2014 Blog in Review

The year 2014 marks the first full calendar year in existance for the Slow Searching blog. In the past twelve months I have written 54 posts, including this one. Almost half of these posts (24) were about Cale and my 100 mile walk to Great Wolf. The other large chunk (23) focused primarily on research, including  a sizeable group (9) about selfsourcing. The remaining seven posts touched on a variety of topics, including three related to gender issues in the computer science.

Some of the most popular Slow Searching posts of 2014 were about:

2014 Research in Review

This post summarizes the research I published in 2014. The work divides roughly into three components covering: 1) slow search, 2) crowdsourcing, and 3) face-to-face social interaction.

Slow Search
We live in a world where the pace of everything from communication to transportation is getting faster. In recent years a number of "slow movements" have emerged that advocate for reducing speed in exchange for increasing quality. These include the slow food movement, slow parenting, slow travel, and even slow science. Building on these movements we have been exploring the concept of slow search, where search engines use additional time to provide a higher quality search experience than is possible given conventional time constraints.

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.