As you already know...
... I travel a good deal for my work. In a typical year, I attend 3 or 4 technical conferences, which are largely meetings where researchers in my field get together to deliver papers on their latest research. We listen, ask questions, argue with each other a bit, and try to figure out how stuff operates.
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| The Wilson library at UNC Chapel Hill. |
Now, you might think this is incredibly tedious stuff, but it's also the mill that grinds the flour of science from raw kernels of ideas into refined understanding about how the world works.
I'm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for a conference that's called Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. It's a nice, smallish conference of people who, like me, wonder about how people search for information online. (Imagine that! There are conferences all about SearchResearch!)
For SRS purposes, such scientific conferences can be incredibly useful collections of information on topics that might not yet be reflected in common web content, magazines, or books. In many ways, the list of conference papers tells you a lot about the topic area of the conference.
Thinking about this prompted the following couple of Search Research Challenges for this week.
1. Conferences typically have papers that are classified as "Best Paper." What was the title of the Best Paper for this year's Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval?
2. Who was opening keynote speaker at CHIIR 2010? (No, I'm not crazy--I'm asking this for a specific reason that I'll reveal on Monday.) BTW, why is this special talk called a "keynote" anyway?
3. While the conference papers are great to listen to, a great deal of work happens by walking around. While walking with a colleague, I found this flower growing just outside the conference meeting place on the side of the road. What is it? (And, aside from enjoying flowers, do you have any idea why I might be asking this apparently out-of-place question?)
4. What is the largest scientific conference that's held somewhere in the world each year (annually)?
I'm here today, and then heading off to DC on Thursday in my role as itinerant scholar. But I'll answer these Challenges on Monday, and you'll see why I'm asking such funny questions.
As always, please tell us not just your answers, but also HOW you found the answers to these questions about scholarly conferences.
Search on!
1. What was the title of the Best Paper for this year's Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval?
ReplyDeletePlaying Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload (Horatiu Bota, Ke Zhou, Joemon M Jose).
Search strategy:
Google: [Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval] => http://sigir.org/chiir2016/
Twitter: [#chiir2016] => CRTL-F: best paper => @horatiubota = Horaţiu Bota
Go to CHIIR 2016 Accepted papers: http://sigir.org/chiir2016/accepted-papers.html => CRTL-F: Bota
2. Who was opening keynote speaker at CHIIR 2010?
Dan Russell (Google): Why is search sometimes easy and sometimes hard? Understanding serendipity and expertise in the mind of the searcher
Search strategy:
Google: [chiir 2010 keynote] => https://sites.google.com/site/hcirworkshop/
Starting in 2016, the HCIR Symposium and the Information Interaction in Context (IIiX) conference will be merged to create the Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval (CHIIR).
HCIR 2010 Keynote: https://sites.google.com/site/hcirworkshop/hcir-2010/keynote
Why is this special talk called a "keynote" anyway?
A prevailing tone or central theme, typically one set or introduced at the start of a conference.
Search strategy:
Google: [define:keynote]
Wikipedia: at academic conferences, the keynote address or keynote speech is delivered to set the underlying tone and summarize the core message or most important revelation of the event.
3. Flower - What is it?
Speedwell, a plant in the genus Veronica
Search strategy:
The filename of the picture is speedwell.jpg => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(plant)
(The name was later changed into Mystery Flower from Chapel Hill.jpg)
4. The largest scientific conference that's held somewhere in the world each year (annually)?
Society of Neuroscience’s annual conference.
Search strategy:
Google: [largest|biggest scientific conference in the world annually]
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2004/10/largest_scienti.html
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-largest-academic-conferences-in-science
http://www.sfn.org/sfn/amstats/amstatsgraph.html
http://www.sfn.org/annual-meeting/past-and-future-annual-meetings/annual-meeting-attendance-statistics
Ah, nice catch on the paper! I should have realized the one I listed was too old for this year.
Delete1) Went to the CHIIR 2016 website and no current info was listed BUT there was a Twitter feed posted of #chiir2016. Searched that tag AND best paper and saw that Horatio Bota, Ke Zhou and Joeman Jose won the Best Paper award. Bota's Twitter handle was included, so went to his feed, which contained a link to his homepage which gave me the title of this paper: Exploring Composite Retrieval from the Users' Perspective written by the three people mentioned, along with a "best paper" tag. Not 100% sure it was for this conference, but I'm going with it for now.
