PAWS meeting - Apr 15, 2009

Jae-wook presenting paper Combining document representations for known item search by Paul Ogilvie and Jamie Callan

The paper investigates the pre-conditions for successful combination of document representations formed from structural markup for the task of known-item search. As this task is very similar to work in meta-search and data fusion, we adapt several hypotheses from those research areas and investigate them in this context. To investigate these hypotheses, we present a mixture-based language model and also examine many of the current meta-search algorithms. We find that compatible output from systems is important for successful combination of document representations. We also demonstrate that combining low performing document representations can improve performance, but not consistently. We find that the techniques best suited for this task are robust to the inclusion of poorly performing document representations. We also explore the role of variance of results across systems and its impact on the performance of fusion, with the surprising result that the correct documents have higher variance across document representations than highly ranking incorrect documents.

Dhruba Baishya presenting a set of innovative visualization techniques, including:

- eigen factor score
- dewey circles
- ny times api
- flickr ecosystem
- ted sphere
- radial social network
- knowledge network
- author co-citation
- euro2004
- web trend map
- los ojos del mundo
- botanical tree
- tagging behavior in nicovideo
- flickr group

Related links
- http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
- http://infosthetics.com/
- http://developer.nytimes.com/visualizations_app/

PAWS Meeting (25 March, 2009)

1. Denis discussed his experiment on Recommendation for CiteULike.

2. Danielle presented a paper about “Tagsplanation” - best paper at IUI’09.
Authors investigated the use of tags for generating and explaining recommendation.

3. Tomek presented a paper that describes Document Summarization based on Eye-Tracking with Web-cam. The paper raised some concerns.

4. Katrina (from Switzerland ;-) introduced her research on culturally-adaptive user interfaces. The system is modeling users’ culture along several dimensions (nationality, religion, education, etc.) and tries to adjust its interface.

PAWS Meeting - Mar 18, 2009

1. Jeniffer presented an article entitled "Accuracy in rating and recommending item features." The paper discusses work aimed at comparing item- and feature-based ratings of images of artwork.

2. Denis presented an article entitled "Clustering the tagged Web." The paper investigates the question of the impact of user-generated tags on improving Web document clustering. Denis also talked about the progress he made on his project and suggested that having Chillean wine while not sleeping enough may be a good idea.

PAWS meeting - Feb 25, 2009

Comments on the first presentation here.

In the second part of the meeting Zhen presented her work about collaborative information behavior (CIB). She studied aspects of CIB by simulating e-discovery tasks and obtained some insights such as: Communication is frequent and an essential component of CIB; the division of labor is common in the collaborative task of e-discovery; and it is important for collaborators to keep “awareness” of each other’s activities to make sure the collaboration goes well. Based on these insights, some functions for retrieval systems that support CIB were proposed: Collaborative information retrieval technologies should support collaborative information behaviors including verbal communication and text exchanging. A well designed CIR system should support both synchronous collaboration and asynchronous collaboration.

[week 5] Muddiest Points

Talking about the Probability Ranking Principle, it was mentioned the case of retrieval costs but we didn't deepen into that concept. In the case that Costs are taking into account in a retrieval model:

• Which are commonly the values for these "C" costs?

• Which variables or factors are taking into account to set these costs values (hardware, size of collection, mean size of documents, etc)?

Another question I have is that several models take constants into account and after some experiments they suggest a range to set the values of those constants when defining a model. I am not absolutely sure, but these ranges must come using metrics such as precision and recall, and the documents collections must come from a programme like TREC. Is this enough to establish a model? It seems that all the theory for these probabilistic and language models is, in practice, oversimplified by smoothing factors and other constants added to the models. How can we be sure that the theory still states when adding these factors and constants in practice?

PAWS meeting - Feb 04, 2009

housekeeping things:
1. use tags to represent projects and systems in CiteULike. to keep our publications up-to-date. alternatively, update them on wiki.

Project 1: Personalized Exploratorium for Database Courses
Tag#1: DBExp
Tag#2: QuizGuide
Tag#3: WebEx
Tag#4: SQLKnoT
Tag#5: SQLTutor(If the paper is related to the system or Tanja is involved in the system)

Project 2: Adaptive Explanatory Visualization for Learning Programming Concepts
Tag#1: Adapvisual
Tag#2: cWADEIn
Tag#3: jWADEIn
Tag#4: Problets

Project 3: Supporting Learning from Examples in a Programming Course
Tag#1: ExampleSupport
Tag#2: NavEx
Tag#3: WebEx

Project 4: Map-Based Access to Open Corpus Information
Tag#1: MapAccess
Tag#2: KnowledgeSea2
Tag#3: KnowledgeSea

Project 5: Educational Software for Teaching and Learning Information Retrieval
Tag#1: EduSW

Project 6: Project 6: Individualized Exercises for Assessment and Self-Assessment of Programming Knowledge
Tag#1: IndExe
Tag#2: QuizPack
Tag#3: QuizGuide

Projects which are not listed in neither on Taler nor on Paws.
- QuizJet
- Proactive
- Pittcult (Even this is my personal project, you can decide whether this could be listed on Paws or not)

2.
produce slide presentation which includes good system screenshots.

3. Dhruba presented the workshop paper for IUI conference.
CiteAware: Visual Group Awareness for a Reference Sharing System
Awareness thru visualization removes the hierarchies.
Demo the system, CiteAware.

PAWS meeting - Jan 28, 2009

1. Integrating Conceptual and Procedural Instruction for Middle-school Math – A Cognitive Tutoring Approach (Gustavo Santos)

Gustavo presented his course project on integrating conceptual instruction into cognitive tutors which are only based on procedural instruction. They have designed think aloud task analysis to figure out the common errors and common strategies to design the conceptual part of the cognitive model. The task analysis was done with university students. He is going to continue on the project by evaluating the approach with middle school students and adding adaptation into the approach.

His presentation was followed by some interesting discussion on how to add personalization, how to model student's knowledge (conceptual vs procedural) and how to evaluate the approach.


2. Modeling Problem Solving in CUMULATE (Michael Yudelson)
Mike presented his idea on improving knowledge modeling by blending user knowledge from trying examples with knowledge from problem solving. He presented some result on effect of his blending approach on prediction of user knowledge by both CUMULATE and Knowledge Tracing. His results suggest some careful consideration of blending :-)

His presentation was extended with lots of discussion about CUMULATE versus Knowledge Tracing user modeling.
blending examples and problems