This invention is related to systems and methods that facilitate computer-based applications in accordance with one or more memorability models that capture the ability of people to recognize particular events as important landmarks in time and to benefit by using the landmarks in navigating or reviewing content.
Global competition has led to an ever-increasing demand for accessing relevant information quickly. For example, prompt access to relevant information can make a difference with respect to making money over losing money in the stock market. Demands on the media and journalists place a premium on obtaining relevant information before the competition. Other industries such as in the high technology sector and consulting fields require individuals in those industries to be on top of current events and trends with respect to certain markets. Likewise, within a client-based system and intranet, quickly accessing relevant information is a must with respect to remaining efficient within a working environment. Accordingly, there is an ever-increasing need for systems and methods which facilitate prompt access to relevant information.
The following presents a simplified summary of the invention in order to provide a basic understanding of some aspects of the invention. This summary is not an extensive overview of the invention. It is not intended to identify key/critical elements of the invention or to delineate the scope of the invention. Its sole purpose is to present some concepts of the invention in a simplified form as a prelude to the more detailed description that is presented later.
The present invention provides systems and methods for developing and harnessing models of memorability that capture in an automated manner the ability of people to recognize events as important landmarks in time. The models of memorability include procedures and policies for categorizing or assigning some measure of memorability to events that can be employed by various computer-based applications to aid users in processing, receiving, and/or communicating information. As an example, events can include appointments and other annotations in a user's calendar, holidays, news stories over time, and photos, among other items. In one particular example application, the models are employed to provide a personalized index containing landmarks in time, wherein the use of such an index can be utilized in browsing directories of files or other information and in reviewing the results of a search engine. The memorability models can include voting models, heuristic models, rules models, statistical models, and/or complimentary models that are based on patterns of forgetfulness rather then items remembered. In addition, user interfaces are provided that facilitate application of the models to assisting users in the retrieval and processing of information. Furthermore, the present invention includes various applications and methods for building a data store itself such as providing a browsable archive of important (and less important) data. For example, the data store can capture a life history (or other events) such as “Our families biography,” and “My autobiography” and so forth.
In another aspect, the subject invention provides for a system and method that facilitates computer-based searching for information in accordance with the memorability models. This includes design and analysis of timeline visualizations in connection with displaying results to queries based at least in part on an index of content. The visualization in connection with the subject invention can be related to a search engine that provides a unified index of information a user has been exposed to (e.g., including web pages, email, documents, pictures, audio . . . ). The subject invention exploits value of extending a basic time view by adding public landmarks (e.g., holidays, important news events) and/or personal landmarks (e.g., photos, significant calendar events).
According to one particular aspect of the invention, results of searches can be presented with an overview-plus-detail timeline visualization. A summary view can show distribution of search hits over time, and a detailed view allows for inspection of individual search results. Returned items can be annotated with icons and short descriptions, if desired.
People employ a variety of strategies when searching through personal emails, files, or web bookmarks for a particular item. Although people do not remember all
aspects of an item they are looking for (such as for example an exact title and path of a file), they do tend to remember important events in their lives (e.g., their children's birthdays, exotic travel, prominent events such as the September 11 attacks or the assassination of JFK). The subject invention can employ such types of contextual information to support searching through content. Interactive visualization in accordance with the subject invention provides timeline-based presentations of search results that can be anchored by public (e.g., news, holidays) and/or personal (e.g., appointments, photos) landmark events. An indexing and search system underlying the visualization in accordance with the subject invention can index text and metadata of items (e.g., documents, visited web pages, and emails) that a user has been exposed to so as to provide a fast and easy manner to search over and retrieve information content.
To the accomplishment of the foregoing and related ends, certain illustrative aspects of the invention are described herein in connection with the following description and the annexed drawings. These aspects are indicative, however, of but a few of the various ways in which the principles of the invention may be employed and the present invention is intended to include all such aspects and their equivalents. Other advantages and novel features of the invention may become apparent from the following detailed description of the invention when considered in conjunction with the drawings.
The present invention is now described with reference to the drawings, wherein like reference numerals are used to refer to like elements throughout. In the following description, for purposes of explanation, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the present invention. It may be evident, however, that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known structures and devices are shown in block diagram form in order to facilitate describing the present invention.
