Track: Digital Media: Content and Communication Track
Minitrack: Information Access & Retrieval: The Web, Users, and HCI

This Minitrack addresses a broad range of issues related to the design of the next generation of information retrieval systems in the context of the increasing reliance on access to the Web. This minitrack addresses the essential question of how to help the user access and make use of digital data. Our goal is to bring together the common threads of research in this area and to provide a forum for researchers in which emerging topics can be fostered. The Minitrack intends to elicit papers in information retrieval, web retrieval search and effectiveness, user experience, and HCI issues related to web access as well as emergent related topics.

Information Retrieval and Web search: Information Retrieval supports the computerized search of large document and digital media collections (millions or billions of items) to select small subsets of those documents relevant to a user's information need. Such algorithms are the basis for internet search engines and question-answering systems. In this minitrack we will examine both theoretical and application issues related but not limited to the following areas:

• Information Retrieval Language Models, Algorithms and Tools

• Fact-based Open-domain Question Answering

• Web-based Information Retrieval

• Topic Detection and Tracking over time

• Geographic Information Retrieval, gazetteers

• Information Visualization

• Text Categorization and Summarization

• Cross Language Retrieval

• Image and Video Retrieval

• Genre detection and use

User Experience and HCI Perspectives: While we have learned a great deal about creating large document spaces and accessing these spaces, we know relatively little about the users who deal with a multi-billion-page Web and design factors for improving the user experience with these systems. Further research is needed to address the user issues related to effectiveness and quality of experience when interacting with Web search engines and when designing new applications in this area. A focus on the users from an HCI perspective allows us to align the user focus and the system focus in a multi-disciplinary forum that includes theoretical foundations, evaluation measures, methodologies, case studies and user study results. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• User-based Web search engines effectiveness measures

• Evaluation of Web search tools in information seeking problems

• Human design issues and evaluations of web applications

• Profiles and personalization to enhance Web search

• Effect of task on information seeking behavior on the Web

• Log analysis

• Individual differences in Web search

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Ray Larson (Primary Contact)
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley
102 South Hall #4600
Berkeley, California 94720-4600
Phone: 510-642-6046
Fax: 510-642-5814
Email: ray@ischool.berkeley.edu

Carolyn Watters
Computer Science Dept.
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada B3H 3W5
Phone: 902-494-6723
Email: carolyn.watters@dal.ca

Amanda Spink
Queensland University of Technology
Queensland, Australia
Email: ah.spink@qut.edu.au