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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Query log analysis for children

Query log analysis in the context of Information Retrieval for children

by Sergio Duarte Torres, Djoerd Hiemstra, and Pavel Serdyukov

In this paper we analyze queries and sessions intended to satisfy children’s information needs using a large-scale query log. The aim of this analysis is twofold: i) To identify differences between such queries and sessions, and general queries and sessions; ii) To enhance the query log by including annotations of queries, sessions, and actions for future research on information retrieval for children. We found statistically significant differences between the set of general purpose and queries seeking for content intended for children. We show that our findings are consistent with previous studies on the physical behavior of children using Web search engines.

The paper will be presented at the ACM SIGIR 2010 Conference, 19-23 July 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland

[download preprint]

Need better support for web search by children?

Yahoo! terms of service force parents of children under the age of 13 to create a Yahoo! Family Account, and this way certify that you are the legal guardian of the child/children listed on this account. They explain that this allows children to access many areas of the Yahoo! Services, including, email, message boards and instant messaging (among others), and then simply put responsibility to determine suitability for children in the parents hands - suggesting that you should find a way to limit access to unsuitable content...

Interesting: as opposed to Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft Bing's terms of service seem to mention no restrictions on age.

We organize a workshop on accessible search at SIGIR on 23 July 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Current search systems are not adequate for individuals with specific needs: children, older adults, people with visual or motor impairments, and people with intellectual disabilities or low literacy. Search services are typically created for average users (young or middle-aged adults without physical or mental disabilities) and information retrieval methods are based on their perception of relevance as well. The workshop will be the first ever to raise the discussion on how to make search engines accessible for different types of users, including those with problems in reading, writing or comprehension of complex content. Search accessibility means that people whose abilities are considerably different from those that average users have will be able to use search systems with the same success.

The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum and initiate collaborations between academics and industrial practitioners interested in making search more usable for users in general and for users with specific needs in particular. We encourage presentation and participation from researchers working at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, ambient intelligence and related areas. The workshop will be a mix of oral presentations for long papers (maximum of 8 pages), a session for posters (maximum of 2 pages) and a panel discussion. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two PC members. Workshop proceedings will be available at the workshop. The workshop welcomes, but is not limited to, contributions on a range of the following key issues:

• Understanding of search behavior of users with specific needs
• Understanding of relevance criteria of users with specific needs
• Understanding the effects of domain expertise, age, user experience and cognitive abilities on search goals and results evaluation
• Non-topical aspects of relevance: text style, readability, appropriateness of language (harassment and explicit content detection)
• Development of test collections for evaluation of accessible search systems
• Collaborative search techniques for assisting users with specific needs (e.g. parents helping children)
• Potential of search personalization techniques to satisfy users with specific needs
• Search interfaces and result representation for people with specific needs
• Using assistive technologies for interaction with search systems, e.g. speech recognition or eye tracking software for querying and browsing.

See the Workshop website.