As used in this application, the terms “component,” “system,” “model,” “application,” and the like are intended to refer to a computer-related entity, either hardware, a combination of hardware and software, software, or software in execution. For example, a component may be, but is not limited to being, a process running on a processor, a processor, an object, an executable, a thread of execution, a program, and/or a computer. By way of illustration, both an application running on a server and the server can be a component. One or more components may reside within a process and/or thread of execution and a component may be localized on one computer and/or distributed between two or more computers.
As used herein, the term “inference” refers generally to the process of reasoning about or inferring states of the system, environment, and/or user from a set of observations as captured via events and/or data. Inference can be employed to identify a specific context or action, or can generate a probability distribution over states, for example. The inference can be probabilistic—that is, the computation of a probability distribution over states of interest based on a consideration of data and events. Inference can also refer to techniques employed for composing higher-level events from a set of events and/or data. Such inference results in the construction of new events or actions from a set of observed events and/or stored event data, whether or not the events are correlated in close temporal proximity, and whether the events and data come from one or several event and data sources.
Referring initially to
One or more heuristic models 140 can be provided as a memorability model 110. For example, these models 140 can utilize several properties of messages and create informal policies that assign scores or deterministic categories of memorability based on functions of properties. As an example, a heuristic function can be constructed that analyzes the increasing duration of events on a calendar (or other information source) as positively influencing the memorability of events. This can include considerations of heuristics relating to which images or subsets of images from a set of images would serve as the most memorable of sets of images snapped at an event, based on such properties as the pictures themselves, including composition of objects in a scene, color histogram, faces recognized (e.g., by automated face recognition software), features involving the sequence and temporal relationships among pictures (e.g., first, or near first in a set of pictures snapped to capture an event), a picture associated with short inter-picture intervals, capturing excitement of the photographer about an aspect of the event 114, and properties that indicate that a user's activity with regard to the picture, such as having examined or displayed (with relatively longer dwell time on the picture) the image, having edited (e.g., cropped and renamed) the picture, and so forth. Other features of images include automated analysis of image quality, including focus and orientation, for example.
At 150, one or more rules models or rules can be provided to determine events 114. This can include rules for automatically assigning measures of memorability to news stories that can include such properties as the number of news stories, persistence in the media, number of casualties, the dollar value of the loss associated with the news story, features capturing dimensions of surprise or atypical, and the proximity to the user of the event (e.g., same/different country, state, city, and so forth). At 160, various statistical models can be provided to model the events 114. Statistical models 160 may be employed for various items, centering on the use of machine learning methods that can provide models which can predict the memorability of items, including calendar events, holidays, news stories, and images, based on sets of features, and so forth. Statistical models 160 and process include the use of Bayesian learning, which can generate Bayesian dependency models, such as Bayesian networks, naïve Bayesian classifiers, and/or Support Vector Machines (SVMs), for example. A trainer (not shown) can be supplied that takes explicit examples of landmark items—or items that may be most likely forgotten, depending on the application, or can be supplied with examples identified through implicit training.
Models of memorability 110 can be also be formulated in a complementary manner at 170 to yield models of forgetting, and thus can be leveraged in the applications 120. Thus, the complimentary models 170 describe the use of variants of the models of memorability 110 which are focused on inferring the likelihood that users will not recall an important forthcoming event or other related information. These models 170 can utilize inferences in applications 120, such as calendars to highlight in a selective manner the information that a user is likely to forget in a visually salient manner, or to change the timing or alerting of information in accordance with the likelihood that the information will not be remembered. Such models of memorability and forgetting can be combined with messaging and reminding systems, for example, wherein context-sensitive costs and benefits of transmitting the information and alerting a user, about information that they may need because they will not remember it, (e.g., information transmitted to a peripheral device or display can be considered in an informal cost-benefit analysis or a formal decision analysis that consider the expected value of if, when, and how to step forward with a reminder). As will be described in more detail below, views of events over time, and processes for assisting users can be provided to browse information stores, in the context of sets of events that are important for easing the task of identifying documents created over time.
The memorability models 110 support various systems, processes, and applications 120. This can include employing model of memorability information-management applications that labels events or items with numerical or categorical labels according to some measure of the likelihood that an item will be recalled, recognized as a landmark, or be most representative of an event or time. These applications can utilize mathematical functions that assign a scalar measure of salience of events or items as being recalled, recognized as landmarks, or be most representative of events or times.
