scholarship, integrating the latest research findings with insights derived from the practical experience of designing and optimizing an extensive range of commercial search applications.  It focuses on the development of transferable, practical skills that can be learnt and practiced within a half-day session.

Benefits

Participants in this tutorial will:

• Explore the fundamental concepts and principles of Human-Centred Design for information search and discovery
• Study models of human information-seeking behavior and how to apply interaction design principles based on those models
• Learn how to differentiate between various types of search behaviour: known-item, exploratory, lookup, learning, investigation, etc. and understand how they may be combined to form composite search strategies and patterns
• Develop an understanding of the key dimensions of user type, goal, context and mode of interaction, and how to apply these dimensions when designing for different user contexts
• Understand the role of design patterns, and how to apply UI design principles and patterns from various libraries in designing search user interfaces
• Gain an awareness of the key design resources available within the HCIR community and how to apply these to practical design challenges

Audience

• Information architects and user experience designers
• Developers and managers of search projects
• IR researchers and other search specialists interested in the designing more effective user experiences for information retrieval and discovery

Structure

This half-day tutorial is structured as follows:

1. Introductions and objectives
2. Understanding Search & Discovery Behaviour
3. Varied Solutions for Varied Contexts
4. Faceted Navigation & Search
5. UI Design Pattern Libraries
6. Group Exercise: UX Review
7. Group Exercise: UX Review (Feedback & Presentations)
8. Conclusions & Wrap-up

NOTE: to get the best out of this tutorial, participants should bring an Internet-enabled laptop.

Instructor

Tony Russell-Rose is founder and director of UXLabs, a consultancy specialising in user experience research, design and analytics. Before founding UXLabs he was Manager of User Experience at Endeca and editor of the Endeca UI Design Pattern Library, a resource dedicated to best practice in the design of search and discovery experiences. Prior to this he was technical lead at Reuters, specialising in advanced user interfaces for information access and search. And before Reuters he was Group Manager at Canon Research Centre Europe, where he led a team developing next generation information access products and services. Earlier professional experience includes a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship at HP Labs and a Short-term Research Fellowship at BT Labs.

His academic qualifications include a PhD in human-computer interaction, an MSc in cognitive psychology and a first degree in engineering, majoring in human factors. He also holds the position of Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Interactive Systems Research, City University, London. He is currently vice-chair of the BCS Information Retrieval group and chair of the IEHF Human-Computer Interaction group.

Related Posts:

1. Search Solutions 2011: lineup announced!
2. Search Solutions 2010: Reactions & Reflections
3. Designing the Search Experience (tutorial at ECIR 2010)
4. ECIR Industry Day – lineup announced
5. Search Solutions 2010: Topics & Titles

Read Full Post »

Search Solutions 2011: lineup announced!

I know the official publicity isn’t due to go out for a little while just yet, but here’s a sneak peek at this year’s lineup for Search Solutions 2011. For those unfamiliar with the event, it is described as:

… a special one-day event dedicated to the latest innovations in web & enterprise search. In contrast to other major industry events, Search Solutions aims to be highly interactive, with attendance strictly limited. The programme includes presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging applications in search and information retrieval.

The major news this year is that we’ll be preceding the event with a tutorials day on November 15, which will offer conference attendees and local participants a stimulating and informative selection of practical training courses reflecting current topics and state-of-the-art methods in search and information retrieval. More on that later! Meanwhile, here is the provisional programme thus far:

• Ricardo Baeza-Yates, VP Research, Yahoo!, Beyond the ten blue links
• John Tait, Chief Science Officer, Information Retrieval Facility, Using Physical Quantities in Finding Similar Documents
• Gabriella Kazai, Research Consultant, Microsoft Research Cambridge, Crowdsourcing Search Relevance
• Matt Taylor, General Manager, Funnelback, Search Experience Management – Techniques for Search Success
• Toby Mostyn, CTO, Polecat, Search for public conversations
• Jarred McGinnis, Research Manager, Press Association, The Press Association Approach to Search and News
• Lewis Crawford, Web Archiving Programme Technical Lead, British Library, Analytics and Access to the UK Web Archive
• Ian Kegel, Technical Group Leader, British Telecom, Broadband TV and Recommendation: Improving the customer experience
• Marianne Sweeny, Principal, Daedalus Information Systems, Successful Enterprise Search by Design

We’ll more than likely be adding to this, and don’t forget that the programme will also include a panel session (to be announced), an evening drinks reception, and the biggest crowd puller of all, the IRSG AGM

More news (e.g. on the panel topic and abstracts for the talks) when I get it, but for now save the date: Wednesday November 16 at BCS London in Covent Garden.

Related Posts:

1. Search Solutions 2010: Reactions & Reflections
2. Tutorial on Designing the Search Experience
3. ECIR Industry Day – lineup announced
4. Events & Presentations
5. Search Solutions 2010: Topics & Titles

Read Full Post »

Text Analytics for Medical Informatics + Question Answering

Here’s a quick shout out for Friday’s meeting of the London Text Analytics group, which will be held at Fizzback‘s offices on the Strand at 18:30. As usual, we’ll aim to start with a couple of informal talks then adjourn to a local pub for a drink or two afterwards. As it happens, this meetup is now full, but you can always join the waiting list or (if you’re not yet a member) sign up for early notification of the next event. Full details below – hope to see you there.

Automating the formalization of clinical guidelines using information extraction: an overview of recent lexical approaches

Phil Gooch (City University)

Formalizing guideline text into a computable model, and linking clinical terms and recommendations in clinical guidelines to concepts in the electronic patient record (EHR) is difficult as, typically, both the guideline text and EHR content may be ambiguous, inconsistent and make use of implicit and background medical knowledge. How can lexical-based IE approaches help to automate this task? In this presentation, various design patterns are discussed and some tools presented.

