This month I have decided to talk about a conference paper and a conference proceedings; the former is out of left field and the latter is a kind of reminder that the proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2007) are now available in the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL). (1) The virtual tele-tASK professor: semantic search in recorded lectures This paper is in the latest issue of the ACM SIGCSE (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) bulletin, in fact it was presented at the SIGCSE Symposium 2007. I personally did not know that this bulletin has been published since 1969 (the first issue was published in Feb 1969). I think this particular paper can be interesting to people who research alternative user interface input techniques. The authors propose an e-librarian service that understands student's complete questions in natural language. Although this work is focusing on e-learning, the results could be useful to general research on systems that aim to support natural language interaction. The authors also indicate that "experiments confirmed our e-librarian service as an efficient e-learning tool". The keynote talk of ACM SIGCSE Symposium also looks interesting, "To Teach is to Touch Lives Forever", but unfortunately only the abstract is available.

"This paper describes our e-librarian service that understands students' complete questions in natural language and retrieves very few but pertinent learning objects, i.e., short multimedia documents. The system is based on three key components: the formal representation of a domain ontology, a mechanism to automatically identify learning objects out of a knowledge source, and a semantic search engine that yields only pertinent results based on the freely formulated questions in natural language.We report on experiments about students' acceptance to enter complete questions instead of only keywords, and about the benefits of such a virtual personal teacher in an educational environment."

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1227310.1227330 Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
(2) Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2007) I believe creating intelligent user interfaces has always been a challenge that the accessibility community addresses. Although the motivation can be different from this conference's focus, I still think the proceedings can be useful and interesting to the accessibility community. This conference was held on 28-31st of January and the proceedings of IUI2007 are now available in the ACM Digital Library (ACM DL).
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces (IUI 2007)

Labels: e-learning, intelligent user interfaces, UIU