Keynote Talks

Digital Word of Mouth

Thomas Hofmann, Google Switzerland

Monday, September 26, 9:30 - 10:30

Abstract

coming soon.

Bio

Thomas Hofmann received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bonn in 1997 and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at MIT and at UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute. From 1999 until 2004 he was Assistant and then tenured Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Between 2004 and 2006, he held a position as a Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, while also serving as the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Publication and Information Systems. He is also co-founder and former CEO & Chief Scientist of Recommind Inc, a privately owned company focusing on enterprise search and predictive technologies. Since July 2006, Thomas is Director of Engineering at Google and one of the site leads of Google's engineering center in Zurich, Switzerland. He leads projects in various areas, including Web search, e-commerce, and internet advertising. His scientific interests are in machine learning, natural language understanding, and information retrieval.

Paper, Pen and Touch

Moira Norrie, ETH Zurich

Tuesday, September 27, 9:00 - 10:00

Abstract

It has long been recognised by researchers that the affordances of paper are likely to ensure that it will continue to be in widespread use in the work place, homes and public spaces. Consequently, numerous research projects have investigated ways of integrating paper with digital media and services. In recent years, a lot of this research has revolved around the digital pen and paper technology developed by the Swedish company Anoto, since it offers a robust solution for tracking the position of a pen on paper. While the commercial sector has tended to focus on applications related to the capture of handwriting, many of these research projects have investigated the use of the pen for real-time interaction and possibilities of turning paper into an interactive medium.

Researchers were also quick to realise that digital pen and paper technology could be adapted to support other forms of pen-based interaction and have developed digital whiteboards and tabletops based on the technology. In addition, some systems have combined the technology with touch devices to support bimanual pen and touch interfaces. In the case of document manipulation, this means that touch could be used to perform actions such as a moving a document or turning pages, while the pen could be used to select elements within a document or to annotate it. Further, there are projects which have integrated the work on interactive paper and pen-based interaction on digital tabletops, investigating ways of allowing users to transfer document elements back and forth between paper and digital surfaces.

Despite the success of these research projects in terms of demonstrating the capabilities of digital pen and paper technology and how it could be exploited to support a wide variety of everyday tasks, there are still some technical and non-technical issues that need to addressed if there are to be major breakthroughs in terms of widespread adoption. The first part of the talk will review research in the field, while the second part will examine these issues and the way ahead.

Bio

Moira C. Norrie is Professor of Computer Science and Head of the Institute for Information Systems at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. She studied in her home country of Scotland and obtained her PhD from the University of Glasgow before moving to ETH Zurich in 1993. Her main areas of research are object databases and how they can support advanced application systems and novel forms of information interaction. During the last ten years, her research group has been involved in several projects investigating the use of digital pen and paper technologies to support applications that bridge the paper-digital divide. More recently, this work has been extended to tabletop systems where a digital pen is used to interact with paper and/or digital documents or used in conjunction with touch to support standard operations of search and annotation within documents. Other topics of current research include the adaptation of web interfaces to large interactive surfaces and innovative tools for personal information management based on ideas from advanced domain-specific tools such as Adobe Lightroom which supports the workflow of professional photographers.

The Futures of Digital Libraries: The Evolution of an Idea

Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information

Wednesday, September 28, 9:30 - 10:30

Abstract

The construction of digital libraries have certainly framed technological challenges, particularly with regard to various aspects of scale, and with the complexities of dealing with human languages, and indeed have given rise to substantial progress in these and other technical fields. But I believe that the greatest significance of digital libraries has been at a more profound intellectual level, inviting us to envision new kinds of environments for knowledge discovery, formulation, and dissemination; approaches to defining, managing and interacting with the cultural and intellectual record of our societies. We have repeatedly been forced to revisit questions of what constitutes a digital library, and how (indeed, even if) this differs from simply a collection of digitized or born-digital materials.

In my presentation I will look at some of there recent responses of these challenges of vision, examining emerging systems like Europeana and proposals like the Digital Public Library of America, a few well established operational digital libraries in various sectors, developing scientific knowledge management environments that integrate scholarship, scholarly communication and evidence, and even the changing ways in which we think of the collective mass of information available worldwide through the internet. As part of my analysis, I will discuss the enormous distorting effects of current copyright laws on our ability to realize many of our collective visions and to achieve necessary scale, but also the promise offered by the new renaissance in public engagement (citizen science, social media and related developments) and the progress of various movements towards openness. Finally, as I look to the conceptual future of digital libraries I’ll consider the steady advance of technological capabilities in the analysis and exploitation of large, dynamic corpora of materials; these will also continue to reshape our understanding of future directions and possibilities.

Bio

Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley's School of Information. He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. Lynch currently serves on the National Digital Preservation Strategy Advisory Board of the Library of Congress and Microsoft's Technical Computing Science Advisory Board.