School of
Information Management & Systems
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
296a-1
Seminar: Information Access.
("The Friday Afternoon Seminar")
Summaries - Fall 2002.
Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule.
Summaries will be added as they become available.
Aug 30: Clifford LYNCH: Introduction. Digital Archiving.
Introduction to the Seminar. Also, an update on
developments in digital archiving.
Sept 6: Marc DAVIS: Towards Computational Media:
Metadata for Media Automation and Reuse.
Over the past five hundred years, we have seen the development of technologies
and social practices that enable the educated
populace to read and write text. However, with video (including motion
pictures and television), millions of people "read" it
everyday, but very few are able to effectively "write" it. The changing of
this asymmetry will require research and innovation that
more intimately integrate video and computation. This presentation will
address the theoretical issues, core technologies, and
applications that will enable video to become a computational data type that
people can easily create, access, share, and reuse.
Specifically, the research challenge is to develop technologies that create
metadata about the semantic content and syntactic
structure of video, and that use that metadata to manipulate and reuse video.
Addressing this challenge requires a methodology that
interleaves the construction and analysis of artifacts and theories, and that
combines ideas and technologies from multiple
disciplines: information science, computer science, film theory and production,
media studies, and human-centered user interaction
design. In addition to talking about my past, present, and future research in
computational media, I will discuss my own path to
SIMS as a way to foreground issues, challenges, and opportunities in
interdisciplinary research and teaching in digital media.
Speaker Bio:
Marc Davis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Management
and Systems at the University of California at
Berkeley. His work is focused on creating the technology and applications that
will enable daily media consumers to become daily
media producers. Prof. Davis' research and teaching encompass the theory,
design, and development of digital media systems for
creating and using media metadata to automate media production and reuse.
Prof. Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at
Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the
University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media
Arts and Sciences from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. At the MIT Media Laboratory, he developed
Media Streams, an iconic visual language for annotating, retrieving, and
repurposing digital video. From 1993 to 1999 at Interval
Research Corporation, he led research and development teams in automatic media
production technology for which a patent was awarded
in 2001. From 1999 to 2002, Prof. Davis was Chairman and Chief Technology
Officer at Amova, a developer of media automation and
personalization technology. Prof. Davis is a co-founder of Narrative
Intelligence Reading Group, which innovated interdisciplinary
work at the intersection of literary theory, artificial intelligence, and media
technology. Prof. Davis was also an invited
contributor to the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Communications of the ACM,
for which he wrote a vision piece about the next 50
years of media technology.
Sept 13: Clifford LYNCH:
Issues in Digital Archiving and Preservation, with a Focus on Current
Project Initiatives.
A continuation of Sept 6 presentation.
Sept 20: Mikael GLEONNOC: Supporting Strategic Alliances in a
Network of Partners: a New Challenge for Information Systems.
In order to gain a competitive advantage without losing
their flexibility and their autonomy, more and more organizations prefer
to develop strategic alliances with external partners than to commit
themselves in more static and constraining models of collaboration such
as, for example, traditional joint ventures. Companies, private and public
laboratories, governmental organizations, independent experts and other
private or institutional entities tend to develop different types of
formal and informal partnerships that link them together. These links
create a direct or indirect complementarity and interdependency between
actors involved in a same social network, some of which are in competition
for the same markets. How to manage such relationships is one of the main
questions experts in management and in organization science have been
trying to answer during the last ten years.
The perception of this phenomenon that is exposed in
this seminar is that it contributes to a general evolution of the modes
of collaboration not only between different organizations but also within
organizations, e.g. between different departments or different working
teams. I maintain that the development of horizontal and cross-boundary
relationships inside the organizations and among the network of external
partners to which they belong contributes to the emergence of a global
new "philosophy of collaboration." Two central concepts, widely explored
in different scientific fields, permit us to understand the dynamic upon
which this philosophy is based. The first concept is that of 'trust'. The
second is the concept of 'network'.
We will argue that the management of trust in a social
network that includes both internal and external partners is the key that
permits us to understand the recent evolution of the modes of collaboration
and we will see that this is still a challenge in most organizations. Then,
we will examine the ways that the information systems supporting this
collaboration are not well adapted to facilitate cross-boundary and
horizontal relationships between interdependent and complementary partners,
especially when some of them are competitors. Although my analysis is
focused upon groupware information and communication tools, the question of
how to support internal and external strategic alliances can be considered
as a design challenge for the next generation of all types of information
systems.
Sept 27: Clifford LYNCH: Digital Rights Management, Research, and the
Higher Education Community.
I will discuss digital rights management
from a very broad perspective, with
particular emphasis on the needs of the research and higher education
community.
