7:00 – 3:30 VTX

• So I was starting The spreading of misinformation online, but it was discussing more of the same. This feels a lot like saturation. My thoughts are coalescing around the idea of the difference between trusted and trustworthy interactions in computer-mediated systems. The anonymous citizen journalism concept becomes a unifying thought experiment that can be used to show the potential strengths and weaknesses of particular concepts.
• The last piece I think I need is what is trust from a developmental perspective. The initial google scholar search of “trust development” didn’t bring up exactly what I want (object permanence maybe?), but it did provide this: Effects of four computer-mediated communications channels on trust development. The citations provided this: The mechanics of trust: A framework for research and design In International Journal of Human – Computer Studies 2005 62(3):381-422. This one seems different enough to look through carefully.
• Ok, I think I found what I’m looking for: The ‘like me’ framework for recognizing and becoming an intentional agent. I think I’ll read The Mechanics of Trust first, them ‘like me’ second.
• Starting The mechanics of trust: A framework for research and design.
  • It does seem to be focused on how effectively a system transmits(?) cues that support well-placed trust. I think that we tend to confuse the trust we place in the channel vs the trust we place in the entity at the other end of the channel. And these lines are not clearly drawn:
    • In IR, we trust that the search engine is providing us with the relevant documents we seek. People trust Google more than Bing because the results are more pertinent. Does this trust carry over into the documents retrieved? Probably, though I can’t find a study that does this. (It would be pretty easy to do with the Google Custom Search Engine API + noise)
    • In GPS the trust in the system is very high, even though it is synthesizing information from retrieved and processed sources (maps, DTED, etc) that could in turn be wrong. Here though, the entity we are interacting with is clearly the GPS, not the mapmakers.
    • Skype, on the other hand is essentially transparent when it’s working right. And that ‘working right’ is a kind of conditional trust in the system that has no effect on out evaluation of the trustworthiness of the person that we are interacting with at the other end of the channel.
    • So what does that mean in the context of our imaginary citizen journalists?
      • They are anonymized. We have no names. We probably don’t even have the exact words as written. These are the same issues that newspapers face when dealing with anonymous sources. And in this case, it’s reasonable to assume that the newspaper is the entity that is attempting to get us to place our trust in it.
        • Reporters as proxies
        • Additional perspectives – images, videos etc.
        • Stories that match reader’s experiences, so that trust can be evaluated.
        • What else?
  • One of the cited papers is What is Trust? A Conceptual Analysis and An Interdisciplinary Model. Quickly scanning through it, I found this on page 830-831: Garfinkel found in natural experiments that people don’t trust others when things “go weird,” that is, when they face inexplicable, abnormal situations. For example, one subject told the experimenter he had a flat tire on the way to work. The experimenter responded, “What do you mean, you had a flat tire?” The subject replied, in a hostile way, “What do you mean? What do you mean? A flat tire is a flat tire. That is what I meant. Nothing special. What a crazy question!” At this point, trust between them broke down because the illogical question produced an abnormal situation. 
    • I think that this is core. Trust is tied to normalicy, and probably builds out from there. 
• Prepping for the sprint planning session.
• As far as the OMG work, I think the following
  • Set up version controlled system for Google CSE keys and url exclude lists, including a way to submit an url for inclusion in an exclusion list.
  • Add PDF parsing and storing to Crawl Service
  • Add MSWord parsing and storing to Crawl Service
  • Add MSExcel parsing and storing to CrawlService
  • Add backlink calculation and storing to CrawlService – this is looking like a good way to increase pertinence within a return, particularly with respect to the matched-name wrong-person condition.
  For the machine learning work
  • Get DB up, accessible and on a backup schedule
  • Set up deployment infrastructure for Rating App.
  • Small scale test of Rating App, with refinement and development of manual
  • Accumulate corpus
  • Test corpus in WEKA
    • Translator from DB to WEKA format
    • Construction of training data sets
    • Tests and evaluations
    • Report
  As far as my research, it’s more vague, so I’m just going to free-associate a bit here.
  First, I just need to write up the proposal, and since that’s where my head is at right now, it’s hard to come up with specifics. One of the overall goals is to build a search result interface that ‘nudges’ users from bubble patterns into star patterns.
  Secondly, it’s my current belief is that this interface could be along the lines of the word cloud plus slider display interface I’ve discussed with you before. On the back end, there’s a topic extraction/document classification system that builds a graph database that is used for:
  • In my case, placing the search results in a context of discussion vs information (DvI) along the axis’ defined by the topics in the search results. The user can select a topic (which then shows the DvI graphs and where the current search falls on those spectrums). Once a topic has been selected, the user can adjust the weights on subsequent topics, causing the result list to reorder and the position on the DvI graph to move.
  • In EIT’s case (1) predictions and alerts and (2) for the user interface [and I think this can be pitched as the gamified display]. For example, I think there are many cases where conditions for making a judgment (medical best practices or behavior related) may be ambiguous. Using such an interface could allow a user to explore and resolve such ambiguity. The nice thing is that in the EIT case, the data is (potentially) more structured and granular, allowing a more fluid analysis (e.g. a bad manager indirectly affecting performance or combined conditions such as opiate addiction + newborn).