ReplyDelete2a) The official CHIIR website says its the first annual conference, so...no conference in 2010? Now, there was a HCIR conference in 2010 which appears to be a very similar, if not the same, thing. The keynote speaker for that was none other than our esteemed blogger Dr. Russell. (http://sigir.org/files/forum/2010D/othwksp/2010d_sigirforum_capra.pdf)
2b) Via Wikipedia: The term key note comes from the practice of a cappella, often barbershop singers, playing a note before singing. The note played determines the key in which the song will be performed. A keynote speech sets the tone or theme for a conference or gathering.
3) Went to wildflowersearch.com and typed in the coordinates for Chapel Hill and the color purple. Looking through the results, it appears that the wildflower Veronica Persica, or Persian Speedwell is a match. The striped petals and and fuzzy leaves were the giveaway to me. Not sure why it is a relevant question, though :(
4) Did a search for [scientific conference largest] and the first hit was a blog entry about the AGU conference in 2010 stating that while it isn't the biggest, it is up there. The biggest, according to the writeup, is The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. The Wiki page says that in 2014, their meeting attendance was 31,263 though it doesn't say its the largest in the world. So I did a search on the official SFN page which states: Neuroscience 2016 will take place November 12-16 at the San Diego Convention Center. Join more than 30,000 colleagues from more than 80 countries at the world’s largest marketplace of ideas and tools for global neuroscience. (https://www.sfn.org/annual-meeting/neuroscience-2016)
Not sure why this didn't appear before... But it's here now!
DeleteGood day, Dr. Russell and everyone.
ReplyDeleteFor Q1 and Q2:
["CHIIR" 2010 opening keynote]from there to here [2010 site:sigir.org/] and [2010 site:sigir.org/ intext:keynote]
The keynote presentation for HCIR 2010 was given by Dan Russell
Keynotes 2010
Chiir2016 Noticed #CHIIR2016 and searched
[why keynotes name]
Keynote Wikipedia
Keynote Speaker
For Q3:
Searchbyimage your photo.
[chapel hill flower identification]
For Q4
[largest annual scientific conference]
[largest scientific conference] search tools Past Year
Israel to host world's biggest science conference It is just one event
American Chemical Society
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
Answers
1. Conferences typically have papers that are classified as "Best Paper." What was the title of the Best Paper for this year's Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval?
#chiir2016 Best Paper Award goes to student Horatio Bota, Ke Zhou, and Joemon Jose From Chiir site: Title is: "Playing Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload"
Proceeding
2. Who was opening keynote speaker at CHIIR 2010?BTW, why is this special talk called a "keynote" anyway?
A: Gary W. Flake
Figurative sense of "leading idea, central principle" is from 1783
Q3: [Flower identification]
Delete4 petals, Blue, toothed leaf
Birdeye Speedwell
[chapel hill around(4) "Birdeye Speedwell"]
Wildflower Identification: Persian Speedwell
Veronica persica
I had to divide my answer in parts.
ReplyDelete1. Weirdly, I couldn't find the Best Paper for 2016 CHIIR on their website. It's on their Twitter feed though: "#chiir2016 Best Paper Award goes to student Horatio Bota, Ke Zhou, and Joemon Jose! Congrats!!" This was the 6th result on my SERP for [ CHIIR best paper ]
Then find Horatio Bota on the website's Accepted Papers page. Turns out he's Horațiu, not Horatio.
Horațiu Bota, Ke Zhou, Joemon M Jose, Playing Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload.
The paper itself can be accessed by clicking on the title.
2. My first thought was that the conference might have changed its name but I wasn't worried about this because the Google Search engine is increasingly more capable of finding related stuff like that. So my quest was [ CHIIR "2010" conference human information interaction retrieval ], after realizing that [ CHIIR 2010 ] wouldn't give me immediate substantial results (even after telling Google I really want CHIIR, not CHOIR). It also workd without the quotation marks around 2010, but this kind of confirms that HCIR is indeed the old name for (the much better) CHIIR, because it places the best link as top result.
