ISiM Special Lecture (6)  

Making a better Web Snippet

by

 Dr. Ed Cutrell

Researcher

 Microsoft Research

 Redmond, USA.

Date and Time

May 08, 2009: 3:30 PM

Venue

ISiM Lecture Hall-1

Abstract of the Talk 

In this talk, Dr. Ed Cutrell will be describing the work his group has  been doing on new ways to represent Web pages for search and re-finding. People regularly interact with a number of different representations of Web pages. A person looking for new information may initially find a Web page represented as a short snippet rendered by a search engine. When s/he wants to return to the same page the next day, the page may instead be represented by a link in his/her browser history.  The research is based on asking  a few questions:

• What is it about Web pages that people actually remember when they want to return to a page?

• What is important for finding new information?

• How do people explore new or re-visited Web pages?

A new compact representation of pages (called “visual snippets”) that supports both the identification of new, relevant web pages and the re-finding of previously viewed pages is created and a study  exploring how different representations are used in a variety of contexts is carried out. Next, eye-tracking technologies are used to understand how people visually interrogate Web pages. Then, this information is used to build a predictive model of “attentional salience” for Web pages. The research hopes to connect up these models of visual salience to build visual snippets that are informed by these models.