7:00 – 4:00 VTX

• Continuing The Law of Group Polarization – done!
  • Group polarization: A critical review and meta-analysis. Looks like a more rigorous version of TLoGP. It’s available in the library as a PDF if needed.
  • Page 194: In short, the external materials and expert panels shift the argument pool available to the deliberators and are also likely to have effects on social influence. 
    • The way I read this, external trusted sources can shift the poles if they are incorporated into the discussion. Think about how a GPS affects wayfinding arguments. If search interfaces are modified such that they show the range of opinion and the position of the ‘Ten Blue Links’ within that range then, given its high system trust, we might expect individuals to adjust their belief trajectories based on their understanding of the pole’s position given the larger information landscape.
  • Page 195: There are large lessons here about appropriate institutional design for 
    deliberating bodies. Group polarization can be heightened, diminished, and
    possibly even eliminated with seemingly small alterations in institutional
    arrangements.
    • Now substitute system for institutional. Although I would contend that search is an institution, given its reach. Also, presenting a better mechanism for placing the returned information in a context allows for ‘nudging‘ cues, which seem to work better than more ‘authoritarian’ systems.
• Starting The spreading of misinformation online
• Before continuing on backlinks, I spent some tom,e looking at the Microsoft Oxford system. LUIS is interesting, though I’m not sure exactly how to take advantage of it yet. I think this can be a chatbot construction kit? The WebLM system looks more immediately useful, kinda like AlchemyNLP. Maybe cheaper? You need a key, which you get here. And this is different from the Academic Knowledge API, which is also an Oxford project, but not listed on the Oxford site.
• Got the SrBacklinkObject persisting
• Adding backlinks to the ResultItemObject2 class. Whoops! Forgot that you have to set both relationships in a many-to-one:
  

  curResult.addBacklink(bo);
  bo.setResultObj(curResult);

• needed to split off the protocol from the curResult.link and add it back to the curResult.displayLink to get backlinks
• Done and working. Kinda like the fallback strategy.