ReplyDeleteLong live serendipity because that's what made me find a different name for the conference. The 2010 keynote was Why is search sometimes easy and sometimes hard? Understanding serendipity and expertise in the mind of the searcher by none other than Daniel M Russell himself. Notice the paramount importance that midllename M has been having at CHIIR.
The definition of "Keynote" on the Online Etymology Dictionary: "also key-note, "lowest note of a musical scale, basis of a tonal key, the tonic," 1776, from key (n.1) in sense of "musical scale" + note (n.). The keynote is the given note on which the melodic and harmonic relationships in the scale are built, and it gives its name to the key. Figurative sense of "leading idea, central principle" is from 1783; keynote address is 1908, American English."
Well, not really 1908, in fact. The Merriam-Webster gives 1914, the Random House (at Dictionary.com) gives 1905-10. But if you look for [ keynote speech,keynote address ] at Google Ngram Viewer, you'll find references from the 19th century. Most of them are wrongly dated on Google Books (because they match multivolume books dated by their first volume) but these two at least are valid:
1 George Francis Dawson, Life and Services of Gen. John A. Logan: As Soldier and Statesman, 1887, transcribing on p.136 "Logan's 'keynote' speech in the House, 1868—Scathing review of the 'Principles of the Democratic Party'."
2 David Decamp Thompson, Abraham Lincoln: The First American, 1895, mentioning on pp.45- "Lincoln's 'keynote' speech."
Notice how on both these sources "keynote" comes in quotation marks, implying that it was at the time a recent use of the word.
Notice also that Wikipedia is wrong on the statement "The term key note comes from the practice of a cappella, often barbershop singers, playing a note before singing." The term precedes barbershop singing by several centuries. The link provided, though, doesn't make this mistake, while explaining very well what a keynote speech is or should be: "I like to think of it as similar to the key note for a cappella singing – its sets the overall tone and context for the event."
I liked your answer so much I quoted it in my answer. Well done.
Delete3. It's easy to find the flower when the file title is its name. ;) Speedwell, aka Veronica, bird's eye, and gypsyweed.
ReplyDeleteVeronicas bring luck to M Russell, but I couldn't find when or how the story started. At first, I thought that Veronica would be his daughter's name but I couldn't find any evidence of that (or of any daughter for the matter). Anyway, [ dan russell veronica | speedwell ] brought me to a Dan Russell's Google+ post: "The funniest birthday present of the year... an M&M chocolate, with my image printed on the surface! It's not quite a veronica, but it does make me feel miraculous! Thanks, family!!"
Anyway, the flower on M Russell's 2010 keynote doesn't seem to be a veronica. I confess I couldn't find what it is via a simple reverse image search.
4. [ largest scientific conference ] gives several sources claiming that the SfN (Society for Neuropsychology) Annual Meeting is the record holder. Their statistics indicate that it has been attended consistently by around 30k people, including general public (and around 25k scientific attendance). Of course, "conference" is just a name, that may or may not encompass meetings, seminars, congresses, and so on. If fairs were to be included (but scientific / academic fairs aren't that common except maybe in the tech field), maybe some other gathering would hold this record.
THE flower: THe file title on my side is just Mystery flower. How'd it be different for you? jon tU
DeleteI got here early, before the file was renamed. Apparently, Hans has found it too.
DeleteYes... I renamed it after Hans pointed out that I'd left the answer in the filename!
DeleteI guess my first post vanished in the web's æther. Here it goes again:
ReplyDelete1. Weirdly, I couldn't find the Best Paper for 2016 CHIIR on their website. It's on their Twitter feed though: "#chiir2016 Best Paper Award goes to student Horatio Bota, Ke Zhou, and Joemon Jose! Congrats!!" This was the 6th result on my SERP for [ CHIIR best paper ]
Then find Horatio Bota on the website's Accepted Papers page. Turns out he's Horațiu, not Horatio.
Horațiu Bota, Ke Zhou, Joemon M Jose, Playing Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload.
The paper itself can be accessed by clicking on the title.
