EuroHCIR 2014

Important Dates

• Submissions: 1st Aug 2014
• Notifications: 18th Aug 2014
• Camera Ready: 29th Aug 2014
• Earlybird Reg: 31st Aug 2014
• Workshop: 13th Sept 2014

Last Year's Workshop

The proceedings from the euroHCIR 2013 workshop are now online: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-909/

 

Related Co-located Events

Twitter

We'll be using the #euroHCIR hashtag where possible

Preliminary Schedule

• Saturday 13th Sept- Key motivating talks and working groups
  We intend to run the day in the same style as the successful 2013 workshop at SIGIR. Each key paper will be briefly presented, and then discussed in working groups of different perspectives, before these are shared collectively.
• Keynote on HCIR to Support Joy, Delight and Proactive Health,
  from m.c. schraefel
• 7 Exciting Diverse HCIR papers

Keynote: m.c. schraefel
ONLY YOU CAN SAVE HUMANITY: the urgent need for HCIR genius in Proactive Health Interactive Tech Design

Researchers in HCIR have a terrific opportunity to help make the world a better place very much in the near term. The challenge is to get enough of us together contributing to this new space to make a scalable demonstrable difference. This space is *in*-bodied health - not health as a medical condition; not health treating someone like they need to change their habits or do more push ups - but health as a social aspiration. That is, where health is not just about an individual, but is a social priority, where we design our cultural artefacts and infrastructures to support that quality of life.

At a recent Dagstuhl Workshop on Grand Challenges for Interactive Technologies to support this concept of Proactive Health, two of the five challenges that emerged are particularly germain to HCIR’s engagement in these challenges: Measures and Motivation. In Measures, particularly related to IR, three areas were of particular interest: to understand first and foremost what are the kinds of data we wish to collect personally and socially around proactive health. We have an opportunity to develop new mechanisms to support meaningful capture of qualitative data with any quantitative data. What is Big Qualitative Data?. How do we do this capture in a scalable way? We likewise have the opportunity not just to run machine learning over quantitative data, but to iterate back with those who have provided data to see if our models resonate, and refine them, collectively. Also, we can prioritise exploration of the Long Tails of our data - we are not constrained to look for the norms of a medical Randomised Controlled Trial; we can spend time with the other ends of the distributions. For the HCI side of these challenges, how do we design systems to help capture this data to understand current health practice and aspirational practices at scale, pro bono, for the good? With an eye to exploratory search, how do we help people explore these collections of information - to which they may themselves be contributing - to understand questions like - am i normal? how am i doing? what’s the minimal effective dose to improve what’s important to me - which may be to stay alert at work, not run a half marathon.

In this talk, i'd like to offer first a model to help HCIR researchers understand proactive health to support proactive health design on the data/interaction side. Second, i propose to review these two challenges on measures and motivation, and offer a few examples we’ve been exploring in this space, namely: goFit, future ghosts, and experiment in a box.

A goal of this presentation will be to explore what we ourselves need as researchers to better coordinate our research efforts to realise our potential to have a noticeable social impact for quality of life.

Bio
m.c. schraefel, phd, cscs, c.eng, f.bcs holds the position Professor of Computer Science and Human Performance at the University of Southampton where she leads the Human Systems Interaction Lab. m.c. is also a certified strength and conditioning coach, nutritionist, movement coach and kettlebell instructor.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~mc
follow mc @mcphoo

Accepted Papers

We've accepted 7 exciting papers from across 5 countries in Europe and Asia.