7:00 – 2:30 VTX

• Took some notes on the MS Tay fiasco yesterday. Need to ping Peter Lee and see if I can get anywhere talking about Group Polarization Theory. Done
• Microsoft Research Open source for academics
• Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service (beta) LUIS
• Veracity Roadmap:Is Big Data Objective, Truthful and Credible?
• Continuing The Law of Group Polarization
  • Page 193: The  constraints  of  time  and  attention  call  for  limits  to heterogeneity; and-a separate point-for good deliberation to take place, some views  are properly placed off the  table, simply because  time  is  limited and they are so  invidious,  implausible,  or both.  This  point might seem  to  create  a  final conundrum: To know what points of view should be represented in any group deliberation,  it  is  important  to  have  a  good  sense  of  the  substantive  issues involved,  indeed a  sufficiently  good sense  as to  generate judgments about what points of view must be included and excluded. But if we already know that, why should we  not proceed directly to  the  merits?  If we  already  know that,  before deliberation occurs, does deliberation have any point at all?
  • The answer is that we often do  know enough to  know which views  count as reasonable,  without  knowing  which  view  counts  as  right,  and  this  point  is sufficient to allow people to  construct deliberative  processes that should correct for the most serious problems potentially created by group deliberation. What is necessary is not to allow every view to be heard, but to ensure that no single view is so  widely heard,  and reinforced,  that  people  are  unable  to  engage  in  critical evaluation of the reasonable competitors. 
  • At E. THE  DELIBERATIVE  OPINION POLL: A  CONTRAST 
• Now that I’ve gotten the queries behaving, working on the SemRushIO and BacklinkObject
  • Added configuration file
  • Nice to know. If SemRush finds nothing, it returns
    ERROR 50 :: NOTHING FOUND so, we can do two passes; if the specific result returns nothing, we can go to the root.
  • Built up the SemRush base class based on the JsonLoadable
  • Built the SrBacklinkObject
  • Loading the object successfully.
• Fika

Peter Lee – Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research

Learning from Tay’s introduction

7:30 – 3:30 VTX

• Saw The Who last night and got into bed after 1:00am. Sleeeeeeeeeepy.
• Still browsing the team sensemaking paper over breakfast. There are some very similar goals. In group polarization, the awareness of where the boundaries of the discussion help to determine how the average viewpoint moves. Current search returns no context on where the results lie on those axis. Translucency in search could allow users to see ‘meta information’ about the search results that they have and where the results lie in that information space, while also providing a means to adjust the position in that space in a way that is not intrusive. Or something like that.
• Group polarization works on chatbots. There is something really interesting here about measuring polarization. Not quite sure what exactly yet.
•  Continuing The Law of Group Polarization
  • Phrase of the day ‘Skewed Argument Pools‘
  • Page 187: And shifts toward more in the way of  enclave deliberation will increase society’s aggregate “argument pool,” and hence enrich the marketplace of ideas, while also increasing extremism, fragmentation, hostility, and even violence.
  • First, it’s a neat thought to think of an interwoven pattern of Bubbles and Stars. Second, I think the continuum to be most interested is the one from most bubble-ish to most star-ish for a given topic. Now that, in and of itself is a big document classification/topic extraction problem, but I would submit that being able to visualize what that search result could look like could help to produce useful work in that direction. And there are proxies that can be used intact, such as papers. Bubbles are papers and topics that point at each other a lot, for example.
  • Page 187: It is important to ensure social spaces for deliberation by like minded persons, but it is equally important to ensure that members of the relevant groups are not isolated from conversation with people having quite different views.
  • ^^^Translucency^^^
  • Page 187: The most important point here is that those who emphasize the ideals associated with deliberative democracy tend to emphasize its preconditions, which include political equality, an absence of strategic behavior, full information, and the goal of “reaching understanding (pp. 52-94).”
  • At Page 189: B. THE VIRTUES  OF HETEROGENEITY
• Scrum – some big changes coming?
• 11:00 all hands
• Working on backlink object
  • Started query generator, SemRushIO.java. After some hiccups in getting the format of the query results right, the generation part is working. The reader should be pretty straightforward, though a little more complex/brittle than reading JSON. Here’s an example return:

