Deima Elnatour

Games to Play

2006-09-04T11:26:00.000-04:00

The games that were covered in Luis Von Ahn presentation below are very interesting to play. I just did not know that there are people who spend 20 hours a day playing! Anyhow, I played the ESP game and found it very interesting. I am providing the links to the games so you can try them in your free time.

Have fun!

- The ESP game: to index pictures
- Peekaboom: to identify objects in an indexed picture - the pics come from the ESP game
- Phetch: picture hunting where the seeker needs to find a pic on the web that matches the discription provided by the other player .. I think. I did not play this one yet!

Human Computation - by Luis Von Ahn

2006-09-04T10:56:00.000-04:00

Google TechTalks
July 26, 2006

Luis von Ahn is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2005. Previously, Luis obtained a B.S. in mathematics from Duke University in 2000. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Research Fellowship.

ABSTRACT
Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game -- many people play over 40 hours a week -- and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it.

I describe other examples of "games with a purpose": Peekaboom, which helps determine the location of objects in images, and Verbosity, which collects common-sense knowledge. I also explain a general approach for constructing games with a purpose.

A word on Creativity and education from Sir Ken Robinson

2006-09-03T18:17:00.000-04:00


Sir Ken Robinson is an influential advocate for the importance of creativity in education. He makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for overhauling our education system. [Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA] This is a must see to all the parents out there... Enjoy!

Live at KDD 2006!

2006-08-20T23:47:00.000-04:00

The 12th international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD 2006) is taking place in Philadelphia from August 20th to 23rd. My advisor Tony (Xiahua) Hu is the chair of local arrangements committee so I am part of the student volunteer group that is comprised of PhD students from UPenn, Temple and Drexel. We have about 750 attendees total, which is a good size for a specialized conference. I will have light attendance this year. But now that I have the proceedings book I can look for interesting papers and discuss with colleagues. Today I spent the day in a workshop that addresses knowledge discovery on the web. There were some very interesting papers that I will be discussing later on my blog.

Hooked on Sudoku!

2006-08-18T18:28:00.000-04:00

Sudoku is a really cool game and I am totally into it now. I have to play it at least once every day. I am in the habit now to start a puzzle and solve it before bed every night. I did not know much about it few months ago and some friends at school got me started and now I can not stop. It is exciting and makes your mind creative in coming up with new strategies to solve the puzzle. Anyhow, I would like to build a java program that people could invoke to provide them the next step when they are stuck. I do get stuck sometimes! I will load the program when it is ready. Schools everywhere in the US use Sudoku as part of the science curriculum to stimulate thinking. I had a good time playing it with my 12-year old nephew.

I highly recommend giving it a try if you have not done so already. Have fun :)

You Tube is Now Promoting Music Video Clips

2006-08-18T00:02:00.000-04:00

You Tube serves videos to 60% of the Internet users that are interested in videos. Now they are in communications with all the major television network and music artists to serve short music clips as promotional items. Here is a video clip of what CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley had to say about this.

Google Chinese Style!

2006-08-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

Google and China.com have joint forces through a partnership agreement. This partnership will allow the two companies to leverage resources across advertising, search technologies, branding and content. China.com is one of the most visited portals by Chinese professionals. "China.com firmly believes that this partnership between the world's premier search company and one of China's leading portals with over 5 million daily users is a perfect fit," said Xiaowei Chen, Executive Director and CFO of China.com.
Click here to access the full story.

When Sharing is Bad!

2006-08-09T19:14:00.000-04:00

AOL released search query data of 500,000 customers from March to May 2006 without customers’ consent. The purpose was to provide this real data to the Information Retrieval research community for examination and discovery purposes. Screen id were not released and replaced by a unique id. As you can imagine, so many people objected to this and considered it a breach of privacy forcing AOL to unexposed the data file, which they did. Get more info at digg where 2,512 pepole so far responded to this story. However, some believe that the data currently is in the hands of about 1,000 people. This means that the data can not be re-claimed and will be further disseminated. This is the magical power of the web!

