Paper Summary: A Crowd of Your Own

A Crowd of Your Own: Crowdsourcing for On-Demand Personalization

Peter Organisciak, Jaime Teevan, Susan Dumais, Robert C. Miller, Adam Tauman Kalai

HCOMP 2014 (Notable Paper)

 

A lot of my research explores personalization. Personalization is a way for computers to support people’s diverse interests and needs by providing content tailored to the individual. However, despite clear evidence that personalization can improve our information experiences, it remains very hard for computers to actually understand individual differences.

Evidence from Behavior

 



Doug Oard at the Information School at the University of Maryland is teaching an open online course on information retrieval this fall (INST 734). Above is the brief cameo lecture I recorded using Office Mix for the segment on Evidence from Behavior.

Public Behavioral Logs

Large-scale behavioral log analysis allows us to do many things, including build better search engines, predict health epidemics, and support communities through crises. But they can also be hard to come by. This post covers some of the different types of publicly available behavioral logs available for study.

Turning Our Personal Devices into Social Devices

Our smartphones allow us to connect with the rest of the world from anywhere. Ironically, however, they also tend to disconnect us from the world immediately around us. But rather than fight the creep of technology into our social spaces, there is the opportunity to reframe our personal devices as social devices.

As we start using our phones to interact with the people who are near us, there are a number of unique aspects of our interaction that mobile applications can capitalize on. Co-located collaborators can see each other, talk with each other, and share surrounding context. This is why it is easier to have a conversation with someone while driving if the other person is in the car with you and not on the phone. A person in the passenger seat can pause when the road requires your attention. A person on the phone can’t see when your attention gets diverted or the road conditions change.

WSDM 2014 Trip Report

Last week I attended the Seventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2014) in New York City. The conference hotel was located right in Times Square, and I enjoyed visiting Cornell Tech, eating delicious food, and catching up with college friends. I also enjoyed attending sessions. WSDM is single track, which means the research being presented isn’t always directly relevant to everyone, but conference attendees have a shared experience and get exposed to research they might not otherwise.

Face-to-Face Social Interaction

Mobile devices allow us to connect with the rest of the world, regardless of where we are. People can now be reached anywhere. If something goes wrong at my kids’ school, for example, a teacher can let me know immediately, even if I’m in the middle of a meeting. People can also access information from anywhere. Before ordering dinner at a new restaurant, I can look the most popular dishes up on Yelp right from the table.

Ironically, however, while mobile devices connect us with the greater world, they often disengage us with what is directly around us. I know I have been guilty of pushing my children away while I catch up on one last email that could have easily waited. Mobile devices are so disruptive that we create rules to regulate their use (“No phones at the dinner table!”) and make up games to keep us away from our phones.

The Case for Slow Search

As discussed in a previous post, Web searchers expect search engines to return results instantaneously. To meet these expectations, search engines make many compromises to shave milliseconds off their response time. But it is ironic that a few milliseconds matter so much when over half of our interactions with a search engine involve multiple queries and take minutes or even hours. Just think, for example, of the last time you planned a vacation or researched a potential medical diagnosis. For these tasks, the quality of the experience – and not speed – is what matters.

Search Engines' Quest for Speed

I remember seeing the World Wide Web for the first time in 1994. I had just started college, and was in a dungeon of a computer lab with a friend of mine (who I happened to marry seven years later). He pulled up Lynx, an early text-based browser, and showed me a page of text that physically resided on a remote computer. We could visit the URLs that he knew, read the text available, and tab between the underlined words to navigate to other pages of text – but that was it. The whole experience was all together underwhelming. It wasn’t until I discovered search engines that the Web really seemed to come alive. 

How to Ask Effective Questions

We all ask questions of our social networks. For example, the other day I posted a question to Twitter looking for a hotel recommendation in Dublin for SIGIR 2013. When we ask questions, sometimes we get good answers, and sometimes we get bad answers. But the quality of the answers we get isn't completely random – it is something we, as question askers, can control. This post describes some of the tricks we have learned about how to ask effective questions online from our research.

#TwitterSearch

Social networking sites are not just places to maintain relationships. They are also valuable information sources. Previous posts (Online QuestionAsking, Asking v. Searching) have discussed how people find information using social networks by asking questions. This post explores the other way people find information using social media: by searching preexisting social media content.  For example, if someone wanted to read a lot of snarky comments about the use of CamelCase in hashtags, they might go to Twitter and search for "#nowthatchersdead."

Asking v. Searching

Most of the time when we want to know something, we don't turn to a search engine – we ask somebody a question. While we used to have to know the right person to ask, we can now use Facebook or Twitter to broadcast our questions to our entire social network. The kinds of questions that we ask our social networks are very similar to what we search for using search engines, except that we tend to keep our questions "cocktail party-appropriate." Not surprisingly, we are more likely to search about health, religion, sex, and politics than to ask questions on those topics. For example, although adult queries make up a sizable portion of search engine queries, my colleagues and I have yet to see a single question asking about porn in the course of our research.