Keynotes

Two keynote speakers will be giving talks at HCIR 2013:

October 3

Blurring of the Boundary between Search and Recommendation

Ed H. Chi, Research Scientist, Google

http://research.google.com/pubs/EdChi.html

As search became more social and personalized, search engines also have become more interactive. Interestingly, as a comparison, recommendation systems have always been social and personalized, as well as highly interactive, starting from the early Collaborative Filtering work led by my late advisor, John Riedl. But recommendation systems have also increasingly been more search-like by offering capabilities that enable users to tune and direct recommendation results instantly.

As the two technologies evolve toward each other, there is increasingly a blurring of the boundary between these two approaches to interactive information seeking. On the search side, some of this is driven by the merging of question answering capabilities with search, led by systems like Google with Google Now and Apple with Siri that move search toward intelligent personal assistants. On the recommendation side, it is a merging of techniques from not just keyword search but also faceted search with user-based and item-based collaborative filtering techniques and other more proactive recommendation systems.

This blurring has resulted in both critical re-thinking not just about how to architect the systems by merging and sharing backend components common to both types of systems, but also how to structure the user interaction and experience. How can we make progress on these new research problems? I will illustrate my thoughts on these problems by looking at our experience in building (1) a social search engine using Delicious social tagging data, (2) personalized newspaper and conversational recommender for Twitter, and (3) ways to use HCI experimental techniques, such as eyetracking, to understand social explanations for search and recommendation results.

October 4

Who are my users and how I can help them? The quest of user-adaptive interaction

Cristina Conati, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia, Department of Computer Science

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~conati/

The Web and the rapidly increasing availability of sophisticated media have dramatically enhanced the potential of computers as interactive tools that support a large variety of users in a growing range of tasks. However, designing complex interactive systems that satisfy the needs of individual users from highly heterogeneous user groups is very difficult. This talk focuses on research that aims to overcome this difficulty by investigating how to devise interactive systems that can autonomously, dynamically and unobtrusively adapt to the specific needs of each individual user, namely research in User-Adaptive Interaction (UAI), a highly interdisciplinary field at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Cognitive Science. I will present some examples of UAI researcher that we are conducting in our laboratory, including how to devise User-Adaptive Visualizations, how to provide personalized support to learning from novel educational systems (e.g., interactive simulations and educational games), and how model relevant user properties in real time by leveraging advanced input sources such as eye-tracking. cheers