The Future of Indexing

2006-08-08T19:15:00.000-04:00

Document indexing is a key to good search. The better the index is, the more relevant the search results are likely to be. However, indices are traditionally viewed as a static vocabulary structure that represents a document collection. There used to be human involvement in indexing, which did not work and had many limitations for obvious reasons. With massive amounts of data finding its way to the web the need for automatic indexing became pressing. So nowadays, most indices are generated automatically by machines. However, IR community still views indices if a collection as a static set. I believe that indices are properties that evolve and grow over time due to the social construct of collection usage. If you are not sure what I mean then do this: go to google and type miserable failure and see what comes up. Then ask yourself the question of how did this actually happen.

I believe that indices must be obtained in real time and they need to be built with a dynamic notion that allows them to grow and change over time. This is in deed the reason why my research is focused on discovering human indices or what you know as tags which is also called Folksonomy (taxanomy by folks or people). I believe that this new construct is the one foundation for quality searches in the future.

Topical Relevance – Is It a Good Idea?

2006-08-08T15:11:00.000-04:00

Topical relevance has increasingly become the focus of researcher over the past 5 years. The idea of topical relevance is quite simple. A search engine results would try to match the topic of the query thus returning better (more relevant) results. Topical relevance is one way to try to capture context of a search request.

For example, if I am looking for info about mouse, this could be taken as mouse the animal or mouse as in a computer peripheral. So in this case the search engine would try to use other query words to detect the topic (animals vs. computers) then render results in that domain. If the query is too short and does not provide hints on what the topic is, we could provide a shortcut menu as navigational hints. But let’s assume that this is not the case.

Topical relevance could be a promising notion if a number of assumptions have been met. If such assumptions are not satisfied, search results could be far from good or relevant. One of these assumptions is that the words mean what they are supposed to mean. If you type tomatoes in Google you will get Rotten Tomatoes as first link. Rotten Tomatoes is an entertainment site – a well-known one. So one of the researchers was arguing that this was a bad thing and that we should find ways to not match an entertainment site to the word tomatoes. Should we? In this case, do we not match the work Amazon to Amazon.com?

Basically, there is no silver bullet to when topical relevance can be useful in search – I recommend using caution when you are thinking of topical relevance. Topical relevance works in well-defined domains and structured search environments …etc. Topical relevance is not always appropriate in general search settings!

SIGIR Pics

2006-08-08T14:20:00.000-04:00

A picture is worth a million words! Click here to see SIGIR 2006 pics on Flickr including pics of CJ van Rijbergan 2006 Salton Award Winner - Keith is considered on of the most influential scholars in information retrieval over the past 30 years.

The New Face of Advertising – Economics of the Web!

2006-08-07T15:04:00.000-04:00

Yahoo vs. Google’s ad pricing models.

Google prices the adds based on revenue that the add is expected to generate – this is called action based pricing or transactional based model. Yahoo, on the other hand, prices the ads based on the highest bid for each slot location on the sponsored-link banner. Consequently Google has been reporting ad revenue of approximately 40% higher than Yahoo’s, experts say. Yahoo announced early last week that they will move to the Google’s model of ad pricing which is expected to boost Yahoo’s future ad revenue. Well … shortly after this announcement, Yahoo’s made an announcement delaying the usage of this new model for three months causing their stock to drop 22%!

Yahoo researchers are not sure how will they users react to this and are worried that their existing advertisers will go to Google. They are re-thinking what to do. I guess it will take some more studies and analysis to figure out Yahoo’s next steps.

Future of Filght and Personalized Search

2006-08-07T08:57:00.000-04:00

Boeing sponsored a reception dinner at the Flight of Future Aviation center in Everett, which is about 35 miles north from the University of Washington district. The event was comprised of a nice size crown and we were surrounded by Boeing planes – next generation of course. I am not sure if you knew that Boeing also makes roller coasters. I was hoping to see something about the future of thrill..

