INVITED SPEAKERS

Dr. T.V. Raman Senior Research Scientist at Google Labs

Toward More Accessible Search

Information retrieval systems such as Google Search perform extremely well when addressing results in the long tail. Addressing accessibility is about recognizing that user needs and abilities vary over time — said differently, accessibility is about serving users in the long tail. As we move toward an increasingly mobile world with users accessing the Web from a variety of devices and usage contexts, overall effectiveness of search systems is determined by the user's ability to complete a given task in a timely manner. In reaching this goal, information retrieval needs to match the result set with the user along a variety of axies. For example, consider the query:

Lufthansa 455

1. On a desktop, one might serve up a detailed Web page showing flight tracking,status and , available future travel.
2. On a mobile device,one might show a light-weight version of the above.
3. When using a voice-only interface, one might only speak the current flight status.

In the age of information overload, the band-width between man and machine gets increasingly overloaded. Thus, the importance of search goes up directly as:

1. user's attention span goes down.
2. User's display size goes down.
3. User's network band-width goes down.

Accessible Search is about building information retrieval systems that take all of the above into account. I'd like us as a field to formally define the various axies along which we determine the right result to serve users appropriately.

Dr. Allison Druin Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland

Searching for the Future: Understanding Children's Challenges, Actions, and Roles in Searching