    page_score;source_title;source_url;target_url;anchor;external_num;internal_num;first_seen;last_seen
    1;Visit AZ – Vacation Information for Arizona, the Grand Canyon State | Arizona Office of Tourism;http://visitarizona.com/places-to-visit/northern-arizona/monument-valley;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;29;116;1452309348;1452309348
    1;"""New Concertina Wire"" Fencing Around Closed Nevada Prison And Guard In Tower - Are Closed Prisons Going To Be Used As ""Fema Camps""? - Veteran Who Took Photos Followed By White Van";http://allnewspipeline.com/Veteran_Notes_New_Wire_Fencing_Nevada.php;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;14;23;1443887704;1452368321
    1;Evening Meeting. - Kirkham & Rural Fylde;http://rotary-ribi.org/clubs/page.php?ClubID=1161&PgID=514041;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;170;59;1444332718;1457694435
    1;Visit AZ – Vacation Information for Arizona, the Grand Canyon State | Arizona Office of Tourism;http://arizodiac.com/places-to-visit/northern-arizona/monument-valley;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;29;115;1447807529;1457622986
    1;Visit AZ – Vacation Information for Arizona, the Grand Canyon State | Arizona Office of Tourism;http://www.arizodiac.com/places-to-visit/northern-arizona/monument-valley;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;29;113;1454861531;1457744933
    1;UNIST - Sajun.org;http://sajun.org/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=2901321&printable=yes&title=UNIST;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;60;48;1448012851;1454851002
    1;1 عدد تمبر جان مون نت - دیپلمات - جمهوری فدرال آلمان 1977;http://tambrestan.com/-/5689-7-1983.html;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;27;1308;1452387237;1452387237
    1;About Puslinch Lake - Calmwaters Cottage & Fly Fishing;http://calmwaterscottage.ca/1337-2/;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;42;12;1454519315;1457440491
    1;PEABODY 100 - demetrioskritikos.com;http://demetrioskritikos.com/peabody100/;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;32;16;1454518621;1454518621
    1;PEABODY SPORTS - demetrioskritikos.com;http://demetrioskritikos.com/peabody-sports/;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_system;Coordinates;21;16;1454518773;1454518773

  • SemRushIO will create the backlink object
    • Calls the service, using a default or read-in key
    • Is fired the same time the page source is loaded (in GuiVars.loadNextPage)
    • Creates a BackLinkObject data from SEMRush includes:
      • page_score
      • source_title
      • source_url
      • target_url
      • anchor (the text in the source)
      • external_num
      • internal_num
      • first_seen
      • last_seen
  • ResultItemObject2 changes
    • Set of BackLinkObjects

7:30 – 4:30 VTX

• Class today
  • Two things – First, I wonder if we as researchers need to use the GSA standards for storing PII:
    • Encryption. Encrypt, using only NIST certified cryptographic modules, all data on mobile computers/devices carrying agency data unless the data is determined not to be sensitive, in writing, by your Deputy Secretary25 or a senior-level individual he/she may designate in writing;
    • Control Remote Access. Allow remote access only with two-factor authentication where one of the factors is provided by a device separate from the computer gaining access;
    • Time-Out Function. Use a “time-out” function for remote access and mobile devices requiring user re-authentication after thirty minutes of inactivity;
    • Log and Verify. Log all computer-readable data extracts from databases holding sensitive information and verify each extract, including whether sensitive data has been erased within 90 days or its use is still required; and
    • Ensure Understanding of Responsibilities. Ensure all individuals with authorized access to personally identifiable information and their supervisors sign at least annually a document clearly describing their responsibilities.
  • Second, basically every security measure we take in a closed network provides a value judgement to the owner of the network. But our high system trust prevents us from seeing that when we untag a picture of us doing something embarrasing, we’re essentially saying to Facebook ‘this is a guilty pleasure‘.
• Taxes this evening
• In Emergencies, Should You Trust a Robot?
• Starting The Law of Group Polarization. And in a semi-related thought, I wonder if flocking behavior can be used to describe this kind of behavior along dimensions of belief???
  • Cass R. Sunstein
  • Wacky. The text was unrecognizable so the quotation manager wouldn’t work. Wound up exporting the PDF to jpg, then using the ‘combine files’ tool to import all the pages, combining them into one document again then running OCR on that. And this was the official file from the Journal of Political Philosophy, so go figure.
• Did some shepherding of the Crawl configuration. Gregg was sending 4 CSEs.
• Finished up the CSEkiller. Wrote up documentation and added it to the CommonComponents.
• Back to getting the rating app working.
• Changing Provider to PersonOfInterest
•  Need to add ‘Personal’, ‘Educational’ and ‘Other’ to sources