In any event, personalization became a discussion of a small group during reception when someone walked up to me and pointed to a colleague from Carnegie Mellon University and appraised the work he’s done with personalization of search. So I started inquiring about the work and the here is what I found: researchers are focused on personalizing search and trying to find a way to provide relevant search results to each user in an automated fashion and without having to maintain user profiles! So the current ideas are focused on automated desktop indexing. I mean indexing of email, docs, pictures, visited online sites ...etc. Google desktop does this today and this free product has been out for a at least couple of years. But how would this local index be used is where most of the debate is. You can simply imagine that we need to create a pretty complex multi-dimensional search algorithm that makes good use of local or “client” index. Some believe that the search results need to be similar or relevant to what you find in the user’s index while others believe that in some cases we need to do the opposite. I say you can take a guess but there is no way to tell right from wrong so you simple do not know what to do with that index. For example if someone is in the process of building a custom home and has been searching for tile, cabinets, wood …etc. The user have probably visited the builder sites and online forums as well as have emails about stuff related to this new home. Let’s say the user one day types “Windows” in the search box. Would we provide house windows, provides, prices …etc. Or would we provide Windows the OS? It depends you can make an assumption that the user wants windows for the new house or having a windows problem. We really do not know what the user wants. We need to be careful of holding the user captive to their own index. To solve this problem, researchers are thinking of providing cluster of topics in this case – more like navigational items that will allow the user to decide what he/she wants to go.

This yet does not address problems like size of index, machines with multiple users, or users with multiple machines. A good usage of user’s local index would be to eliminate duplicated and ensure continuity of search results. Think about it and let me know how you can utilize this index – most importantly is this the best way to achieve personalized search?

The New Norm

2006-08-06T19:03:00.000-04:00

The web has become the new norm in the American way of life. Those that do not go online represent an ever shrinking population. Studies show that 77 million users in the US serf the web daily. It is fascinating to see how the paradigm of search box has penetrated its way to the public unconsciousness – especially when we compare that to ever flashing clock on DVD and VCR machines (users could not easily figure out how to set the time despite the simplicity of such task).

The Pew Internet and American Life studies the social impact of the Internet. Here is a recent report that provides important data.

Why is this important? This emphasizes the importance of online presence. Weather you are a large organization or a small specialized business – online presence is the name of the game to survival and profitability.

Live at SIGIR 2006

2006-08-06T16:46:00.000-04:00

I am now in Seattle Washington attending the 29th annual SIGIR conference. SIGIR is an important international conference that connects industry practitioners with academic researchers around topics in the broad field of information retrieval or search. The conference is taking place on the University of Washington campus, August 6th to 11th. I will be spending the week in collaborations and stimulating discussions about search. My goal is to detect the next big thing in search and learn about what is in the innovation pipeline of the field of information retrieval and representation.

Good news is that everyone is here; Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Ask.com, IBM Research, Amazon.com, AOL, Boeing …etc. In addition, most universities that care about IR are also well represented in this conference for obvious reasons.

Stay tuned to hear more about what I find!

Arabic is a Tough Language to Crack

2006-06-04T00:34:00.000-04:00

There is a lot of research now that is focused on automatic translation. Even though we have a number of success stories with most languages, the story is quite different when it comes to Arabic. Many may wonder why?

Arabic is a very challenging language to translate by machines because it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology. Arabic also is a context-centric language where the meaning is inferred from sentences and paragraphs rather than words. Arabic words can take a number of meanings and inherently lead to many interpretations. Lastly, the written form of the language is far different in structure and expression from the spoken form. So if we have a good machine translator for the written form, we must have another one with different rules for the spoken form. Now you know why it is not easy to perfect machine translation for Arabic.

Google research took a shot at creating a rules-based Arabic-English translator. They claim that their translator provides better and enhanced results. So I decided to take it for a test drive….. I think it is definitely better than other ones I have seen in the past, but it still needs a lot of improvement. The translation is kind of week where it provides some meaning but not the full idea. I tested it using simple sentences that have to do with daily mundane interactions.

Here is a link to the Google Beta translators page in case you want to try any of the translators.