Statistical models of memorability via machine learning methods can also be applied, trained implicitly or with an explicit training system that collects information about a sample of memorable or non-memorable events or items. This can include providing real-time inference or classification about the likelihood that events or items as being recalled, recognized as landmarks, or be most representative of events or times, or, more generally, provide a probability distribution over different degrees or aspects of the systems and processes supported by the present invention.
Other applications include the use of models of memorability to automatically filter a stream of heterogeneous events and content, so as to selectively store events for log of lifetime events, for example, to limit required memory of storage. The use of models of memorability can also be employed to create a means of browsing (e.g., hierarchically a lifetime log of heterogeneous events or content browsing data at different levels of temporal precision (e.g., hours, days, months, years, decades)). Another application includes the use of models of representative landmarks and memorability to selectively choose pictures for an ambient display of pictures drawn from a picture library. Still other applications include the use of models of representative memory landmarks and memorability to selectively choose a set of pictures in a slide show over time or at different points in time about one or more events, under constraints in the total number of slides that a user desires to show. In yet another aspect, applications include the use of models of representative memory landmarks and memorability to selectively choose a set of items (e.g., images) to characterize or summarize the contents of a corpus of items (e.g., a photo library, thumbnails of graphics or photo images displayed on the files, items, or folders of documents in an operating system (e.g., MS Windows). It is noted that the concepts of memorability also apply to a range of targets, per learning and inference such as:
As noted above, a complement to models of memorability are models of forgetting. Thus, the present invention can similarly train models from data and perform inference about items that may be forgotten and couple the inferred likelihood that an item will be forgotten with a cost-benefit analysis of the expected value of reminding a user about an item. General decision-theoretic analyses about when to come forward under the uncertainty that assistance is needed is described by works such as Principles of Mixed-Initiative Interaction by E. Horvitz, Proceedings of CHI '99, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Pittsburgh, Pa., May 1999. ACM Press. pp 159-166.
The present invention can employ such expected-utility methods, taking as central in the computation of the expected value of reminding a user, the likelihood of forgetting (and remembering) that is inferred from models of memorability. Thus, the present invention can perform expected-utility decision making about if and when to come forward to remind a user about something that they are likely to forget given the item type and context—considering the cost of the interruption (e.g., the current cost of interruption). Such models can be used in the control of alerting about reminders in desktop, as well for mobile devices, via the incorporation of the disruptiveness and the cost of the transmission.
Beyond use for healthy people, such models can also be exploited to assist patients with various cognitive deficits that may lead to memory aberrancies. For example, a model of memorability built from training data may be used to predict the likelihood that a patient with Alzheimer's disease is at a particular stage of the illness. Such models can be coupled with cost-benefit analyses as described above and, with appropriate hardware to provide audiovisual cues to users, providing ideal reminders.
The interface 200 depicts the use of appointment items, however, as can be appreciated it can apply similar methods to adding key images and news stories, etc. to the left hand column 210. Files can be launched directly from these columns (e.g., mouse click), as in other file browsers.
Thus, more events are added from that depicted in
A training system and method can be invoked in the interfaces depicted above.
p(memory landmark |E1 . . . En), wherein p is a probability and E1 . . . En is evidence relating to one or more event properties (e.g., closeness of event to holiday, key words such as important or urgent meeting, award presentation or reception indicators, milestone meetings, performance review, and so forth). This probability can be assigned to non-scored calendar events for use in the above interfaces.
It is noted that one or more decision models can be formulated for computing memorization models. Consider for example, the model 600 displayed in
The model 600 shows a Bayesian network (probabilistic dependency model) inferred from the data. Note the variables being considered, can be automatically gleaned from a user's online appointments. Some of the more interesting variables include, whether or not peers (organizationally) are at a meeting, the day of week, the time of day, the duration of the meeting, whether the meeting is recurrent, the time set for early reminding about the meeting, the role of the user (organizer?, attendee?, etc.), did the meeting come via an alias or from a person, how many attendees are at the meeting, are a user's direct reports, manager, or manager's manager at the meeting, who is the organizer of the meeting, the subject of the meeting, the location of the meeting, how did the user respond to the meeting request. Some variables under consideration (see Bayesian network model) in statistical modeling are specially designed for this kind of memory landmark application. These include “organizer atypia,” “location atypia,” and “attendees atypia.” These are computed from a user's appointment store and capture the rarity or “atypia” of properties of an event or appointment.
