Shui-Lung Chuang ------------------------------------------------------ Web Search for information that I saw before. I think that most people has such an experience that they remember they saw something useful or interesting before, but just cannot figure out how to access them again. For example, when planning the dinner, one may just happen to remember s/he saw an interesting receipt in a cookbook site before and try to find it. However, s/he just forget the name of the site and couldn't find it after trying several different queries to the search engines. I believe this kind of information need usually emerges in our daily life. In such situation, we usually still have a rough idea of that information. Sometimes, we can recall the original search context (when or what situation) and then figure out how to query and then access it again. But sometimes, we have to give it up after several unsuccessful trials. This kind of search is different from the general Web search. The user is each individual user who ever surfs and searches the Web. The search content would be the pages that s/he have ever accessed. The challenge is how to help the user clarify his memory so as to figure out the context to access the target information. There would be many kinds of approaches to this problem. For example, the Internet front end (e.g., IE) can log the queries that the user ever submitted and interactively help the user to refine the query. Another possibility is that a personal agent indexes all the pages accessed before and do the search on these cached pages. Although the search space of such cached pages becomes much smaller compared to the whole Web, the space available in local computer limit the indexing capability. It may not be able to index all cached pages. How to index and perform search would be critical. To summarize, User: Each individual user Data: Cached Web page + Web Function: efficient indexing and search in local computer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Email An adaptive classifier to help the organization of email. Email has become the majority in my daily information processing. A lot of appointments and events are carried out through email communication with other people. A lot of data I process, e.g., writing some notes, searching Web and sharing photos, are also around the email processing. However, there is still no well-integrated environment of all such information processing need, probably due to file/folder-based informatin management system in our local computers. Igoring this restriction, one of the problems I face often is how to organize the email. Usually, I will keep useful or informative or memorial emails and organize them into some folders. However, such folder hierarchy would grow as more and more new things carried by emails happen. For a while, the folder hierarchy becomes large and I usually have to re-arrange them: e.g., add more levels to have a more organized hierarchy, merge, split or rename some folders to clearly reflect the contents it contains, and archive some less used folders. The challenge is that such a folder hierarchy changes often. In addition, folders may not always carry some topics according to the email content. Some folders may just correspond to some of the friends or groups. The conventional content-based classifier may not work. To summarize, User: every individual user Data: Email + Hierarchy + External data such as Web Funtion: The classifier to give some annotation for each email (Note that the emails is still been processed linearly or thread-based, and not categorized automatically). The classifier must be adaptive to the frequent change of the hierarchy and different characteristics of the folders in the hierarchy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Literature Help the research paper writing When I am writing a paper, one tedious thing is to compose the related work. Usually, I only have a few competitive or referential papers. But the related work needs a more thorough survey, so as to avoid some unnecessary arguments from the reviewers. It would be good to have a system that I can give it some articles or some paragraphs from the ongoing paper and it can return some typical related works together with a rough organization of them according to research topics. For example, given this note, the system may return some papers about searching in local cached pages, some about email categorization, and some about paper retrieval and summarization. To retrieve related papers, it may need the techniques of content-based information retrieval together with link-based approach on the collection obtained by expanding the citations in the given articles. To give each paper a short summary, we may apply some sort of summarization technique on each paper, or just extract th! ose sentences mentioning the paper in other papers that refer the target paper. To organize the result pagers can be achieved by classification using some well-defined research topic hierachy or by clustering if no such topic information is available in advanced. User: Research paper writers Data: Research papers Function: Given some papers, return some typical related works together with some summarization of each paper as the reference to compose the article and some topical information about each paper that help us to organize those related papers.