Baby Names & The Power of Visualization

2006-05-16T18:30:00.000-04:00

Not sure if you have been put in a situation where you had to think hard of a good baby name. You may know someone that needed help with baby names. Everyone knows that baby names are usually a touchy subject. You do not want an old fashion name that is complicated nor a name that is too simple where the baby never grows. Some even believe that baby names could affect the future outlook of a person and support or distress their success in certain professions. The other day I heard a female caller to a radio station saying that she saw the most hansom man, Hollywood type figure. As she started talking to him she asked about his name. His name happens to be “Bert” like in Bert and Ernie. She said in her mind “you got to be kidding me… No way.” then ended the conversation peacefully and walked away with no return! So when people say it does not matter what you name the baby – I tend to think that it matters. I would highly advice that you take the time and think of a good name that will not cause social or ideological obstacles in the new person’s life…

Why am I writing about this? because I came across the most fascinating baby names tool. It visualizes baby names and provides trends about baby names in the US since the 18th century. This tool is a good example of how information visualization could be utilized. The information that is represented visually through this tool would be cumbersome, if not too hard to comprehend, without it.

The tool is called Baby Voyager – check it out and let me know what you find.

Information Overload

2006-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

Information overload is a big problem, more so nowadays than ever before. This problem have invaded our lives and affected every part of it in ways that we could not deem possible. At work, I receive on average about 100 emails per day. You can only imagine what happens when I take a week off. One time, I had a little over 1000 email waiting in my box after I returned from a week-long vacation. Luckily not all of these emails needed personal replies. But of course, I had to review them all to decide which ones needed replies and which ones did not. It would take me at least a week of long working hours to go through all of these messages while carrying out my daily responsibilities.
As of school email, I receive an average of about 10 emails daily. This number could vary day to day - it all depends on what is going on at the moment. If I am working on any publishing or research projects, there would be a lot more emails addressing those engagements. I also receive my library circulation reminders, which I love, reminding me of the books that are due in five days of less. This ensures that I either renew the book or return it to the library. Not to mention the Ucnet and digest messages that I receive from my college as well as other professional organizations which I am a member of.
At a personal level, I receive about 5 messages a day from family and friends on average, which is not too bad.
Let’s do the math, between email I receive from work, school and family/friends, I receive an average of 115 messages daily. Could you imagine that? I was startled when I realized that this is what is happening her. I am sure I am not alone in this. Some people may receive more or less than that. But let’s thing about this for a second and consider the amount of time that we spend everyday. Do we really need all of this? Are we able to absorb and benefits from all of this information that comes traveling our way whether we ask for it or not. Does too much means too little? Do we even have the option of not reading our emails.

This is one side of the issue, the internet is another and more critical side of the information overload problem. The internet provides access to massive volumes of data that cultivating by the second. With these large volumes of data, it becomes important to focus on aspects of information storage and retrieval. Topics like data warehousing and data mining become more important than ever before. Inevitably, information representation becomes the interface of the new world of information overload.

I was hoping that you would share your thoughts on this topic.

I am Back!

2006-05-03T23:58:00.000-04:00

As some of you know, I have disappeared from the blogsphere for a while since I have accidentally deleted my blog L. It took me weeks to get over it but now I am back and more careful than ever before. Many of you have asked that I re-post some of the previous ideas discussed - ones that had cool links and useful resources. If my memory serves me well, I will bring back all your favorites. Regrettably, I will not be able to bring back your comments and discussion threads. In any event, let’s give it another shot.

Welcome to My Blog

2006-05-03T23:53:00.000-04:00

This blog is dedicated to addressing the gap between research and practice in the field of information sciences and technology. As a researcher, I am always looking for real life problems to solve. As a practitioner, I am on a quest to find answers and get advice from the experts on what works. Therefore, I believe that the worlds of practice (industry) and research are strongly intertwined where one can not survive without the other.

I have been traveling between the two worlds for a while and have come to believe that the gap needs to be bridged and eventually eliminated. This is what I am set to do by inviting discussions around information science topics that matter to industry practitioners as well as researchers.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!