Jay Budzik

User interactions with everyday applications as context for just-in-time information access

Our central claim is that user interactions with everyday productivity applications (e.g., word processors, Web browsers, etc.) provide rich contextual information that can be leveraged to support just-in-time access to task-relevant information. We discuss the requirements for such systems, and develop a general architecture for systems of this type. As evidence for our claim, we present Watson, a system which gathers contextual information in the form of the text of the document the user is manipulating in order to proactively retrieve documents from distributed information repositories. We close by describing the results of several experiments with Watson, which show it consistently provides useful information to its users.

Mining navigation history for recommendation

Although a users navigation history contains a lot of hidden information about the relationship between web pages and between users, this information is usually not exploited. The information hidden in the history can be an invaluable source of knowledge in assisting a user to better surf the Web. We presented a system which actively monitors and tracks a users navigation. Once a users navigation history is captured, we apply data mining techniques to discover the hidden knowledge contained in the history. The knowledge is then used to suggest potentially interesting web pages to users.

Information access in context

Our central claim is that user interactions with productivity applications (e.g. word processors, Web browsers, etc.) provide rich contextual information that can be leveraged to support just-in-time access to task-relevant information. As evidence for our claim, we present Watson, a system which gathers contextual information in the form of the text of the document the user is manipulating, in order to proactively retrieve documents from distributed information repositories related to task at hand, as well as process explicit requests in the context of this task. We close by describing the results of several experiments with Watson, which show it consistently provides useful information to its users. The experiments also suggest that, contrary to the assumptions of many system designers, similar documents are not necessarily useful documents in the context of a particular task.

Supporting on-line resource discovery in the context of ongoing tasks with proactive software assistants

We present ongoing work on systems aimed at improving a users awareness of resources available to them on the Internet and in intranets. First, we briefly describe Watson, a system that proactively retrieves documents from on-line repositories that are potentially useful in the context of a task, allowing the user to quickly become aware of document resources available in on-line information repositories. Next, we describe I2I, an extension of Watson that builds communities of practice on the fly, based on the work that its users do, so that users with similar goals and interests can discover each other and communicate both synchronously and asynchronously. Both Watson and I2I operate given some knowledge of the users current task, gleaned automatically from the behavior of users in software tools. As a result, the systems can provide users with useful resources in the context of the work that they are performing. We argue that the systems can foster a greater sense of awareness of the resources available, while minimizing the effort required to discover them.

Clustering for opportunistic communication

We describe ongoing work on I2I, a system aimed at fostering opportunistic communication among users viewing or manipulating content on the Web and in productivity applications. Unlike previous work in which the URLs of Web resources are used to group users visiting the same resource, we present a more general framework for clustering work contexts to group users together that accounts for dynamic content and distributional properties of Web accesses which can limit the utility URL based systems. In addition, we describe a method for scaffolding asynchronous communication in the context of an ongoing task that takes into account the ephemeral nature of the location of content on the Web. The techniques we describe also nicely cover local files in progress, in addition to publicly available Web content. We present the results of several evaluations that indicate systems that use the techniques we employ may be more useful than systems that are strictly URL based.

Network arts: exposing cultural reality

In this article, we explore a new role for the computer in art as a reflector of popular culture. Moving away from the static audio-visual installations of other artistic endeavors and from the traditional role of the machine as a computational tool, we fuse art and the Internet to expose cultural connections people draw implicitly but rarely consider directly. We describe several art installations that use the World Wide Web as a reflection of cultural reality to highlight and explore the relations between ideas that compose the fabric of our every day lives.

XLibris: an automated library research assistant

While recent work has focused on providing tools and infrastructure for users to access electronic information over the Internet, the relationship between the physical world and information available online has been relatively unexplored. Information about a users location, and the objects she interacts with, can be sufficient to recognize enough of the users task to drive retrieval of online information relevant to the task at hand. The XLibris system automatically retrieves, aggregates, and delivers information about books to users as they are checked out of the library, using information about the books themselves and the users task. XLibris locates books in the Dewey Decimal subject hierarchy to automatically search for the most relevant information about the book for the user, tailoring both the sources queried and the information returned based on the books position in the hierarchy.