Y!RB Brain Jam, August 24th: Eunyee Koh, Generating views of the Buzz August 24, 2007

Free and open to the public, followed at 4pm with a Social Jam that includes refreshments - and beer. It would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above.

Eunyee Koh, Interface Ecology Lab - Texas A&M
Generating Views of the Buzz: Browsing Popular Media and Authoring using Mixed-Initiative Composition

ABSTRACT:
combinFormation's mixed-initiative composition space enables system agents and humans to engage in processes of finding relevant information, and forming and authoring collections. Previously, the system was developed and utilized to support information discovery. The efficacy of the system for supporting creativity has been established in some contexts. We present combinFormation as a tool for browsing popular media and authoring personal collections. Yahoo Buzz is an popular media collection of top search queries, categorized into genres such as actors, music and sports. Existing interfaces limit the human participant to only viewing results of a single search at any given time. This paper presents a new system structure which interleaves multiple searches concurrently in a round-robin manner, enabling participants to concurrently explore and connect diverse result sets, which, in aggregate, may consist of hundreds of documents. The mixed-initiative composition space serves as a media interface for combining search results and authoring personal collections. Evaluation using the Buzz demonstrated participants ability to browse more diverse information using combinFormation than with a typical browser. They experienced browsing and authoring as easier and more entertaining. Results have implications for a broad range of use contexts in which combined views of the results of multiple searches need to be authored, including research scenarios, as well as popular media.

BIOGRAPHY:
Eunyee Koh is a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at Texas A&M University. Her research area includes human computer interaction and information retrieval. Her recent research work focuses on development and evaluation of the information system named combinFormation (http://ecologylab.cs.tamu.edu/combinFormation/). The research results in publishing papers in ACM Multimedia, SIGIR, ACM Document Engineering, Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), and European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) . She was a reviewer for IEEE transactions on Human-Centered Computing and ACM Computer Human Interaction. In addition, she is actively involved in volunteering and mentoring work in the women in computer science group, and also she was a student volunteer in various conferences such as the JCDL, ACM CHI, and SIGIR.

Official Website: http://yahooresearchberkeley.com