• Serendipity is not bullshit (Position Paper)
  Stephann Makri (City)
  Abstract:
  Serendipity in the context of information-seeking and retrieval involves coming across information that is both useful and unexpected - either when looking for information on a different topic, when looking for information with no particular aim or when not looking for information at all. An article in The Stanford Daily newspaper, entitled ‘serendipity is bullshit,’ argues that there is little point in designing digital environments to support serendipity. We disagree. In this position paper, we respond to arguments made in the article and explain why it is very important that digital information environments should not only support users in seeking useful information, but also in encountering useful information unexpectedly.
• Are topic-specific search term, journal name and author name recommendations relevant for researchers? (Research Paper)
  Philipp Mayr (GESIS)
  Abstract:
  In this paper we describe a case study where researchers in the social sciences (n=19) assess topical relevance for controlled search terms, journal names and author names which have been compiled automatically by bibliometric-enhanced information retrieval (IR) services. We call these bibliometric-enhanced IR services Search Term Recommender (STR), Journal Name Recommender (JNR) and Author Name Recommender (ANR) in this paper. The researchers in our study (practitioners, PhD students and postdocs) were asked to assess the top n pre-processed recommendations from each recommender for specific research topics which have been named by them in an interview before the experiment. Our results show clearly that the presented search term, journal name and author name recommendations are highly relevant to the researchers’ topic and can easily be integrated for search in Digital Libraries. The average precision for top ranked recommendations is 0.75 for author names, 0.74 for search terms and 0.73 for journal names. The relevance distribution differs largely across topics and researcher types. Practitioners seem to favor author name recommendations while postdocs have rated author name recommendations the lowest. In the experiment the small postdoc group (n=3) favor journal name recommendations.
• Human-Computer Information Retrieval Design Implications of Big Smart Data Utilisation in the Domain of Digital Humanities (Position Paper)
  Anastasis Petrou (West London)
  Abstract:
  Discussion in this paper highlights a need for careful integration of Big Data into information research processes given concerns about existing issues in terms of data quality regarding data volume, velocity and variety and due to reduced data veracity. The paper suggests use of a Big Smart Data (BSD) construct in Digital Humanities. The latter is meant to sustain focus on Big Data integration concerns along the lines of other literature discussions about use of savvy or smart techniques for transformations of Big Data into useful information for research processes. Implications for the application of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques to Information Retrieval (IR) and HCIR design are briefly discussed in relation to BSD utilisation in the Domain of Digital Humanities and in other domains.
• Improving Cross-Lingual Enterprise Information Access (Position Paper)
  Marina Santini (SICS East Swedish ICT)
  Abstract:
  In this position paper it is argued that cross-lingual enterprise information access is underdeveloped and underexploited. Some use cases are presented. It is pointed out that very little of the extensive research findings in cross-lingual and multilingual information retrieval have penetrated enterprise search. It is claimed that with little investment in R&D, it would be relatively easy to create a re-usable cross-lingual enterprise search module to automatically and reliably translate search queries (one of the most used approach in Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval) from a foreign language to a target language in order to retrieve relevant documents.
• Exploring cognitive activity in information interactions (Research Paper)
  Frances Johnson (Manchester Metropolitan)
  Abstract:
  The study of information interactions is complex involving users, information and the system that delivers. This study develops a psychometric questionnaire to provide insights into information interaction focusing on the cognitive activity of relevance judgments. Search tasks on Google and on Google scholar were analysed to identify the use, and the evaluation, of retrieved information in making these critical judgments. Factor and regression analysis indicate the core factors influencing these judgments across the task contexts. The approach taken demonstrates the impact of the search task on the users’ critical evaluation of the information and suggests a new relationship between task involvement and the impact of perceived informational and system ease of use on relevance judgments formed in information interactions
• Applying Cross-cultural theory to understand users’ preferences on interactive information retrieval platform design (Research Paper)
  Karen Chessum, Haiming Liu and Ingo Frommholz (Bedford)
  Abstract:
  In this paper we look at using culture to group users and model the users’ preference on cross cultural information retrieval, in order to investigate the relationship between the user search preferences and the user’s cultural background. Initially we review and discuss briefly website localisation. We continue by examining culture and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. We identified a link between Hofstede’s five dimensions and user experience. We did an analogy for each of the five dimensions and developed six hypotheses from the analogies. These hypotheses were then tested by means of a user study. Whilst the key findings from the study suggest cross cultural theory can be used to model user’s preferences for information retrieval, further work still needs to be done on how cultural dimensions can be applied to inform the search interface design.
• Real-Life Click Behavior under Environmental Stressors (Research Paper)
  Nikolai Buzikashvili (Russian Academy of Sciences)
  Abstract:
  Large scale differences in real-life search behavior, in particular click behavior determined by environmental factors, are investigated. To do it, a search engine log was partitioned into “IP classes” that differently present stressful and free environments. It is shown that real-life environmental stressors do not affect query formulation or session execution, shift slightly moving across the retrieved results and shift enormously click behavior.