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April 2006 - Vol. 49 No. 4

April 2006 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Editorial pointers Apr 1 2006

Editorial Pointers

Online search is part of daily life, with popular search engines and digital libraries typically supporting users best able to define their information needs. The hitch comes when those needs are sketchy or the knowledge necessary is absent. How do users find the information they need if they don’t know it exists? How do they […]
Architecture and Hardware
News News track Apr 1 2006

News Track

The U.S. government is developing a massive computer system that could someday collect huge amounts of data and, by linking information from blogs and email messages to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity. The Christian Science Monitor reports this little-known system—called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE)—is an […]
Computing Applications
Opinion Forum Apr 1 2006

Forum

While Phillip G. Armour’s "The Business of Software" column ("Counting Boulders and Measuring Mountains," Jan. 2006) was based on good ideas, many of them were overshadowed by errors and omissions that made it difficult to understand what he was getting at. A systems perspective is necessary, but even systems engineers can miss the wider view, […]
Architecture and Hardware
Opinion Hot links Apr 1 2006

Top 10 Downloads from ACM’s Digital Library

Communications of the ACM Volume 49, Number 4 (2006), Pages 29-30 Hot links: Top 10 Downloads from ACM’s Digital Library Diane Crawford Table of Contents Tables Back to Top Tables Table. The Top 10 Most Popular Papers from ACM’s Refereed Journals and Conference Proceedings Downloaded in January 2006 Table. The 10 Most Popular Courses at […]
Computing Applications
Research and Advances Special Section: Supporting Exploratory Search Apr 1 2006

Supporting Exploratory Search: An Introduction

Online search has become an increasingly important part of the everyday lives of most computer users. Search engines, bibliographic databases, and digital libraries provide adequate support for users whose information needs are well defined. However, there are research and development opportunities to improve current search interfaces so users can succeed more often in situations when: […]
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Special Section: Supporting Exploratory Search Apr 1 2006

mSpace: Improving Information Access to Multimedia Domains with Multimodal Exploratory Search

If you do not know much about classical music, how do you discover what you might like? The first port of call for most people is to Google “classical music.” This returns a list of links to sites that provide textual descriptions of terms or times in the classical music domain, or sometimes sites that […]
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Special Section: Supporting Exploratory Search Apr 1 2006

Clustering Versus Faceted Categories For Information Exploration

Information seekers often express a desire for a user interface that organizes search results into meaningful groups, in order to help make sense of the results, and to help decide what to do next. A longitudinal study in which participants were provided with the ability to group search results found they changed their search habits […]
Computing Applications
Research and Advances Special Section: Supporting Exploratory Search Apr 1 2006

Find that Photo!: Interface Strategies to Annotate, Browse, and Share

As digital photos become the standard media for personal photo taking, supporting users to explore those photos becomes a vital goal. Dominant strategies that have emerged involve innovative user interfaces that support annotation, browsing, and sharing that add up to rich support for exploratory search. Successful retrieval is based largely on attaching appropriate annotations to […]
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Special Section: Supporting Exploratory Search Apr 1 2006

Using Temporal Patterns of Interactions to Design Effective Automated Searching Assistance

Web search engines effectively support searching of short queries, with session durations of typically 15 minutes, while providing limited searching assistance to the user. However, Web search engines are less effective in the more complex searching situations in which users lack the domain knowledge or contextual awareness to use the system effectively. User uncertainty about […]
Computing Applications
Opinion Inside Risks Apr 1 2006

Fake ID: Batteries Not Included

It was only a matter of time. We’ve come to expect almost anything imaginable to be sold on late-night TV infomercials—from feel-good "health" bracelets to "get rich quick" real-estate schemes. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised to stumble across a 3 a.m. full-hour ad for a firm offering biometric "appliances" (for legal applications only—the […]
Computing Applications

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