Organizer atypia refers to the frequency that the organizer has organized a meeting. All of the appointments are examined and the organizers are noted. The fraction of times the current organizer has been an organizer for the meetings is computed for each meeting being analyzed. The same is performed for locations and attendees at a meeting. For the latter, the most atypical attendee is considered to be the atypical attendee meeting property for an event. In one implementation, the present invention discretizes typicality for Location, Organizer, and Attendees into states based on ranges of frequency, e.g.,:
0% to 1%—very atypical
1% to 5%—atypical
5% to 10%—typical
10% to 100%—very typical
The psychology literature contains abundant discussion of episodic memory, the theory that memories about the past may be organized by episodes, which include information such as the location of an event, who was present, and what occurred before, during, and after the event. Research also suggests that people use routine or extraordinary events as “anchors” when trying to reconstruct memories of the past. Time of a particular event can be recalled by framing it in terms of other events, either historic or autobiographical. Visualization in connection with the subject invention harnesses these ideas by annotating a base timeline with personal and/or public landmarks when displaying the results of users' searches over personal content.
A study of memory for computing events showed that people forgot a significant number of computing tasks they had performed one month in the past. Their knowledge of a temporal order of those tasks had also decayed after one month, but when prompted by videos and photographs of their work during a target time period, they were able to recall significantly more of the tasks they had performed and were able to more accurately remember the actual sequence of those tasks. More generally, research on encoding specificity emphasizes interdependence between what is encoded and what cues are later successful for retrieval. Memory also depends on the reinstatement of not only item-specific contexts, but also more general learning contexts.
A large body of research on efficient searching exists, including work on visualizing search results in a matrix whose rows and columns could be ordered by a variety of user-specified parameters, work suggesting that textual and 2D interfaces are generally more efficient than 3D interfaces for most search tasks, and research on displaying categorical, summary, and/or thumbnail information with search results. The subject invention employs utility of timelines and temporal landmarks for guiding the search over content (e.g., personal content). Time is a common organizational structure for applications and data. Plaisant, et al.'s LifeLines (See Plaisant, C., Milash, B., Rose, A., Widoff, S., and Shneiderman, B. LifeLines: Visualizing Personal Histories. Proceedings of CHI 1996, 221-228) takes advantage of the time-based structure of human memory by displaying personal histories in a timeline format. Kumar, et al.'s work (See Kumar, V., Furuta, R., and Allen, R. Metadata Visualization for Digital Libraries: Interactive Timeline Editing and Review. Proceedings of the 3 rd ACM Conference on Digital Libraries (1998), 126-133) on digital libraries uses timelines to visualize topics such as world history and stock prices, as well as metadata about documents in the library, such as publication date. Rekimoto's “time-machine computing” (See Rekimoto, J. Time-Machine Computing: A Time-centric Approach for the Information Environment. Proceedings of UIST 1999, 45-54) leverages the fact that people's activities are closely associated with times by allowing users to find old documents via “time-travel” to a prior version of their desktop where the target items were present. Fertig, et al.'s LifeStreams (See Rekimoto, J. Time-Machine Computing: A Time-centric Approach for the Information Environment. Proceedings of UIST 1999, 45-54) presents the user's personal file system in timeline format. “Forget-Me-Not” is a ubiquitous computing system that serves as a memory augmentation device by gathering information about daily events from other devices in the environment, and allowing perusal and filtering of those records. Meetings with coworkers (time, location, and names of people present), phone calls, and emails are examples of the type of data collected and available as memory cues. “Save Everything” (See Hull, J. and Hart, P. Toward Zero Effort Personal Document Management. IEEE Computer (March, 2001), 30-35) has a similar approach, collecting various data about documents and then allowing querying using personal metadata such as the manner of a document's acquisition (e.g., fax vs. email vs. photocopying) or the relevant activities occurring at the time of the data's acquisition. Minneman and Harrison's Timestreams (See Minneman, S. and Harrison, S. Space, Timestreams, and Architecture: Design in the Age of Digital Video. Proceedings of the Third International International Federation of Information Processing WG 5.2 Workshop on Formal Design Methods for CAD (1997)) use everyday activities (e.g., speaking, drawing sketches, typing notes) to index into audio and video streams. In contrast to these efforts, the system 1100 in accordance with the subject invention uses a variety of personal and public landmarks as memory cues to explore whether such context provides useful memory prompts for efficiently searching personal content. While previous research efforts have individually explored timeline-based visualizations, contextual cues for retrieval, or other methods for increasing search efficiency, the subject invention bridges all three areas by using the metaphor of a timeline combined with contextual cues in searching over content (e.g., personal content).