Hmm, what happened to my comment/answer :(
ReplyDelete… interesting, haven't ever seen a comment completely obliterated before… comment count number even adjusted… odd
Deletefwiw, here at the "ops center" in Delta, UT we occasionally "net the net" and just happened;) to catch your original comment… yt$aw
btw, AEB, colored & in civies
•••› mark unclassifiedrefDIR420dmrsRsX1HRC:[BccAlphaXYZ.com|attAT]
\\\\"Casey BroughMarch 16, 2016 at 8:33 AM
1) Went to the CHIIR 2016 website and no current info was listed BUT there was a Twitter feed posted of #chiir2016. Searched that tag AND best paper and saw that Horatio Bota, Ke Zhou and Joeman Jose won the Best Paper award. Bota's Twitter handle was included, so went to his feed, which contained a link to his homepage which gave me the title of this paper: Exploring Composite Retrieval from the Users' Perspective written by the three people mentioned, along with a "best paper" tag. Not 100% sure it was for this conference, but I'm going with it for now.
2a) The official CHIIR website says its the first annual conference, so...no conference in 2010? Now, there was a HCIR conference in 2010 which appears to be a very similar, if not the same, thing. The keynote speaker for that was none other than our esteemed blogger Dr. Russell. (http://sigir.org/files/forum/2010D/othwksp/2010d_sigirforum_capra.pdf)
2b) Via Wikipedia: The term key note comes from the practice of a cappella, often barbershop singers, playing a note before singing. The note played determines the key in which the song will be performed. A keynote speech sets the tone or theme for a conference or gathering.
3) Went to wildflowersearch.com and typed in the coordinates for Chapel Hill and the color purple. Looking through the results, it appears that the wildflower Veronica Persica, or Persian Speedwell is a match. The striped petals and and fuzzy leaves were the giveaway to me. Not sure why it is a relevant question, though :(
4) Did a search for [scientific conference largest] and the first hit was a blog entry about the AGU conference in 2010 stating that while it isn't the biggest, it is up there. The biggest, according to the writeup, is The Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. The Wiki page says that in 2014, their meeting attendance was 31,263 though it doesn't say its the largest in the world. So I did a search on the official SFN page which states: Neuroscience 2016 will take place November 12-16 at the San Diego Convention Center. Join more than 30,000 colleagues from more than 80 countries at the world’s largest marketplace of ideas and tools for global neuroscience. (https://www.sfn.org/annual-meeting/neuroscience-2016)"
\\\\endretrievalprotocol **@9194004Y∞
Comments have been vanishing for years. Ramon suggested a work around: tap in any letter and hit Publish. Then paste your comments in the box and hit Publish and it will likely go thru on this second try. I thought this had been fixed. jon
Deletethis is a shot in the dark -- for the 2nd part of ?#3, a medical malady?, Dan is in need of "Europe tea." —
ReplyDelete"Gout was historically known as "the disease of kings" or "rich man's disease". …or the searching/flying man's disease?
› podagra
›this is Thyme Leaf Speedwell
›Speedwell alt; the van from Chapel Hill in Boulder
›Speedwell, Veronica: Female fidelity - tough to plug that one in
›Persian - USU
›SERP - ages affected 41-60
wandering…
›M&M/DMR Veronica, courtesy of LMV
›veil
›keynote missing?
›flowers at the 'plex
›another angle
›Mar 2016 - may have seen this being composed?
›marketing
›UDC
›boxes in the desert
›worth a look
from:
›Google News Lab via Henk van Ess
›17/03/16, Sláinte
reading material for the in betweens…
ReplyDeleteI. Burrington… knows it's really Bluffdale
Art Data, Private Eye - …this was not going to end well, but perhaps not badly…
DrD has good eyes…and a camera to match
ReplyDeletefrom:
⌘(cmd)f: Persian speedwell
1) Not finding any easy way to find the Best Paper, I looked it up in Twitter and found it right away [#chiir2016]
ReplyDelete#chiir2016 Best Paper Award goes to student Horatiu Bota Ke Zhou, and Joemon Jose! Looking then up I find
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2854946
Playing Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload
Horatiu Bota, Ke Zhou, Joemon M. Jose
2) Keynote speaker 2010: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ryenw/hcir2010/index.html CHIIR did not exist then but HCIR did. Some guy named Dan Russell ;) gave the 2010 Keynote Address: Why is search sometimes easy and sometimes hard?: Understanding serendipity and expertise in the mind of the searcher... from his Home Page. Keynote if a term from music. It is the note on which a key is based. Similarly such a keynote address establishes the framework for the following programme of events or convention agenda
3) When cropped Images finds it instantly: Birdeye Speedwell, Persian Speedwell (Veronica persica)
Weedy lawn on the Duke University Campus, Durham Co., NC http://www.jeffpippen.com/plants/veronica.htm
rom Radford, Ahles, & Bell. 1968. Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas.
