Re: 90 minutes with HCI researchers - what would you discuss?

> What is in it for HCI?  The need for HCI methods in Semantic Web
> research and practice is obvious: we now have all this great machine
> processing of knowledge, now we need to have users make the most of
> it.  But can you describe what unique contributions the Semantic Web
> field has to offer to concerns currently held by the HCI community?

 
I have been working in the area of HCI for Multimedia Information Retrieval area for a few years now, and I found the above question very similar to what I have always been asking myself.  Here’s my explanation, hopefully it can throw some light by comparison to Semantic Web.
 
In Multimedia IR community, there are many obvious HCI implications from many of the underlying machine processing development.  For example, interaction designers for personal photo management systems (such as Flickr) have a chronic problem of getting the user annotate as much as possible for their uploaded photos.  Manually adding annotation for each photo is quite a burden and time-spender for the user; but without annotation the access is severely limited because the user cannot search properly, especially when the number of photos is very large.  So we (HCI folks) have been devising interaction mechanisms to encourage the users to add more annotation for each photo by easy drag-and-drop labels, simple choice from a provided vocabulary list, or allowing bulk (batch) annotation for multiple photos, etc. But as the collection size of the photos grows very fast, all these interaction techniques seem less and less usable.  
 
Now, multimedia IR (highly technically-focused) comes up with content-based image analysis techniques to automatically organise, classify, annotate and label the photos.  For example, faces in a newly-uploaded photo can be automatically detected and labeled as long as there are already some photos that have been previously labeled in the collection.  Imagine you upload 50-100 photos on the Flickr and you can immediately search by name of the persons appearing in those photos, without having to manually annotate each photo.  The implication that this particular technical development brings to HCI aspect is very obvious: it helps reduce the user’s manual annotation burden dramatically, and there is a very significant effect in designing interfaces for photo management systems.
 
In other words, this is one of the contributions the multimedia field can offer to concerns currently held by the HCI community.  So I imagine there must be similar kinds of obvious contributions that Semantic Web technology can do for the currently available interfaces for various application areas, in reducing user’s burden for example.
 
For another example, HCI folks in the field of IR and Information Visualisation are working on visualizing temporal media such as video.  In designing efficient interaction schemes for a large movie archive, we want to provide a good overview of each movie before the user have to play the whole movie for 2 hours.  Video retrieval community offers automatic judicious selection of keyframes from the movie, thus summarizing the 2-hour temporal medium into a single-page, 50 miniaturised thumbnails of visual summary fully automatically.  It also offers automatic extraction of the most interesting or exciting sequences of the 2-hour movie and generate 1-minute video summary.  In designing user-interface for movie browsing, such summarization techniques can be directly used to help the user in quickly getting overview of each movie.  Again, the contribution that this particular technology can offer to HCI aspect is very clear and obvious: it adds to the designer’s options in supporting the user’s task of getting quick overview of the movies.
 
The recurring question in my case has been on how to take advantage of these newly emerging technologies in multimedia in order to support the end-users, but the answers to these have been relatively straightforward because what the specific multimedia technology is trying to do is often naturally such that HCI people can take away and use to solve their problems.  I can imagine the HCI folks for Semantic Web technology will probably think in the same way.  There are also chain-reaction issues, in which once we adopt a technology to reduce a main problem, another problems (although usually less severe as the original one) occurs as an HCI challenge.  Hopefully I’ll have a chance to explain these later.
 
Hyowon


----------------------------------------------------
Dr Hyowon Lee
Post-doctoral researcher
Centre for Digital Video Processing
Dublin City University
Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland
Tel: +353 -1 -7005829
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~hlee/
Email: hlee@computing.dcu.ie
----------------------------------------------------


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lloyd Rutledge" <Lloyd.Rutledge@cwi.nl>
To: <public-semweb-ui@w3.org>; "Duane Degler" <ddegler@ipgems.com>; "'Lisa Battle'" <lisa@designforcontext.com>; "Scott Henninger" <scotth@cse.unl.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 2:12 PM
Subject: Re: 90 minutes with HCI researchers - what would you discuss?


> 
> Thanks, Duane, for setting this up.  The results will be interesting.
> Here are some questions I'd ask:
> 
> What is in it for HCI?  The need for HCI methods in Semantic Web
> research and practice is obvious: we now have all this great machine
> processing of knowledge, now we need to have users make the most of
> it.  But can you describe what unique contributions the Semantic Web
> field has to offer to concerns currently held by the HCI community?
> Are there important HCI problems that the Semantic Web is uniquely
> suited to address?  What Semantic Web-related topics would you like
> to see covered in papers at next year's CHI?
> 
> ... and more inline:
> 
> Duane Degler wrote:
> > If you spent 90 minutes with a large group of HCI researchers and
> > practitioners, what important Semantic Web challenges would you talk about?
> > What questions do you feel are most pressing or interesting for the
> > development of SW User Interaction?
> >
> > We have that opportunity coming up, and would like your input on valuable
> > discussion topics.
> >
> > - What particular problem are you wrestling with in your current work that
> > you see has a hook both to HCI and to the SW?
> 
> If the Semantic Web enables novel forms of interaction, what HCI
> techniques apply well to their developement?  Do truly novel
> interaction forms or, more dramatically, a "paradigm shift", resist
> current HCI techniques?  Should SW researchers who feel they have a
> truly novel interaction form ...
> 
> 1) assume immunity to HCI concerns,
> 2) humbly rethink whether it is truly so novel or does indeed have
>    hooks in established techniques, or
> 3) consider certain established HCI techiques that apply particularly
>    well to new forms of interaction that require a personal learning
>    curve or development of large-scale social collaboration.
> 
> In particular, how do the above questions apply to Web 2.0-like
> forms of interaction?
> 
> > - What kinds of HCI information/research do you feel you lack?
> 
> What the standards and expectations are for user-oriented techniques
> and methods throughout the life-cycle of a SWUI research and/or
> development project?
> 
> > - What kinds of collaboration or communication would interest you?
> 
> Ditto.
> 
> > - What are the priority issues and challenges for SWUI?
> 
> Ditto.
> 
> > - What do you consider to be short-term, mid-term, or long-term topics?
> 
> Short:  Good task and goal analysis of current and currently emerging
> Semantic Web interface tools and the interactive forms they enable.
> 
> Mid:  Models and common understanding of the emerging interactive
> forms these tools enable us to understand so we can find patterns of
> interaction in them from which we can define the next layer/generation
> of interaction.
> 
> Long:  How best to monitor, guide and develop the amorphous mess that
> collectively forms the emerging and evolving "Web 2.0".
> 
> -Lloyd
> 
> > In short, what would you like to discuss?
> >
> > Also, what sort of examples would you show them to spark the conversation?
> >
> > We are gathering thoughts and input over the next two weeks, to finish
> > preparing for a CHI interactive discussion session on May 3rd. Your input is
> > greatly appreciated!
> >
> > Any outcomes and points from the session will be fed back to this list.
> >
> > Many thanks,
> >
> > Duane Degler
> > Scott Henninger
> > Lisa Battle
>

Received on Friday, 4 May 2007 18:58:09 UTC