Visualization
To test the value of annotating timelines with temporal landmarks, a prototype was developed that provides an interactive visualization of results output by a search application. The visualization, displayed in
Public Landmarks
Public landmarks are drawn from incidents that a broad base of users would typically be aware of. Landmarks are given a priority ranking, and typically only landmarks that meet a threshold priority are displayed. For a prototype in accordance with the subject invention, all users saw the same public landmarks, although it is to be appreciated that different aspects of the invention can explore letting users customize their public landmarks adding, for instance, religious holidays that are important to them, or lowering the ranking of news headlines that they don't deem memorable.
Holidays
A list of secular holidays commonly celebrated in the United States was obtained, and the dates those holidays occurred from 1994 through 2004, by extracting that information from a calendar. Priorities were manually assigned to each holiday, based on knowledge of American culture (e.g., Groundhog Day was given a low priority, while Thanksgiving Day was given a high priority). Holidays and priorities could easily be adapted for any culture.
News Headlines
News headlines from 1994-2001 were extracted from the world history timeline that comes with a commercially available multimedia encyclopedia program. Because 2002 events were not available, inventors of the subject invention used their own recollections of current events to supply major news headlines from that year. Ten employees from an organization (none of whom were participants in a later user study) rated a set of news headlines on a scale of 1 to 10 based on how memorable they found those events. The averages of these scores were used to assign priorities to the news landmarks.
Personal Landmarks
Personal landmarks are unique for each user. For the prototype, all of these landmarks were automatically generated, but for other aspects of the subject invention it is appreciated that users can have the option of specifying their own landmarks.
Calendar Appointments
Dates, times, and titles of appointments stored in the user's calendar were automatically extracted for use as landmark events. Appointments were assigned a priority according to a set of heuristics. If an appointment was recurring, its priority was lowered, because it seemed less likely to stand out as memorable. An appointment's priority increased proportionally with the duration of the event, as longer events (for example such as conferences or vacations) seemed likely to be particularly memorable. For similar reasons, appointments designated as “out of office” times received a boost in score. Being flagged as a “tentative” appointment lowered priority, while being explicitly tagged as “important” increased priority.
Digital Photographs
The prototype crawled the users' digital photographs (if they had any). The first photo taken on a given day was selected as a landmark for that day, and a thumbnail (64 pixels along the longer side) was created. Photos that were the first in a given year were given higher priorities than those which were the first in a month, which in turn were ranked more highly than those which were first on a day. Thus, as the zoom level changed an appropriate number of photo landmarks could be shown. The inventors did not explore more sophisticated algorithms for selecting photos to display, but it is to be appreciated that such techniques (See Graham, A., Garcia-Molina, H., Paepcke, A., and Winograd, T. Time as Essence for Photo Browsing Through Personal Digital Libraries. Proceedings of the Second ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (2002), 326-335, or by Platt, J. AutoAlbum: Clustering Digital Photographs Using Probabilistic Model Merging. IEEE Workshop on Content-Based Access of Image and Video Libraries 2000, 96-100) are contemplated with respect to the subject invention and are intended to fall within the scope of the hereto appended claims.
Study
To evaluate concepts behind the prototype, a user study was conducted. Goals were to learn whether a timeline-based presentation of search results was helpful to users, and whether different types of landmarks improved the utility of the timeline view for searching. Both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered to investigate those issues.
Participants
The subjects were twelve employees from an organization, all of whom were men aged twenty-five to sixty. A prerequisite for participation in the study was being a user of a search system (e.g., Stuff I've Seen (SIS)).
Preparation
The day before each subject came to a usability lab, they were asked to do two things. First, the inventors asked subjects to install a program that extracted the titles of all of their non-private appointments from their calendar, and then e-mail that list of titles to the inventors. This information was employed to create from two to eight personalized queries for each participant, based on educated guesses about their appointments (e.g., if they had an appointment called “trip to Florida” the inventors might prepare a question like “Find the webpage you used when buying your airline tickets to Florida”, or if they had an appointment called “CHI 2002” the inventors might ask them to find the paper they had submitted to CHI 2002).