7:30 – 6:00 VTX

• Ok, that was a great conference. Might be fun to go to Oslo next year.
• Wrote up reflections on the HCC Comps while flying home.
• Continuing Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How Much
  • Here’s the citation on Mechanical Turk study design: Crowdsourcing User Studies With Mechanical Turk 
  • Got through the Methods section. All kinds of good study design and rationale. Starting with Results tomorrow.
• Need to submit expense report – done
• Working on a test harness to exercise the GoogleCSE. Got the thread that calls the search built and running, and got most of the manager built. Heath wants it as a sanity check to evaluate Google local and in the deployment.

7:30 – 5:00 VTX

• Write up some thoughts on Comps. What synthesis is, how study design doesn’t stop with the design, matrix of themes and papers, nuggets more than notes, etc.
• Andy Field has a new stats book out. It looks nice: Discovering Statistics – The Reality Enigma
• Starting on Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How Much
  • Sean A. Munson
  • Paul Resnick – has worked on some very interesting things
    • BALANCE: Enhancing Diversity in News and Opinion Aggregators
    • RumorLens
  • New aggregator site for political news Memeorandum
  • New papers to add to the list….
    • Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users
    • The Law of Group Polarization
  • The Methods section is particularly good. I should probably use something similar.
• Conference
• Keynote – Pia Borlund Reflections on interactive IR evaluation issues.
  • What data is required to answer the research question
  • Which methods can provide the required data
  • Types of users to test
  • Data collection to use
  • Number of participants
  • Tasks to use in testing
  • Time constraints
  • Tailoring the work task situations according to requirements and inclusion of genuine information need that they bring with them.
  • Rotation and counterbalancing of search tasks and systems (remove confounding variables) e.g. neutralize
    • System knowledge
    • topical knowledge
    • fatigue
  • Protocols
  • Tutorials,
  • Pilot testing
  • Test Design
    • Define the purpose of the study
    • formulate the questions
    • Design the study accordingly
      • Pre search questionnaire
      • Simulated work task
      • Transaction logging
      • Post-search interview
      • Observation
  • A protocol (can be 50 steps including things like turning on the test computer, cleaning the keyboard, etc)
    • Is a step-by step description of the overall study procedure
    • Is a checklist to the investigator
    • Ensures consistency in the conduction of the study
    • Ensures that all participants get the same information
    • and….
    • Before testing section
    • Testing section
    • After testing section
  • Tutorials
    • Introduction
    • Tasks expectation
    • Have the user explain what they are supposed to do
  • Pilot testing
    • What questions the participants ask
    • Does the protocol work? Missing steps, wrong order
    • How long the study takes
    • Technical problems
    • that the required data is collected
    • To practice the control of pleasing effect and human nature
    • Continue doing the pilot test until the the protocol is sufficient for the study. This means being consistent in explaining the procedure. Maybe use a video instead?
    • Don’t do the study too close to the pilot, since lessons learned need to be incorporated.
  • Everyday life information seeking: Approaching information seeking in the context of “way of life”
  • Discussion
    • The amount of dedication in the search makes a difference. How does this manifest in the data?
    • Are we studying Great White Sharks in aquariums?
    • Does there need to be a research-based ISP/telecom? Spyware? Securityware? Studyware? How does the user get to review/edit set anonymization levels?
• A Usefulness-based Approach for Measuring the Local and Global Effect of IIR Services
  • Good paper on logging WRT new IIR tools to determine usefulness.
• Assessing Learning Outcomes in Web Search:  A Comparison of Tasks and Query Strategies
  • The search system was hosted on Amazon EC2 and used an architecture derived from uFindIt [1] that logs user events such as queries and clicks to a MySQL database. The baseline ranked document lists for the single and multiple query conditions were provided by the Google Custom Search API.
  • Intrinsically diverse presentation – rolls subtopics into ’10 blue link’ list.
  • Coding by looking at the presence or absence of a predetermined list of items, this allows for sorting (n/N). Questions require examples of different levels of learning.
  • Two groups – lots of clicking and exploring vs. fewer results longer reading.
  • Need to do follow up studies to see the difference between learning and robust learning, where the knowledge is retained.
  • There is something here. Have to ponder the kind if inferences that can be made.
• A Comparison of Primary and Secondary Relevance Judgments for Real-Life Topics
  • Shows how to make a corpus of variable relevance with respect to an information need. Very nice. Could be used for the person task but inverted? In other words we know what query returned a piece of text, but we give the reviewer the goal (bad doctor) and they judge relevance on those grounds, which lets us determine the quality of the query.
  • Relevance – binary
  • Confidence – 1 – 7
  • Time, etc
  • Experts have scanning behavior and can look for synonyms. Secondary assessors had to read in depth
    • Closed topics – what date did x happen? More agreement
    • Open topics – what caused the 2008 recession? Less agreement
  • There is an altruistic(?) component in looking for “information that might be useful”.
• Interactive Topic Modeling for aiding Qualitative Content Analysis
  • Peter Bruza <- check out more. Semantic spaces and such
  • Identification and interpretation of themes within text
  • Types of content analysis
    • Summative – keywords
    • Conventional (inductive) Observation – NMF, LDA
    • Directed (Deductive)
    • Logic-LDA – Steerable using rules, and open source NMF – Linear Algebra underpinnings. LDA is probabilistic.
    • Semantic Validity – important for analyst confidence.Also known as topic coherence
    • Email for github repo.- done
  • The Information Network: Exploiting Causal Dependencies in Online Information Seeking
    • Network of informational elements
    • Granger causality modeling? (prediction of causality model) not used for prediction in information before
    • They use wikipedia page views as a marker topic newsworthiness!!!
    • And that means that you can look at one page becoming popular that it’s popularity in time exists with in the context described by a Granger Causality
    • Auto regressive model is good for time series modeling
    • jaspreet singh  singh@l3s.de <– Call about Wikipedia!!!

