Have you ever seen a headline that read: “Atheist militants detonate bomb in city café” -?
Doug Stanhope
Monthly Archive for August, 2006
Chase, William G., and Herbert A. Simon. 1973. “Perception in chess.” Cognitive Psychology.
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Given a perception task and a memory task from a briefly exposed position, chess players of varying strength extract different amounts of information according to their strength. Superior performance of stronger players depends on their ability “to encode the position into larger perceptual chunks, each consisting of a familiar subconfiguration of pieces.” There is evidence that pieces converging on the opponent’s king (or other) position are chunked in a more abstract attack relation. “Finally, the number of chunks retained in short-term memory after brief exposure to chess positions is about the magnitude we would predict from immediate recall of common words … and copying of visual patterns.”
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I don’t like to write my papers in Word. I usually prefer TexShop but sometimes we need to collaborate and Word is much better format for that. What I really hate of Word is that there is no easy way to use numbered references.
This is a nice trick on how to create numbered references in Microsoft Word. It does not fix completely the issue though because if you insert a new reference between the olds then you need to click on all the references you created and refresh the number.
(via)
I like this concept of “air boards”, an imaginary frame in front of the person that can be accessed with hand gestures. This space is often used by co-located speaker to symbolize diagrams and objects and the basic relationships between them: e.g., this is on top, this is under, this “talks to” this other thing, etc.
In gesture languages for the deaf, air boards can be used to instantiate a set of temporal pointer which are valid during the talk session: instead of spelling “Dan gibson” every time, after the first time I take this reference to the air board so that the next times I will have just to point at it.
In the literature the air boards have been studied by Olson & Olson:
In videotapes of software design meetings we saw someone describe a complex idea by drawing with his hands in the air (the “air board”; Olson & Olson, 1991). Later someone referred to “that idea” by pointing to the spot in the air where the first person had “drawn” his idea.
Probably worth looking at: Olson & Olson 1991: Olson, G. M., and Olson, J. S. (1991) User centered design of collaboration technology. Journal of Organizational Computing, 1, 61-83.
Image Source
Tags: human computer interaction, interaction design, universal cognitive distance
Axil (AXiom Indexing Library) is a indexing library for Divmod’s Axiom database. It is an implementation of a graph based text classification alghorithm known as CNG (Contextual Network Graphs).
Contextual Network Graphs are a modified version of what was prior refferd to as Spreading Activation Network algorithms: they are a method for implement classification strategies that are been evaluated as qualitative equivalent to LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) or naive-baesyan classifiers, without many of their limitations (as term-document matrix recalculation as in LSI or continuos-learnig phase as naive-baesyan classifiers).
First there’ns a support for many languages (notably many european and all asian languages) in all of the indexing phases (in particular there is a stemming implementation only for EN and IT languages); this lack of support implies the lack of a chance to implement “term reduction” strategies in early stage of the process, resulting in a loss of effectivness in subsequents phases.
Furthermore document term extraction (splitting/stemming) implementations are written in pure Python and are slow comparing to C/Python based parsers;
[more in Italian]
Yesterday, I attended the Geographical Information Retrieval workshop, which was part of the SIGIR conference. There were lots of interesting papers, some of which are very close to my thesis’ interests.
This workshop will address all aspects of Geographic Information Retrieval – that is the provision and evaluation of methods to identify geographic scope, retrieve and relevance rank documents or other resources from both unstructured and partially structured collections on the basis of queries specifying both theme and geographic scope.
As an overall comment I can say that although we are on the third edition of this event, this particular discipline is still struggling to find its natural audience and support. In most of the cases the results are only partial or superficial even because there are no dataset around that we can play with. (A notable exception is this GeoCLEF2005)
My notes of the talks are in the extended section (or here).