Second, each subject was sent a .pst file (e.g., a repository of Microsoft Outlook™ email messages) so that the SIS application running on their machine would have time to index the contents of that file before they arrived for the study. This file contained a collection of messages that had been sent to a large number of people in the organization (e.g., announcements of talks, holiday parties, promotions, etc.), which everyone would have received at some point. Although the inventors knew everyone had received these messages since they were originally sent to large mailing lists, the inventors did not know in advance whether individual participants archived such mail or deleted it, so the inventors sent them the .pst file in order to facilitate that the target items were in their index.
Method
When participants came to the usability lab, they were asked to use Windows XP's Remote Desktop feature to access their office computer. While the participant toured the lab, the inventors installed a visualization client in accordance with the subject invention on their machine. Participants first filled out a questionnaire asking for demographic information as well as information about their searching and filing habits and about ways they remembered information. Next they read a tutorial and performed two practice searches using the timeline interface. They were given as much time as they needed to complete the tutorial and were allowed to ask questions. The experiment began after the tutorial was completed.
The experiment had a within-subjects design. Each participant was given a series of tasks to complete using two different interfaces. For half of the tasks, they saw their search results presented in the context of a timeline annotated only by dates (
The inventors used two kinds of questions: thirty questions common to all participants, and 2-8 unique personalized questions. The first fifteen questions in each of the two conditions involved finding items which the inventors knew had been sent to a large number of employees, and which the inventors had included in the .pst file the inventors had installed the previous day. For each of these thirty common tasks, the inventors provided participants with a pre-determined query to issue, and instructed them not to change this query. The inventors chose to use pre-set queries because their goal was to test how well the timeline and landmarks helped users to navigate among their search results, and the inventors did not want to inadvertently end up testing how well the user was able to formulate a query. Thus, the inventors chose queries that would ensure that the target item would appear somewhere on the timeline, but that were broad enough that many other results would also appear.
At the end of each set of common questions, the inventors asked a few questions that the inventors had customized for each user based on the subject lines from their calendar appointments that the inventors had extracted the day before. Although these questions were different for each participant, the inventors felt they were important to add because they targeted more personal and memorable documents than the company-wide email messages. For these personal tasks, users were allowed to enter a query of their choosing and to reformulate the query to refine their search if they desired.
Once a query had been issued, users could navigate the timeline and inspect the search results by looking at the icons and titles, hovering for popup summaries with more detailed information, or clicking to open the actual document. When they had found the target item, they clicked a large button marked “Found It,” and were automatically presented with the next task and query. If they were unable to locate the target item, there was also a button marked “Give Up,” which allowed them to proceed to the next question. During the experiment, software logged all the details of their interaction, including the number of search results returned for each query, the number of landmarks of various types that were displayed, and information on the users' hovering, clicking, and overall timing of interactions.
After completing all of the tasks, subjects filled out another questionnaire asking for feedback about the usability of the software, the utility of the timeline presentation and the various types of landmarks, and for free-form comments.
In summary, each of the 12 study participants were exposed to both of the experimental conditions—using the timeline with dates and landmarks, and using the timeline with dates only. In each condition, participants used the visualization to answer two types of questions—fixed questions about email that had been sent to large distribution lists and personalized questions custom-picked for each subject.
Results
Search Time
Analysis was performed on the median search times for each participant to help mitigate common skewing of human performance times. Here the inventors only looked at questions common to all participants, to insure a fair comparison. A paired-sample t-test of the median search times for each participant indicated that times for the Landmark condition were significantly faster than the date-only condition, t(11)=2.33, p<0.05. A comparison of the average of median search times is shown in
Questionnaire
In addition to the timing data, participants completed questionnaires at the beginning and conclusion of the experiment. Participants first entered some demographic information followed by a number of questions using a 7-point Likert scale. (A score of 1=“Strongly Disagree” and 7=“Strongly Agree.” E.g., “I liked using this software” or “When I need to find old documents or email, it is relatively easy to do so.”). Finally, participants answered a number of free-form questions (e.g., “Are there certain types of search tasks for which you think landmarks would help you search more efficiently?”).
At the start of each session, before seeing the visualization, subjects answered a series of questions about their current strategies for locating documents (Table 1). The three most highly rated attributes for searching were topic, people and time. Existing search tools support access by topic and people, but provide less support for time-oriented search. The visualization helps remedy this by allowing a keyword-based search to generate an initial set of results, coupled with a rich time display for navigation among results.