7:00 -4:00

• Algorithm of Discovery – New Ideas From Computers
  • Jantzen, B. “Discovery without a ‘logic’ would be a miracle,” Synthese (forthcoming). (preprint)
  • From Jantzen’s current work:
    • My current work is focused on a suite of interrelated questions about natural kinds and the logic of discovery. I am attempting to test ideas about the logic of discovery by building algorithms that carry out automated scientific discovery. In particular, I’m interested in algorithms capable of generating novel ontologies or, put less grandly, novel sets of variables that may cross-cut those provided as input. Working drafts are available for some components and derivatives of this work (I’ll make more available soon). My paper arguing, contrary to received wisdom, that there must exist a logic of discovery can be found here. With regard to natural kinds, a paper in which I apply what I call the ‘dynamical kinds’ approach to the problem of levels of selection can be found here. A talk I gave on the same material at the International Conference on Evolutionary Patterns in Lisbon can be found here.
• The Google UX Van came by yesterday and they asked what would I like from Google and I realized that an Ad-Free subscription would be worth some price. Interestingly, that’s kind of available through Custom Search. It would probably run 100 – 250/year doing it this way. And I’ve already got my keys, and you can point the omnibox to anything. Have to think about this…
• Continuing A Survey on Assessment and Ranking Methodologies for User-Generated Content on the Web.
  • Presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much. From the abstract:  We find individual differences: some people are diversity-seeking while others are challenge-averse. That sounds a lot like Star-and-Bubble to me!
  • Finished! Long but good. Something like 65 quotes.
• Starting Presenting diverse political opinions: how and how much.
• I’m beginning to wonder if there is a way to have an interface that drives users to the confirming or exploratory camps. Basically see it that can be used to present cleaner data. (see highlighted below)

