Dr. Rob Capra, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), recently co-organized the Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR), which took place at Google’s main campus in Mountain View, California.
As one of seven organizers of the workshop, Capra helped coordinate the event, which this year focused (according to its Web site) on “the problem of information availability, where the seeker faces uncertainty as to whether the information of interest is available at all.” Presenters gave papers and posters addressing issues ranging from information visualization to ethnography pertinent to information retrieval and access. It is estimated that about 100 people participated in the event.
Dr. Gary Marchionini, SILS Dean and Cary C. Boshamer Professor, delivered the keynote address, titled, "HCIR: Now the Tricky Part."
Capra presented a paper he co-wrote with Jason Raitz (MSIS ’11) on “Faceted Search on Mobile Devices” (link to PDF), which explores the trade-offs and use of smaller-screen faceted interfaces. Little had been written before about mobile faceted search in HCI research or user experience design literature.
“Capra showed,” Brad Stenger wrote, “that he is off to an impressive start on the tedious work of determining the best layout for presenting faceted search results on a palm-size screen with his Diamond Browser, a tool for rapidly developing faceted search interfaces on handheld screens.”
Stenger – who works at beta620, the experimental Web projects division of The New York Times – described Capra’s talk as a highlight of the conference.
