We had Dan Rose from A9.com (search subsidy of Amazon.com) as a visitor in CIIR today, who gave a talk titled ‘Lessons and Challenges from Product Search’. Throughout his talk, he listed the factors makes product search different from typical web search problem, how A9 approaches some of these issues, and future challenges. Here I… [Read more…]
October 25, 2011
HCIR’11 was like a great school to me. I always felt that a good 1-day workshop can be better than week-long conferences, yet this was a special opportunity for me who is trying to extend my horizon to more user-conscious part of IR research. Gary’s keynote was particularly enchanting, providing a good overview on HCIR… [Read more…]
October 10, 2011
I’ve written several papers as a grad student, and it feels like I’ve learned a bit about paper writing over the last 4 years. Looking back, however, I feel that my research has followed several patterns found in information retrieval research. In other words, it’s not easy to speak of something as ‘my own research style’.… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
Keyword Search, Associative Browsing and Faceted Navigation are three major techniques of information access. Google provide search, browsing (find-similar links) and navigation (filtering by time and types), and there exists many domain-specific collections of structured data (e.g., Amazon, IMDB and Yelp!) which supports all three methods in different forms. In this post, I’ll compare these method, and consider ways to… [Read more…]
September 22, 2011
I read a paper from FXPAL on a new framework and system of exploratory search. It’s been months since I read it, yet I want make a connection with my recent work here. They characterize exploratory search as follows: Exploratory search is often characterized by an evolving information need and the likelihood that the information… [Read more…]
March 10, 2011
PRM-S (Probabilistic Retrieval Model for Semistructured Data) is a novel retrieval model for structured documents — i.e. XML documents or emails. My previous works show its effectiveness in the IMDB collection [1], and also in the TREC email known-item finding task [2]. (I have blogged about the model before) Recently I got requests for codes implementing… [Read more…]
February 21, 2011
I will be interning at CLUES (Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search) group at Microsoft Research Redmond. My mentor is Kevyn Collins-Thompson and my manager is Susan Dumais. As most of you may know, CLUES specializes on research in the area spanning IR, HCI and Machine Learning, which is a good fit with my intention… [Read more…]
January 9, 2011
Beyond Total Capture: A Constructive Critique of Lifelogging is a CACM article on lifelogging where the authors surveyed current research on lifelogging and provided suggestions. I’ve been also interested in the idea of ubiquitous and automatic capturing of personal information since the Life-Optimization Project I did before joining UMass CIIR, so this was an interesting read for… [Read more…]
January 6, 2011
Recently I’ve been reading what the HCI people I know called ‘classics’, including several titles such as: Things That Make Us Smart by Donald Norman The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin As an IR graduate student who have mostly known the world of retrieval models and TREC-style evaluations, these books help me understand the cognitive… [Read more…]
January 3, 2011
I’m currently looking for summer internship position. So far, I’ve mostly worked on the area of structured document retrieval and the retrieval of personal documents. Currently I’m preparing my thesis proposal whose main topic is combining different methods (keyword search, associative browsing and metadata-based filtering) for personal documents retrieval. Last year, I had summer internship… [Read more…]
November 10, 2011
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