Tuesday, April 5, 2011

SearchGuru: Assisting Computer Newbies in Search

SearchGuru: (firefox plugin, chrome plugin that connects to a service)
- When a non-native user types a search query, if we can identify the sense or meaning of the word/phrase typed based on the results returned, then we show the “phishguru” style help online for the illiterate population, old population that are not comfortable with Google (VillageGoogle)
- Provides data for Crosslingual IR (queries that users affirm for a set of results can be cross-indexed)
- Provides data for sense-disambiguation
- A cool mascot is needed to cater to Kids and Elderly !

Monday, April 4, 2011

Meta-Search Engine for Micro-tasks

Crowdflower, odesk, crowdcloud, castingwords, mechanical turk and the list goes on.
Lots of websites and the users have no clue of where to contribute how and make best use of the few minutes of time they have per day.

We propose a meta-search engine for harvesting tasks in real-time from these micro-task markets and act as a thin-layer of abstraction.

Now, apart from having the luxury of a single-point of entry, what else can we offer so that users embrace such a crowdsourcing platform.
1. Larger volume of tasks becomes quickly attractive for users who are looking for scale
2. Personalized search catering to the constraints of the user
3. Recommendation based on the skillset of the user will be benficial not only to user but also the requester who has to deal with low-quality otherwise.

As researchers embrace micro-task markets for eliciting human input, the nature of the posted tasks moves from those requiring simple mechanical labor to requiring specific cognitive skills. On the other hand, increase is seen in the number of such tasks and the user population in micro-task market places requiring better search interfaces for productive user participation. We posit that understanding user skill sets and presenting them with suitable tasks not only maximizes the over quality of the output, but also attempts to maximize the benefit to the user in terms of more successfully completed tasks.

Summarizing local news for Global Communication

mNews -
http://buenosaires.lti.cs.cmu.edu/andhra/