Before beginning the study session, subjects were also asked to rate the importance of different types of landmarks for recalling events (Table 2). It is interesting to note that public events (world events and holidays) received lower ratings than more personalized events. One user commented, “Photos could easily be useful, as are calendar appts. But news events and holidays are less important. I mean, I know Halloween is in October . . . and Xmas is in December. Calling that out doesn't add information.” Another user said, “For me it's more events in my life, then world wide events. Of course September 11 is a big thing, but for me I think of what happened before I went to Africa, or after I moved into the new house, etc.”
An interesting avenue for future work would be to extend the study of the date-only versus all-landmarks conditions by distinguishing between different types of events—running “personal landmarks” and “public landmarks” conditions in addition to the two conditions explored here. After finishing the experiment, participants evaluated the general usefulness of the timeline interface (Table 3). Participants generally found the time-based presentation of results useful, although it would be worthwhile to explore further whether certain classes of search tasks are better suited to time-based presentation of results and other types of tasks might work best with alternate organizational schemes. One participant suggested the landmarks were most useful when “looking for time- or event-related mail: finding Rick's mail about airport closures is pretty coupled to September 11.”
Although the vertical presentation of the timeline was well received, many users wanted the option of reversing the flow of time such that more recent search results were displayed near the bottom of the screen. This preference about the direction of time was often related to whether their email client displayed newer messages at the top or bottom of the message queue. As can be appreciated, the present invention can employ various timeline renderings (e.g., horizontal timelines, reverse direction timelines).
Users generally found the overview provided in the visualization to be useful (one user commented, “I liked the way the little horizontal lines showed bursts of activity. That way I could figure out what time period stuff happened.”), but many users found it confusing to navigate through the search results by selecting a section of the overview timeline (another user said, “Adjusting the time scale on the Overview pane didn't seem intuitive to me”).
The inventors developed and evaluated a timeline-based visualization of search results over personal content. Results on episodic memory inspired them to augment the timeline with public (news headlines and holidays) and personal (calendar appointments and digital photographs) landmark events, in hopes that this added context would aid people in locating the target of their search. A user study found that there was a statistically significant time savings for searching with the landmark-augmented timeline compared to a timeline marked only by dates. Additionally, the inventors gathered important feedback about the way users believe that they remember events and about their reactions to the visualization. This work demonstrates the utility of adding global and personal context to the presentation of search results, as well as suggesting directions for future study.
In view of at least the above, the inventors contemplate relative value of different kinds of temporal landmarks in reviewing search results, and for investigating, more generally, when timeline-centric views are most useful for finding target results of interest. It is likely, for example, that the distribution of items over time returned for a particular query will influence the overall utility of a timeline view for finding items.
There are a number of other opportunities for refining the system. Users reported some difficulty in navigating the timeline and the inventors would like to improve the control of navigation via better coupling of zooming and translation in time. Accordingly, one particular aspect of the subject invention can refine heuristics (or other models) for selecting and ranking landmarks (from all sources), and in exploring different types of summary landmarks. For example, shading segments of the overview timeline with different colors to indicate years or seasons within a year can be employed. Landmarks related to the search results themselves could also be identified, such as key attributes about the content and structure of documents. In addition to passively displaying landmarks, users can combine landmarks and more traditional search terms in formulation of a query, enabling users to search “by landmark”, e.g., saying something like “show me all documents that I composed right before the project review with my manager” or “show me all emails I received the week of the earthquake.”
With reference to
The system bus 1708 can be any of several types of bus structure including a memory bus or memory controller, a peripheral bus and a local bus using any of a variety of commercially available bus architectures. The system memory 1706 includes read only memory (ROM) 1710 and random access memory (RAM) 1712. A basic input/output system (BIOS), containing the basic routines that help to transfer information between elements within the computer 1702, such as during start-up, is stored in the ROM 1710.
The computer 1702 further includes a hard disk drive 1714, a magnetic disk drive 1716, (e.g., to read from or write to a removable disk 1718) and an optical disk drive 1720, (e.g., reading a CD-ROM disk 1722 or to read from or write to other optical media). The hard disk drive 1714, magnetic disk drive 1716 and optical disk drive 1720 can be connected to the system bus 1708 by a hard disk drive interface 1724, a magnetic disk drive interface 1726 and an optical drive interface 1728, respectively. The drives and their associated computer-readable media provide nonvolatile storage of data, data structures, computer-executable instructions, and so forth. For the computer 1702, the drives and media accommodate the storage of broadcast programming in a suitable digital format. Although the description of computer-readable media above refers to a hard disk, a removable magnetic disk and a CD, it should be appreciated by those skilled in the art that other types of media which are readable by a computer, such as zip drives, magnetic cassettes, flash memory cards, digital video disks, cartridges, and the like, may also be used in the exemplary operating environment, and further that any such media may contain computer-executable instructions for performing the methods of the present invention.