Conference

• Knowledge Graphs versus Hierarchies: An Analysis of User Behaviours and Perspectives in Information Seeking
  • Lookup, learn and investigate, last two are exploratory
  • Knowledge Graph built from semantic relationships
  • Watch behaviors based on these two representation(hierarchy vs graph)
  • Context on the left, display on the right.
  • Users interacted with graph structure more, and hierarchies sent users to the underlying documents.
• Exploring the Use of Query Auto Completion: Search Behavior and Query Entry Profiles
  • Does pulling from the QAC list imply looking for confirmation?
  • Is this the kind of key that I was looking for above?
  • As an aside, there needs to be a ‘benchmark query + SERP’ that allows for monitoring google for changes.Watching the watchers
    • What would the queries be?
    • How are the results evaluated?
    • What about topicality WRT queries? Should some be topical and others ‘classic’
    • SERP vs QAC storage and evaluation?
    • Other search engines to watch (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo…)
• What Affects Word Changes in Query Reformulation During a Task-based Search Session?
  • Query vs. SERP using text analytics
  • Reusing a word in a search is almost always a return from a subtopic to a main theme.
    • So if the subject of the query is a more specific version of the subject in the previous search, then we can get some interesting insights into the way that they are looking at the problem they are trying to solve.
  • Also via one of the authors Cathy Smith: Helen Nissenbaum http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum. Legal definitions of trust, etc.
• Playing Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload
  • Non-linear results page???
  • HIT to find information on Axle Rose. Turk & CrowdFlower
  • Bing API
  • Marked Relevant or not
  • Used the Wikipedia disambiguation pages to find ambiguous terms. Nice…
  • Arbitrary insertion of non-relevant topics that were lexically similar.
  • Attention paying questions to mark credible responses.
  • MANOVA, ANOVA, with Bonferroni
  • Query reformulation happens quicker when the card is off-topic
  • No significance for card coherence. Habituation?
  • Diverse cards have photos, which are credibility cues. If the photos are right, that’s reinforcing. If the photos are wrong, then that’s a very visible warning that the results aren’t credible. Which also makes me wonder how photos affect the psychology of the users. And system trust.
• Impacts of Time Constraints and System Delays on User Experience
  • Leif Azzopardi – good work on economics of search from an IR perspective.
  • Multilevel Modelling?
  • AQUAINT corpus
  • Delay injection and task completion limits.
  • This also relates to GPS navigation as well. Possibly interesting paper. And speaking of which:
    Come drive with me: an ethnographic study of driver-passenger pairs to inform future in-car assistance