Oct 4: Two Reports:
Avi RAPPOPORT, Search Engine Consultant, searchtools.com:
Developments in the Enterprise Search Industry
A report on interesting developments in the enterprise
search industry, including her research on spellchecking search
queries, the leading open source search engines, connections with
content management systems, and implementation of faceted metadata
search.
and also
Clifford LYNCH: What's become of the digital library?
I'll revisit some of the material in the talk
I just gave at Educause, "What's become of the digital library?",
which deals with print and digital collections and public myths and
expectations.
Oct 11: Daniel GREENSTEIN,
University Librarian for Systemwide Library Planning and Scholarly
Information and Director, California Digital Library, Office of the
President, University of California: Building
Towards the User's Vision of the 21st Century Research Library.
Analyzing data on how faculty and students perceive
and use scholarly
information, the talk will identify users' vision for the 21st century
research library. It will then explore some of the challenges and
opportunities that exist for the California Digital Library and its
University of California co-libraries as they build collectively towards
that vision. The talk will present data gathered recently in studies
conducted variously by the Digital Library Federation and Outsell Inc., by
the California Digital Library, and by the Office of the President's
division of Systemwide Library Planning. It will also offer an early look
into possible developmental trajectories for the California Digital Library.
Oct 18: Maggie EXON, Visiting Scholar from Curtin University of
Technology, Australia:
Democratizing Metadata: Should Those who Create Documents
Write their Own
Metadata?
A connected set
of developments in the world of information has led to an
assumption: that those who create documents also create the metadata for them.
This differs from practice in libraries where authors write
books and cataloguers create descriptions of them.
The rise of author-created metadata has been particularly
influential (and therefore instructive) in the implementation of
corporate document management systems. As these have developed into,
or influenced, knowledge management, enterprise prortals, and all other
so-called "seamless solutions" for corporate information management, the
problems of how to create valid and useful metadata have become pressing.
This talk will examine these issues and their implications for
metadata generally.
Oct 25: Michael BUCKLAND: Events as Information.
What we know is influenced signifying events as much
as by signifying documents. Yet Information Management / Science has
focused on documents. How could our understanding of Information
Management be made more complete?
Two different lines will be explored.
1. THE SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF PAST EVENTS: A CASE-STUDY.
History, heritage, and the past. What is past is passed,
and no longer directly knowable. History is composed of narratives,
always multiple and always incomplete. Heritage, what we have today from
the past, includes "received history" (aka "Social memory"), and is
mythic, in the sense of being a powerful belief which may or may not be
true. Historically, Information Management is a modernist undertaking
originating in the late nineteenth century. A detailed reconstruction
of how the history of the first use of electronics for searching
collections of documents shows that the received, mythic history is
importantly determined by accidents and vested interests. This aspect of the
creation, distribution, and flow of knowledge in society is a
neglected, research front in Information Management.
2. EVENTS AS A CHALLENGE TO INFORMATION SCIENCE THEORY.
A convenient way to organize the highly varied discourse
about "information" is to categorize use of the word "information" in
terms of three different kinds of phenomena: "information-as-knowledge",
"information-as-process", and "information-as-thing", where "thing"
denotes anything physical that is regarded as signifying something.
We are, however, also informed by events, not just documents about them.
So how might "Event-as-information" fit? Taking events seriously seems
to require major changes in how "information" is theorized: A move away
from formal models borrowed from other fields, such as the conduit model
(Shannon-Weaver signaling theory) and from cognitive models; and more
attention to disciplines concerned with meaning, representation, and
interpretation, i.e. towards language and the humanities.
Nov 1: Lewis LANCASTER, Director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative;
Emeritus Professor of Buddhist Studies & of East Asian Languages &
Cultures:
Update on the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.
An update and progress report on the work of the Electronic Cultural
Atlas Initiative (ECAI), an
international effort, based at Berkeley, to enhance scholarship
through increased attention to time and place.
The origins and mission of ECAI.
Strategies adopted for international community building, software
development, training institutes, and standards development.
Recent efforts have focused on the design of online gazetteers,
creating e-publications that include dynamic maps, and the incorporation
geo-temporal resources in teaching.
The role of communities in cultural history and the use of time and space
to provide new insights for research and analysis. Examples of how
attention to time and space and map visualization can advance scholarship.
Nov 8: Students' Progress Reports.
Behrang MOHIT:
Information Extraction using FrameNet and WordNet.
Information Extraction is the science of detecting
specific types of data
from the raw text. I have been using the FrameNet project's
(http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~framenet) annotations to provide a precise
seed pattern set for information extraction. In my presentation, I will
focus on:
1. The Information Extraction task in general.
2. FrameNet project and the type of services that
I have used for
Information Extraction.
