maandag 20 juni 2011

Google Kids: The Sequel

Michael Agger from Slate Magazine discusses PuppyIR research and other search for kids initiatives, see: http://www.slate.com/id/2296824/

donderdag 12 mei 2011

Child-oriented multimedia results with collAge

A picture is worth a thousand search results: finding child-oriented multimedia results with collAge

by Karl Gyllstrom and Marie-Francine Moens

We present a simple and effective approach to complement search results for children's web queries with child-oriented multimedia results, such as coloring pages and music sheets. Our approach determines appropriate media types for a query by searching Google's database of frequent queries for co-occurrences of a query's terms (e.g., "dinosaurs") with preselected multimedia terms (e.g., "coloring pages"). We show the effectiveness of this approach through an online user evaluation.

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ImagePile: an Alternative for Vertical Results Lists

by Saskia Akkersdijk, Merel Brandon, Hanna Jochmann-Mannak, Djoerd Hiemstra, and Theo Huibers

Recent work shows that children are very well capable of searching with Google, due to their familiarity with the interface. However, children do have difficulties with the vertical list representation of the results. In this paper, we present an alternative result representation for a touch interface, the ImagePile. The ImagePile displays the results as a pile of images where the user navigates through via horizontal swiping. This representation was tested on a search engine for the Emma child hospital's library. Using a within subject experiment, both representations were tested with children to compare the usability of both systems. The vertical representation was perceived as easier to use, but the ImagePile system was considered more fun to use. Also, with the ImagePile system more relevant results were chosen by the children, and they were more aware of the number of results.

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Expedition Museon: a quest for teams

To show the potential of the technology that is being developed, a group quest through the Museon's exhibitions starting and ending at a multi-touch table is being developed. A small impression of a demonstrator under construction.

Visual Exploration of Health Information for Children

by Frans van der Sluis, Sergio Duarte, Djoerd Hiemstra, Betsy van Dijk and Frea Kruisinga

Children experience several difficulties retrieving information using current Information Retrieval (IR) systems. Particularly, children struggle to find the right keywords to construct queries given their lack of domain knowledge. This problem is even more critical in the case of the specialized health domain. In this work we present a novel method to address this problem using a cross-media search interface in which the textual data is searched through visual images. This solution aims to solve the recall and recognition problem which is salient for health information, by replacing the need for a vocabulary with the easy task of recognising the different body parts.

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Picture-based Querying and Learning

Enabling Picture-based Querying and Learning with the JuSe Interface

by Tamara Polajnar, Richard Glassey, Karl Gyllstrom and Leif Azzopardi


Presented at the Child Computer Interaction: Workshop on UI Technologies and Educational Pedagogy (at CHI)

Identifying Web Sites for Children

A Combined Topical/Non-topical Approach to Identifying Web Sites for Children

by Carsten Eickhoff, Pavel Serdyukov, and Arjen de Vries

Today children interact more and more frequently with information services. Especially in on-line scenarios there is a great amount of content that is not suitable for their age group. Due to the growing importance and ubiquity of the Internet in today's world, denying children any unsupervised Web access is often not possible. This work presents an automatic way of distinguishing web pages for children from those for adults in order to improve child-appropriate web search engine performance. A range of 80 different features based on findings from cognitive sciences and children's psychology are discussed and evaluated. We conducted a large scale user study on the suitability of web sites and give detailed information about the insights gained. Finally a comparison to traditional web classification methods as well as human annotator performance reveals that our automatic classifier can reach a performance close to that of human agreement.

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