Posters

One interesting area I have not been covering so far are the posters. In the hall there are multiple poster presentations, which change every 4 hours. This makes it hard to take notes directly into the PC as I have been doing with the sessions. In between sessions I am going to try and put up some comments on the posters I have seen.

SEARCH
A gentleman from Rutgers University has a big poster on search. He investigated several different methods of improving search, ranging from asking the user to enter more data via a series of boxes to automated methods. His research showed that, with his set of data, incorporating a weighting based on the top 30 documents for a search term - based on expert opinion of the top documents significantly improved the relevant search. I think we could incorporate this once we have our logs. We could look at the top queries and start modifying when those queries are run. He had another interesting idea, in which he used the index of the persons desktop, gathered via google desktop search, into the relevancy ranking. This was not as good as the expert evaluation, but did improve relevancy quite a bit.

WIKIPEDIA
Interesting review of the research around wikipedia and the available areas for further research at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:phoebe_ayers

CREDIBILITY
Interesting poster that showed that peoples use of sources is not based on the source itself, but how helpful they found the source.