Y!RB Brain Jam: Andreas Paepcke (Stanford) April 20, 2007

Free and open to the public - it would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above. Followed at 4pm by Social Jam with drinks and refreshments.

Twenty Questions to Name That Bird
With Aswath Manoharan, YuanYuan Yu, and Jeannie Stamberger

ABSTRACT:
We constructed EcoPod, a PDA-based tool that helps skilled amateurs identify plants and animals out in the field. The tool is intended for biodiversity census activities. EcoPod asks its user questions about the organism that it is deployed to help identify. Users may attach evidence to each answer, and they may register uncertainty with their decision. I will describe EcoPod and then move to a specific problem we needed to solve in its design: The tool should ask as few questions as possible so as to optimize the user experience. We use well-known decision tree and information gain theory towards this optimization. I will sketch this approach and show how we use historic species observation data to optimize typical usage patterns.

BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Andreas Paepcke is a Senior Research Scientist and director of the Digital Library and BioACT Projects at Stanford University. His interests include user interfaces for small devices, novel Web search facilities, and browsing facilities for digital artifacts that are difficult to index. With his group of students he has designed and implemented WebBase, an experimental storage and high speed dissemination system for Web contents. His work on small devices has focused on novel methods for summarizing and transforming Web pages, and on browsing images on small displays. He serves on the editorial board of the ACM TWEB journal. Dr. Paepcke received BS and MS degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Previously, he worked as a researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratory, and as a research consultant at Xerox PARC.

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