“Toward Human Computer Information Retrieval”

This is an interesting talk coming up tomorrow at the University of Washington’s Information School. This is going to be an excellent talk, and you should come if you’re interested in these topics. You can mention you’re going at upcoming, and the full description of the talk is at the ischool’s website here.

“Toward Human Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR)”
by Gary Marchionini

Classical information retrieval had yielded novel techniques for applying computers to retrieval problems, including WWW search engines.

The classical model of retrieval is one of matching queries to documents and ranking these matches. It is apparent, however, that a new model of retrieval is needed as people access large-scale digital libraries of multimedia content and vast collections of unstructured data in the WWW. What is needed are ways to bring human intelligence and attention more actively into the search process. To this end, researchers are beginning to combine the lessons from designing highly interactive user interfaces with the lessons from human information behavior to create new kinds of search systems that depend on continuous human control of the search process. I call this hybrid approach to the challenges of information seeking, human computer interaction (HCIR).