Recent Publications

Recent blog posts

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Usable Smart Environments

I am currently the group leader of the Usable Smart Environments group. We take a user-centered approach to identifying and understanding pain points related to workplace activities. We use such analyses as inspiration for technical innovation, expressed as prototype systems that we deploy and evaluate. Past examples of this approach include Distributed Interactive Conference Environment (DICE) and ReBoard. DICE is a task-oriented interface and infrastructure for controlling meeting spaces. ReBoaard is a whiteboard capture tool and retrieval tool that supports people's episodic memory of whiteboard activity. Currently, we are investigating a range of tools for improving communication in the workplace through fostering awareness of co-workers' activities.

Information Seeking

My other area of interest relates to Human-Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR). I have designed, implemented, and evaluated a variety of interfaces for browsing and exploring document collections. I have focused on novel interaction techniques including dynamic hypertext, query-mediated browsing, implicit queries based on annotations, and lately (working with Jeremy Pickens), on Collaborative Exploratory Search.

I have published extensively in information seeking and collaborative exploratory search, and have co-organized several workshops on information exploration (at CHI98 and SIGIR98) and collaborative search (at CSCW98, JCDL 2008, and coming up at CSCW 2010).

Past projects

My prior projects with FXPAL include XLibris and PowerPoint Annotation, web services, and distributed analysis projects.

Before joining FXPAL in 1996, I earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Los Angeles and my Ph.D. from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Interactive Media Lab, part of the Human Factors/Ergonomics area at the University of Toronto.

In 1993 and 1994, I was a visiting scientist at GMD-IPSI, where I helped develop a collaborative drawing tool and an automated diagram layout program. I was also an intern at IBM in 1990 and 1992.

New news

• I am an AC for CHI 2010
• I am on the Program Committee of the User Interfaces/Rich Interaction Area for the WWW 2010 Conference
• With Merrie Morris and Jeremy Pickens, I am co-organizing the 2^nd Int'l Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking to be held in conjunction with CSCW 2010 in Savannah, GA in Feburary, 2010. Deadline for submitting position papers is November 20^th.
• I am the Theme Editor for Information Discovery for JoDI, the Journal of Digital Information.
• The FXPAL Blog is up
• Jeremy Pickens, Merrie Morris and I are co-editing a Special Issue of Information Processing and Management on Collaborative Exploratory Search.

Old news

    Workshops and tutorials

• I co-organized a workshop (with Jake Biehl and Kent Lyons from Intel Corp.) on Multi-Display Environments held in conjunction with the CSCW2008 conference in San Diego, CA
• I co-organized a workshop (with Jeremy Pickens and Meredith Ringel Morris) on Collaborative Exploratory Search held in conjunction with JCDL 2008 in Pittsburgh, PA
• I co-organized a tutorial with Cathy Marshall and Elli Mylonas on Evaluating, using, and publishing eBooks at the JCDL 2001 conference
• I co-organized a workshop on Designing Electronic Books at CHI99 with With Cathy Marshall and Bill Schilit.
• I co-organized a workshop on Collaborative and co-operative information seeking in digital information environments with Elizabeth Churchill and Dave Snowdon at CSCW '98.
• I co-organized a workshop on users' expectations of querying with Birgit Schmidt-Wesche at SIGIR98.
• I co-organized a workshop on information exploration with Nick Belkin at CHI98.

    Conference and Program Committees

• I reviewed papers for SIGIR 2009
• I was a member of the program committee for JCDL 2009
• I reviewed papers for the CHI 2009 conference
• I was the Workshops chair for JCDL 2008 conference (June 16-19, 2008)
• I reviewed papers for the SIGIR 2008 conference
• I reviewed papers for the GI2006 conference
• I was on the Program Committee for JCDL in 2002, 2003, and from 2005 through 2008
• I reviewed papers for UIST 2004, 2005 and 2008 conferences
• I reviewed papers for WWW2002, WWW2004 and WWW2006 conferences
• I reviewed papers for InfoVis 2002 and 2003 conferences
• Alan Wexelblat and I were Panels co-chairs for CHI2002
• I was a member of the Program Committee for Hypertext 2002
• I reviewed papers for CHI 2001-2004 and CHI 2008 conferences
• I reviewed papers for Hypertext 2001-2003 and 2005 conferences
• John Tang and I were Mentoring co-chairs at CHI2000 and CHI2001
• I was the Technical Briefings chair and member of the Review Committee for Hypertext 2001
• I was panels & briefings chair and an Associate Chair for Hypertext 2000

    Other

• We published a paper at CHI 2009; this was my 20th consecutive CHI conference
• Our paper won the Best Paper award at SIGIR 2008.
• I was the Secretary for ACM SIGWEB from 1999-2003.
• Between 1999 and 2002, I was involved in Open eBook Forum (OEBF) standards work. I was the development sub-group co-chair of the Open eBook Publication Structure 1.2 standard, released in 2002.
• I gave a keynote address at the seminar on Pedagogical Technology and Educational Systems hosted by the The Center for Futurism in Education in Ben Gurion University (Beer-Sheva, Israel, July 26-27, 1999)