Dan Russell loves serendipity and so when this plant appeared, not searched for, it was a serendiptous find. (see 2020 keynote address)
4) I guessed AAAS was a likely culprit. Indeed at http://www.aaas.org/press-public-engagement "Annual Meeting. The world's largest scientific conference..."
I was surprised at how well Twitter worked as a search engine.
Cheer jon tU
Might the following lead to the reason(s) why Dan "might be asking this apparently out-of-place question"?
ReplyDelete1) Searching on [Veronica slang], I found http://www.slang-dictionary.org/australian-slang/Veronica:
> > >
Veronica -- Australian Slang
search engine for the Internet (acronym from Very Easy, Rodent-Oriented, Net-wide, Index of Computerised Archives)
< < <
2) Searching next on ["Very Easy ... Archives"] turned up the "Veronica (search engine)" Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)), which includes:
> > >
Veronica was a search engine system for the Gopher protocol, developed in 1992 by Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at the University of Nevada, Reno.
...
The name, although officially a backronym for "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives", was chosen to match that of the FTP search service known as Archie — Veronica Lodge being the name of another character from the Archie Comics.
< < <
So Veronica is the name of one of the very first search engines. (A little more information an context can be found on p. 18 of the book "Google" by Virginia A. Scott (https://books.google.com/books?id=UVz06fnwJvUC&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq="Veronica"), which I found by searching on ["Veronica search engine" Google].)
3) I'm wondering if one of Dan's earliest papers on 'search' might have involved the Veronica search engine. But my initial searches on Google Scholar turned up nothing of apparent significance ... and it's a little late in the evening (morning) for me to head deeper into that quest. :-)
-- Mike Ross
Bravo, very well done! Now that you mention it, I now realize that I knew this! The Veronica search engine is mentioned in a book I read long time ago, John Battelle's The Search.
DeleteIn the meantime, all I had found, apart from the M&Ms comment I had mentioned already, was a very related post and comment here on this very blog, where Dan Russell mentions the word to be a synonym of sudarium. And then I fully understood his M&Ms comment. Funny thing is I knew the word in Portuguese ("verónica") and I am almost sure I had read this post but aparently my brain refused to connect the dots.
Memory works in mysterious ways.
I guess my other posts vanished, so here's the important one again.
ReplyDelete1) Not finding any easy way to find the Best Paper, I looked it up in Twitter and found it right away [#chiir2016]
#chiir2016 Best Paper Award goes to student Horatiu Bota Ke Zhou, and Joemon Jose! Looking then up I find
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2854946
Playing Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload
Horatiu Bota, Ke Zhou, Joemon M. Jose
2) Keynote speaker 2010: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ryenw/hcir2010/index.html CHIIR did not exist then but HCIR did. Some guy named Dan Russell ;) gave the 2010 Keynote Address: Why is search sometimes easy and sometimes hard?: Understanding serendipity and expertise in the mind of the searcher... from his Home Page. Keynote if a term from music. It is the note on which a key is based. Similarly such a keynote address establishes the framework for the following programme of events or convention agenda
3) When cropped Images finds it instantly: Birdeye Speedwell, Persian Speedwell (Veronica persica)
Weedy lawn on the Duke University Campus, Durham Co., NC http://www.jeffpippen.com/plants/veronica.htm
rom Radford, Ahles, & Bell. 1968. Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas.
Dan Russell loves serendipity and so when this plant appeared, not searched for, it was a serendiptous find. (see 2020 keynote address)
4) I guessed AAAS was a likely culprit. Indeed at http://www.aaas.org/press-public-engagement "Annual Meeting. The world's largest scientific conference..."
I was surprised at how well Twitter worked as a search engine.
Cheer jon tU