3. Future of my work which includes usage of WordNet Ontalogies and
Machine Learning techniques.
Emily LIGGETT:
Interfaces Designed for the Visualization of Complex Relationships.
Last summer, I worked for Professor Hearst and Oracle
designing an interface geared towards sales managers.
This interface was designed as a way in which sales
managers can view and manage all relationships that
are important to them and which help them do their job
(e.g. their relationships with sales reps, sales reps
relationships with contacts and companies to which
they sell, etc.). Each relationship is displayed as a
direct line between people - and a person's (in this
case, sales manager's) entire network would be viewed
as a graph, all laid out on concentric circles. The
end goal for this endeavor would be to provide this
interface as a complementary tool to already existing
sales software packages.
I will discuss this interface, as well as the results of the usability
studies performed on it, along with studies that have
been done on similar interfaces.
Grace JEON:
Applying MPEG7 to a DigitalChem Project.
Lecture Video/Audio can be searched and organized
by using standard
multimedia metadata.
MPEG7, one of several multimedia description languages, will be explored
as a way to allow users to
search specific segments of a lecture video.
Luis VILLAFANA:
Design of a Maintenance and Operations Recommender (MORE).
MORE uses information from computerized maintenance
management systems
(CMMS) and energy management and control systems (EMCS) to recommend
what maintenance personnel should do in response to a maintenance
service request or other event requiring a maintenance or control system
action.
Nov 15: Doug OARD, University of Maryland: Searching Spoken Word Collections.
Spoken word collections promise access to unique and compelling
content, and most of the needed technology to realize that promise is
now in place. Decreasing storage costs, increasing network capacity,
and easy availability of software to exchange digital audio make
possible physical access to spoken word collections at a previously
unimaginable scale. Effective support for intellectual access -- the
problem of finding what you are looking for -- is much more
challenging, however. In this talk I will review the work that has
been done on this problem at the Text Retrieval Conferences and the
Topic Detection and Tracking evaluations, and I will present some
early results from a user study comparing present manual and automated
approaches to indexing spoken word collections. I will then describe
a unique resource, a collection of 116,000 hours of oral history
interviews recorded in 32 languages in 67 countries, and explain how
we are leveraging an unprecedented manual indexing effort to develop
the ability to index similar materials automatically.
About the speaker:
Doug Oard is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, with a
joint appointment in the College of Information Studies and the Institute
for Advanced Computer Studies. He is on sabbatical at USC-ISI through
August, 2003. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the
University of Maryland, and his research interests center around the use
of emerging technologies to support information seeking by end users.
Dr. Oard's recent work has focused on cross-language information
retrieval, retrieval from audio, data mining from text, and the exchange
of ratings by networked users. Additional information is available at
www.glue.umd.edu/~oard/
Nov 22: Fredric GEY, UCDATA, and Ray LARSON: Recent Developments in Information
Retrieval.
We will summarize the research highlights of four
conferences on information retrieval and, especially, cross-lingual retrieval:
The ACM SIGIR meeting,
August 2002,
in Tampere, Finland, including the workshop on "Cross Language
Information Retrieval: A Research Roadmap"; the
2002 Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) in Rome, September 2002,
which dealt with
Euopean languages; the TREC 2002 English - Arabic retrieval track; and
the NTCIR3 conference on Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean retrieval
in Tokyo in October 2002.
Dec 13: Students' Final Progress Reports.
Grace JEON:
Digitalchem - Applying MPEG7 to Lecture Video Search Engine.
The lecture browser streams videos to students accompanied by
slides in Flash format. Due to the growing number files, students will
eventually need a search engine for these audio-visual type documents.
MPEG7 offers the framework for such a search engine but it can be simpler
than the typical audio-visual document metadata.
Behrang MOHIT:
Information Extraction using FrameNet and WordNet.
In this presentation, I will talk about my approach to Information
Extraction by using two human built knowledge=base (FrameNet and
WordNet). I have used FrameNet annotation to build a pattern set and also
a lexicon for the information extraction task and then improved my lexicon
by using WordNet. My most recent evaluation shows %66 Precission and %76
Recall for this system.
Luis Villafana:
Design of a Maintenance and Operations Recommender (MORE).
MORE uses information from computerized maintenance management systems
(CMMS) and energy management and control systems (EMCS) to recommend
what maintenance personnel should do in response to a maintenance
service request or other event requiring a maintenance or control system
action. MORE integrates text information from a CMMS database and sensor
information from an EMCS to provide recommendations.
Fall 2002 schedule.
Spring 2002 schedule
and
summaries.
Spring 2003 schedule
and
summaries.