In this paper we describe a novel social-medical discovery solution, based on an idea of social and medical data unification. Built on foundations of exploratory search technologies, the proposed discovery solution is better tailored for the social-medical discovery task. We then describe its implementation within the IBM Medics system and discuss a sample usecase which demonstrates several new...

A wealth of studies has revealed a cross-cultural difference in the user preference on webpage designs. Users from other cultures often criticize a widely accepted webpage design in one culture. Designs for diverse cultures are thus expected to be specific to address diverse user preferences. This study investigated the preferences of Chinese users on four essential design elements related to t...

The aim of our research project called DidaTab – Didactics of Spreadsheets – is to get a more comprehensive picture of ICT uses in French schools and to obtain a better knowledge of students’ spreadsheet competencies. The exploratory study of curricula and practices shows very sparse use during secondary education. To achieve a more precise estimation of what students can do with spreadsheets, ...

Tagging is a popular feature that supports several collaborative tasks, including search, as tags produced by one user can help others finding relevant content. However, task performance depends on the existence of 'good' tags. A first step towards creating incentives for users to produce ‘good’ tags requires the quantification of their value in the first place. This work fills this gap by comb...

With more longitudinal archives becoming digitized and publicly available, new uses emerge. Collections that span centuries call for a time-aware exploration approach, a coordinated environment supporting understanding the development of word usage and meaning through time, with the means to leverage this for exploration. We present ongoing work on a coordinated time-aware exploratory search ap...

Cultural Heritage institutions have developed numerous ways of supporting visitors who have simply wandered in through the front door. However, for their digital collections, the CH institutions mostly provide a simple search-box, which supports the expert user, but which does not support the casual user who has just stumbled across the collection. These casual users frequently have no goal or ...

Huge amount of users use Web search engines to learn new skills and knowledge everyday. Understanding how the users search to learn is essential for making search engines support these learning-related searches more effectively. Previous researches categorize these learning-related searches as exploratory searches, because they are often open-ended and multi-faceted, in which the user usually s...

Exploratory data analysis often plays a central role in the early stages of scientiic inquiry. Models of complex phenomena are built incrementally, based on suggestive patterns in data and iterative reenement of plausible explanations. Unfortunately, exploration poses an explosive search problem. In this paper we present a planning approach to the problem. We outline the motivation for this app...

We present two novel music interaction systems developed for casual exploratory search. In casual search scenarios, users have an ill-defined information need and it is not clear how to determine relevance. We apply Bayesian inference using evidence of listening intent in these cases, allowing for a belief over a music collection to be inferred. The first system using this approach allows users...