Question-Answering over Linked Data

Danica Damljanovic (Sheffield University)

The availability and growth of the Linked Open Data cloud made exploiting the rich semantics easily accessible but also challenging mainly due to its scale. In this talk I will discuss challenges for building a Question-Answering system that uses these data as the main source for finding the answer. I will introduce the FREyA system which combines syntactic parsing with the semantic annotation in order to correctly interpret the question, and involves the user into dialog if necessary. Through the dialog, FREyA allows the user to validate or change the semantic meaning of each word in the question – the user’s input is used to train the system and improve its performance over time.

Related Posts:

1. Prostitutes Appeal to Pope: Text Analytics applied to Search
2. The role of Natural Language Processing in Information Retrieval
3. IR book is out!
4. Applying text analytics to product innovation and legal cases
5. Text Analytics: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

 

Read Full Post »

EuroHCIR 2011: lineup announced!

I’m pleased to announce the final line up for the EuroHCIR 2011 workshop, which will be held as part of the BCS HCI Conference in Newcastle on July 4. This event is particularly significant as it represents the first major HCIR event to be held outside of the US, and as such represents a critical point in the development of the HCIR community in Europe. We’re just in the process of finalizing the programme, which will include 9 presentations, a keynote speaker (to be announced) and a poster session. We also hope to include an interactive group session in the afternoon – more on that later! In the meantime, I’ve appended the full list of accepted papers below. More details on the EuroHCIR website. Hope to see you there.

Accepted Papers for Oral Presentation

• The potential of Recall and Precision as interface design parameters for information retrieval systems situated in everyday environments
  Ayman Moghnieh and Josep Blat
• The Mosaic Test: Benchmarking Colour-based Image Retrieval Systems Using Image Mosaics
  William Plant, Joanna Lumsden and Ian Nabney.
• Exploratory Search in an Audio-Visual Archive: Evaluating a Professional Search Tool for Non-Professional Users
  Marc Bron, Jasmijn Van Gorp, Frank Nack and Maarten De Rijke
• A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search
  Tony Russell-Rose, Joe Lamantia and Mark Burrell
• Evaluating the Cognitive Impact of Search User Interface Design Decisions
  Max L. Wilson
• Supplying Collaborative Source-code Retrieval Tools to Software Developers
  Juan M. Fernández-Luna, Juan F. Huete and Julio Rodriguez-Cano
• Problem Solved: A Practical Approach to Search Design
  Vegard Sandvold
• Back to MARS: The unexplored possibilities in query result visualization
  Alfredo Ferreira, Pedro B. Pascoal and Manuel J. Fonseca.
• Interactive Analysis and Exploration of Experimental Evaluation Results
  Emanuele Di Buccio, Marco Dussin, Nicola Ferro, Ivano Masiero, Giuseppe Santucci and Giuseppe Tino

Accepted Posters

• Towards User-Centered Retrieval Algorithms
  Manuel J. Fonseca
• Design Thinking Search User Interfaces
  Arne Berger
• The Development and Application of an Evaluation Methodology for Person Search Engines
  Roland Brennecke, Thomas Mandl and Christa Womser-Hacker

Related Posts:

1. From Search to Discovery: a taxonomy of search tasks, modes and activities
2. Designing faceted search: Getting the basics right (part 1)
3. Where am I? Techniques for wayfinding and navigation in faceted search
4. Interaction Models for Faceted Search
5. Reflections on Faceted Search and Beyond

Read Full Post »

CIKM 2011 Industry Event: Call for Papers

As I posted a few months ago, I’m organizing the Industry Event at CIKM 2011 with Daniel Tunkelang. We have a great set of keynotes lined up:

• Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research)
• John Giannandrea (Google)
• Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera)
• Peter Jackson (Thomson Reuters)

We’re also looking for submissions from industry researchers and practitioners. The submission deadline is June 21.

Here is a copy of the call for papers:

This year’s CIKM conference will include an Industry Event, which will be held during the regular conference program in parallel with the technical tracks.

The Industry Event’s objectives are twofold. The first objective is to present the state-of-the-art in information retrieval, knowledge management, databases, and data mining, delivered as keynote talks by influential technical leaders who work in industry. The second objective is to present interesting, novel and innovative industry developments in these areas.

Industry authors are invited to prepare proposals for presenting interesting, novel and innovative ideas, and submit these to industry@cikm2011.org by June 21st 2011. The proposals should contain (with respective lengths):

• Short company portrait (125 words)
• Short CV of the presenter (125 words)
• Title and abstract of the presentation (250 words)
• Reasons why the presentation should be interesting to the CIKM audience

When submitting a proposal, please bear in mind the following:

• Ensure the presentation is relevant to the CIKM audience (the Call for Papers gives a good idea of the conference scope).
• Try to highlight interesting R&D challenges in the work you present. Please do not present a sales pitch.
• All slides will be made public (no confidential information on the slides; you will be expected to ensure your slides are approved by your company before being presented).
• Presenters may opt to have their presentation videoed and made public, and if so, the presenter will be asked to sign a release form.

We look forward to receiving your submissions, and welcoming you to the CIKM 2011 Conference and Industry Event.

Important dates:
21 June 2011: Industry Event paper proposals due
19 July 2011: Notifications sent
27 October 2011: Industry Event
24-28 October 2011: CIKM conference

Related Posts:

1. Events & Presentations
2. 1st European Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
3. ECIR Industry Day: Lineup Announced
4. Tutorial on Designing the Search Experience
5. Design Patterns for Spatial Information Visualisation and Analytics Applications

Read Full Post »