Author: Benjamin Kille
In the end of August, I had the pleasure to attend the final edition of the Information Interaction in Context conference (IIiX). The conference took place in Regensburg, Germany.
The organisers dedicated the conference to building bridges between communities. The pool of attendees comprised researchers interested in user interface design, information retrieval systems, and evaluating search behaviours.
I presented the poster of the short paper “Users’ Reading Habits in Online News Portals” by Cagdas Esiok, Brijnesh-Johannes Jain, Frank Hopfgartner, Sahin Albayrak, and myself. The paper investigates transition probabilities observed as users interact with news articles from different categories.
Besides plenty of interesting paper presentation, the conference features three keynotes. Peter Pirolli elaborated on cognitive models for human-information interaction. He focused on information foraging. He mentioned that collecting data can support changing behaviours. Users should set achievable yet challenging goals to improve their lifestyles. Gabriella Kazai held the second keynote. Her talk discussed web content recommendations. She pointed out that evaluation protocols have to consider misjudgements even by highly skilled assessors. Crowd experiments may help to overcome such deficiencies. Francesco Ricci dedicated his keynote to context-aware recommender systems. He highlighted different levels of expectation raised by users. He suggested to deal with new users using a combination of context-awareness and active learning.
The conferences offered an exceptionally good social program including organ concert, Bavarian BBQ, and a tour through a local brewery. I enjoyed the diversity of researchers. I could grasp new perspectives and valuable insights.
IIiX will merge with the Human-Computer Information Retrieval Symposium (HCIR) to become the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR). Alternative naming proposals by Leif Azzopardi (CHIIX) had been dismissed.
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