7:00 – 6:00 VTX

• Happy PI day!
• At CHIIR 16 – User Modelling Tutorial yesterday, presentations today.
• Continuing A Survey on Assessment and Ranking Methodologies for User-Generated Content on the Web.
  • Found Beyond the filter bubble: interactive effects of perceived threat and topic involvement on selective exposure to information. It shows that confirmation bias will affect users when presented with differing accounts on the same page. This seems to give strength to the idea of trustworthy/distrustworthy inference networks that can trace to authoritative material in a positive or negative way.
  • Whooly.net – MSR – A mobile web app that makes latent, hyperlocal neighborhood communities more visible, to help neighbors connect. This project leverages intelligent filters and event detection algorithms to help users find relevant, spiking topics about what is happening here and now.
  • Finding and assessing social media information sources in the context of journalism From the abstract: [It is a]…challenge to finding interesting and trustworthy sources in the din of the stream. In this paper we develop and investigate new methods for filtering and assessing the verity of sources found through social media by journalists. We take a human centered design approach to developing a system, SRSR (“Seriously Rapid Source Review”), informed by journalistic practices and knowledge of information production in events.
    • They build classifiers to discriminate sources and value!
  • Reflect – Reflect makes a simple change to comment boards. Next to every comment, Reflect invites readers to succinctly restate the commenter’s points. These restatements are shown in a bulleted list.
  • Microsoft Academic Knowledge API looks useful for tying back to experts maybe?
• Keynote
  • Mark Ackerman
  • Information reuse and context
  • Computer supported cooperative work –
  • You have build things before you understand the world.
  • Understand the world before you can build successful things
  • CSCW is now social computing???
  • CSCW has a pint of view
    • Use of collaborative contributions – i.e Google Docs.
    • Social navigation – ant trails This is diferent from wayfinding.
    • Iterative refinement
    • Reward systems dictate how people interact with social systems
    • Finding the background of the information for trust issues. With Lutters – aircraft engineers would throw out calculations of people they don’t know
    • The ‘cold start problem’ for recommender systems
    • Expert locators good programmers hang out in stackoverflow
    • Ifrastructuring == habituation?
    • The postmodern turn
    • FIT – How do you measure the information distance?
    • People placing themselves on their connectivist structure?? Can we know that this is true?
    • Activity traces
      • Mental Illness severity in online Pro-Eating disorder – CSCW 16
      • The livhoods project ICSWM 2012
      • Generalizing activity instantiations based on context
•  Papers
  • Active and passive Utility of Search Interface Features
    • Hugo Huudeman
    • Interactive Search User INterfaces proven in micro-studies.
    • SearchAssist – it would be interesting to use a ranker as the backend
  • The Forgotten Needle in My Collections: Task-Aware Ranking of Documents in Semantic Information Space
    • Ranking of items that are being used in a task recently.
    • PIMO Personal Information Model – Semantic layer over workspace
    • Users create the annotations
    • Look at task aware ranking. Connections, Beagle+++, SURPA, T-Fresh
    • Uses machine learning to determine the weights.
    • http://pimo.opendfki.de/
  • Behaviour Mining for Automatic Task-Keeping and Visualisations for Task-Refinding
    • Using the interaction between documents as a way to connect tasks as a network Didn’t work at first so they added types of interactions and weighted those
    • Labeled weak nodes rather than discarding- Polynomial decay function for flags???
    • Are FF plugins easier to write?
  • Collaborative Information Retrieval
    • Rerank based on search context (chat, click through, previous queries from other team members)
    • We apply the following procedure to re-rank relevant documents for each to-be-supported query. For each candidate document, we estimate its document language model using Dirchilet smoothing [31], where we set the smoothing parameter µ = 100. The similarity between each candidate document and the contextual model is measured by the KL divergence between their estimated language models [30]. The matching between a candidate document and the query is determined by Google rank position of the given candidate document. This is because our experimental system uses Google results as the default. Instead of using linear interpolation proposed by Shen et al. [23], we employ LambaMART in RankLib2 to build a pairwise learning-to-rank approach for combining different features.
  • (The Lack of) Privacy Concerns with Sharing Web Activity at Work and the Implications for Collaborative Search.
    • Loosely coupled collaboration. Tools must have minimal effort to use.
    • Coupling – the amount of work that people can do individualy before they have to interact explicitly. It’s opportunistic.
    • Webwear???
  • An AID for Avoiding Inadvertent Disclosure: Supporting Interactive Review for Privilege in E-Discovery
    • Automated annotators – this is exactly what we need for flags. Don’t see exactly how the annotator is built other than ML.
      • Used Enron Corpus
      • Entity Linking – people and companies
      • Type
      • Propensity that the person is involved with the confidential communication
      • Unigram language models
        • Privileged communication
        • Non-privileged communication
        • Compared the entropy for the top-n words and used that.
    • Relevance Review
    • Privilege review – by senior lawyers because of the error cost.
    • Lawyers have no System Trust? Why? What do they trust?
      • They trust stories with provenance, not a number generated by machine learning system
    • Increase in recall, decrease in precision? Huh.
    • People highlighting was useful,
    • Term highlighting was useful.
    • Preference for sentence and paragraphs.
• Posters
  • DP-means clustering?