Tags: human computer interaction, information retrieval
Continue reading ‘Geographical Information Retrieval workshop’
Well, now that I am attending SIGIR I have to admit that sometimes I am a bit pissed by some presentations from big industries like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. (maybe i am just envious)
They present great results because they can access the usage log of a great deal of users. Unfortunately, their dataset is almost always kept private claiming privacy issues. This means that basically we cannot verify most of the claims raised in the papers. However, these works are accepted by the scientific community.
I think that scientific contributions built on top of private dataset should not been accepted in mainstream conferences if their results cannot be replicated by other institution using the same data. I do, however, understand that sometime disclosure of this information can results in troubles for the companies. So I propose two tracks:
1. Let’s create a special track in each mainstream conference for papers that present non-reproducible results.
2. Let’s do some research on how scramble the data in a private dataset to maintain the user privacy maintaining the statistical validity of the dataset.
Tags: information retrieval, politics, scientific method, research, search engine, statistics
SIGIR is a huge conference. I really enjoyed participating in this meeting to listed to these great talks. Particularly, I enjoyed the session on the user experience: it was pertinent to my research, but still the most critiqued and discussed. There is a struggle to accept that the metrics made to measure the system performances do not match with the metrics of the humans using that system.
My notes are in the extended part of this post [or here] of Day 1. Enjoy!
Some time ago I was truly thinking to something like that: a device that could record a part of my life. There are a couple of projects that are going in that direction (see the wearable life monitor). Nicolas pointed to the Sensecam project at Microsoft.
So it seems that there is an interest in recording a part of our life not just with the pictures but with other sorts of logs:
1- the trace of our path; the positions were we go; the places that we visited (Step logger);
2- the emotions that we feel at some point in time (Greenwich emotion map);
3- the pollution that we are exposed to during the day (feral robots);
Collecting these traces is so intriguing that we also want our pets to do the same (AIBO-life). But what’s the value of recording this information? Comparing? Remembering? Sharing? Maybe a combination of these.
Technology is reaching the critical point where all these simple recording will be facilitated by thousands of cheap sensors that we will have all around our premises.
Nike and Apple went commercial with something like that and I decided to give it a try. I find extremely interesting to look at the recordings of my runs because it helps me to compare my workouts and to fix specific challenges. There is also a value in remembering after a while what it was that particular run. Pretty much like this blog helps me to remember what I was thinking at that time.
Tags: ethnography, field tools, hack, human computer interaction, information metric, information visualization, map algorithms, mobile learning, psychogeography, ubiquitous computing, urban, urban exploration, user experience
I found this nice collection of Information Retrieval Tutorials for IR students and engine marketers. Some include examples, fast tracks, reader’s feedback, reviews or exercises. Nice work.
Recently Google filled a patent on serving dynamical offers using the position of the user. The main principle is that of offering driving or walking direction to the user, detailing the resources at the end point of the direction and along the way. Seo by the Sea explains in details how this can work.
Generating and/or serving dynamic promotional offers such as coupons and advertisements
Inventors: Ashutosh Garg and Allen Romero
US Patent Application 20060143080
Published June 29, 2006
Filed December 29, 2004
Abstract
A promotional offer may be generated by (i) accepting information concerning at least one of (A) a search query entered, at a client device, by a user, (B) an item or establishment which is the subject of a search result selected by a user using a client device, (C) one or more items or establishments which are elements of a shopping session summary provided to a user via a client device, (ii) determining a promotional offer to serve using at least the accepted search query information, and (iii) determining terms of the promotional offer using at least one of (A) a location of the client device, (B) a distance from the client device to an establishment associated with the promotional offer, and (C) a distance from the client device to an establishment competing with the establishment associated with the promotional offer, (D) an inventory, at an establishment associated with the promotional offer, of the goods which the promotional offer concerns, (E) a capacity, at an establishment associated with the promotional offer, to provide the services which the promotional offer concerns, (F) a level of excess capacity, at an establishment associated with the promotional offer, to provide the services which the promotional offer concerns, (G) a perishability of goods which the promotional offer concerns, and (H) a remaining shelf-life of goods which the promotional offer concerns.
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