Last Sunday was HCIR 2010, the Fourth Annual Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, collocated with the Information Interaction in Context Symposium (IIiX 2010). With 70 registered attendees, it was the biggest HCIR workshop we have held. Rutgers was a gracious host, providing space not only for [...]

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I’ve been exchanging emails with Dhiti co-founder Bharath Mohan about Nuggetize, an intriguing interface that surfaces “nuggets” from a site to reduce the user’s cost of exploring a document collection. Specifically Nuggetize targets research scenarios where users are likely to assemble a substantial reading list before diving into it. You can try Nuggetize on the [...]

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If you’re a search engine junkie like me, you’ve probably heard about Blekko, a search engine that has been percolating for over two years and recently launched a private beta. If not, I encourage you to watch the TechCrunch video I’ve embedded above. You can join the beta by following them on Twitter. I did [...]

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The 4th Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2010) is coming up on August 22 in New Brunswick, NJ, taking place immediately after the Information Interaction in Context conference (IIiX 2010). That’s just a few weeks away! If you are are interested in attending and haven’t already registered, please let me know as [...]

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As I blogged a few months ago, University of Oviedo professor Daniel Gayo-Avello published a research paper entitled “Nepotistic Relationships in Twitter and their Impact on Rank Prestige Algorithms“, in which he concluded that TunkRank was the best of the measures he studied for ranking Twitter users. I recently discovered that he and David Brenes posted slides from [...]

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Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com have been around since 2005. But community question answering (as distinct from question answering using natural language processing) has witnessed a resurgence of popularity–at least in the blogosphere and among investors. Quora and Hunch are two of hottest startups on the web, and Aardvark was acquired by Google earlier this year. Most recently, Ask.com [...]

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