A number of program modules can be stored in the drives and RAM 1712, including an operating system 1730, one or more application programs 1732, other program modules 1734 and program data 1736. It is appreciated that the present invention can be implemented with various commercially available operating systems or combinations of operating systems.
A user can enter commands and information into the computer 1702 through a keyboard 1738 and a pointing device, such as a mouse 1740. Other input devices (not shown) may include a microphone, an IR remote control, a joystick, a game pad, a satellite dish, a scanner, or the like. These and other input devices are often connected to the processing unit 1704 through a serial port interface 1742 that is coupled to the system bus 1708, but may be connected by other interfaces, such as a parallel port, a game port, a universal serial bus (“USB”), an IR interface, etc. A monitor 1744 or other type of display device is also connected to the system bus 1708 via an interface, such as a video adapter 1746. In addition to the monitor 1744, a computer typically includes other peripheral output devices (not shown), such as speakers, printers etc.
The computer 1702 may operate in a networked environment using logical connections to one or more remote computers, such as a remote computer(s) 1748. The remote computer(s) 1748 may be a workstation, a server computer, a router, a personal computer, portable computer, microprocessor-based entertainment appliance, a peer device or other common network node, and typically includes many or all of the elements described relative to the computer 1702, although, for purposes of brevity, only a memory storage device 1750 is illustrated. The logical connections depicted include a LAN 1752 and a WAN 1754. Such networking environments are commonplace in offices, enterprise-wide computer networks, intranets and the Internet.
When used in a LAN networking environment, the computer 1702 is connected to the local network 1752 through a network interface or adapter 1756. When used in a WAN networking environment, the computer 1702 typically includes a modem 1758, or is connected to a communications server on the LAN, or has other means for establishing communications over the WAN 1754, such as the Internet. The modem 1758, which may be internal or external, is connected to the system bus 1708 via the serial port interface 1742. In a networked environment, program modules depicted relative to the computer 1702, or portions thereof, may be stored in the remote memory storage device 1750. It will be appreciated that the network connections shown are exemplary and other means of establishing a communications link between the computers may be used.
In accordance with one aspect of the present invention, the filter architecture adapts to the degree of filtering desired by the particular user of the system on which the filtering is employed. It can be appreciated, however, that this “adaptive” aspect can be extended from the local user system environment back to the manufacturing process of the system vendor where the degree of filtering for a particular class of users can be selected for implementation in systems produced for sale at the factory. For example, if a purchaser decides that a first batch of purchased systems are to be provided for users that do should not require access to any junk mail, the default setting at the factory for this batch of systems can be set high, whereas a second batch of systems for a second class of users can be configured for a lower setting to all more junk mail for review. In either scenario, the adaptive nature of the present invention can be enabled locally to allow the individual users of any class of users to then adjust the degree of filtering, or if disabled, prevented from altering the default setting at all. It is also appreciated that a network administrator who exercises comparable access rights to configure one or many systems suitably configured with the disclosed filter architecture, can also implement such class configurations locally.
What has been described above includes examples of the present invention. It is, of course, not possible to describe every conceivable combination of components or methodologies for purposes of describing the present invention, but one of ordinary skill in the art may recognize that many further combinations and permutations of the present invention are possible. Accordingly, the present invention is intended to embrace all such alterations, modifications and variations that fall within the spirit and scope of the appended claims. Furthermore, to the extent that the term “includes” is used in either the detailed description or the claims, such term is intended to be inclusive in a manner similar to the term “comprising” as “comprising” is interpreted when employed as a transitional word in a claim.
This application is a divisional application of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/374,436, entitled SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR CONTSRUCTING AND USING MODELS OF MEMORABILITY IN COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATIONS APPLICATIONS, which was filed on Feb. 25, 2003 which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 60/444,827 which was filed Feb. 4, 2003, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD THAT FACILITATES COMPUTER-BASED SEARCHING FOR CONTENT. The entirety these applications are incorporated herein by reference.
Number | Date | Country | |
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60444827 | Feb 2003 | US |
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 10374436 | Feb 2003 | US |
Child | 11348018 | Feb 2006 | US |