(audience applauding)
- So it is a great pleasure to be able to present
the Lasting Impact Award this year.
So the question you might have
is what is the Lasting Impact Award
with all the (mumbles) influence here
you might think it's due to something that hits you so hard
you get black and blue or something like that.
But it is not.
The Lasting Impact award is an award
that honors each year a UIST paper
from at least 10 years earlier, that means 2008 and earlier,
that made significant research contributions
with long-lasting impact on the UIST community and beyond.
So if you're interested in what has been awarded
in previous years the url is at the bottom over there
to the 2018 archive which is the link
you can click on at the upper right hand corner
of all the pages of this year's conference webpage.
And then you will see all the awards,
in fact there's a list of all the conferences,
the awards, the speakers it's literally the entire history
of UIST and of the several pre-UIST conferences as well.
But the important point for us
is the list of Lasting Impact Awards from the past.
But let's not dwell on the past let's go on to the present
and the Lasting Impact Award this year
is given by a committee.
I had the pleasure of being the chair of that committee
and the other members were Jen Mankoff
from the University of Washington
and Shumin Zhai from Google.
So, without any further ado, well with a little further ado
I will read you the Impact Statement but I'm not gonna show
you the names of the authors or the paper title
until after I read the statement
and you can try to guess, okay,
what this award is being given for.
This is for a paper again, 2008 and earlier,
and the Lasting Impact Award this year is awarded to a paper
for its influential exploration of synchronous
and asynchronous remote collaborative web search,
integrating support for mutual awareness between users,
division of labor among users
and persistence across sessions.
And this has inspired much new research and development
in collaborative information seeking.
And the authors of that important paper
are Mary Morris and Eric Horvitz for a SearchTogether
An Interface for Collaborative Web Search from UIST 2007.
Let's-- (applauding)
And for those of you who have not read the paper,
who are not aware of the work,
what better person to explain it than Mary Morris herself
and before we do this we're going to give her her award.
So we have a little photo moment over here.
(audience applauding)
And I will leave the stage and she will take it
to spend a few minutes telling you about the paper
and putting it in context.
- Great so thank you.
Thank-you for your patience.
And it's really a great honor to accept
the UIST'S Lasting Impact Award
on behalf of myself and my co-author
Eric Horvitz who couldn't travel here today.
So the idea for SearchTogether arose
because when I graduated from Stanford in 2006
I then had to move from California to Seattle
to start my new job at Microsoft Research.
So my husband and I were transitioning
from grad-student life to real-person life
and we had all sorts of things we had to do grown-up things.
So we had to buy a car, we had to buy a house
and most importantly we had to buy a puppy.
And so all of those shopping jobs
involved a lot of searching the web.
So in the summer and fall of 2006
we were searching the web all the time
and if anyone knows me personally
you know I'm a big fan of efficiency
and this was making me crazy
because the process of the two of us
trying to coordinate our web searches
for these activities was so inefficient.
There was all sorts of redundant work.
I was searching for things that my husband
had already searched for but I didn't know
or I was wasting my time looking through webpages
that he had already found to be ineffective
and we were just emailing a lot of links back and forth.
So this process was really frustrating.
And part of the reason it's so frustrating
is because search engines are really conceived
of as being a single-user interface.
They're not designed to support
these kinds of collaborations.
So when I showed up at Microsoft finally with house,
dog and puppy I decided that I would invest my time
in trying to understand better
how to make this a better process.
I did a lot of interviews and survey studies
to learn about whether I was the only person
who had experienced this frustration
and if not how did other people manage it.
We learned a lot about people's
collaborative search practices with status-quo tools.
And so people had all sorts of work-arounds for this right,
so in co-located settings you'd see a lot
of shoulder-surfing where someone would be
a backseat driver and kind of be like,
click on the third link, or suggest a query formulation.
And in remote settings people were doing
what my husband and I did they were using instant messaging
and email to just send sets of links back and forth.
These work-arounds were okay
but they really weren't optimal.
We also learned a lot about the kinds of tasks
that motivated collaborative searching.
So planning travel is a big one
especially if you have groups of people
going on a trip together.
So they're mutually invested in the task.
Shopping for big ticket items
especially two spouses or partners who share a budget
on those items was another big motivator.
Health, unfortunately was a big motivator
because often if someone if someone was diagnosed
with a serious medical condition
then members of their friends and extended family
would all be working to search for things
like treatment options and support and things like that.
And also planning big events,
big social events like weddings
or planning a conference where again
you have multiple stakeholders.
So we saw these kinds of tasks but we also saw
that there were common challenges that people face
trying to use status-quo tools across all these tasks.
And these are, lack of awareness of what the remote partners
are searching for and finding.
Inefficient division of labor among the group
for different parts of the search task
and then a lack of persistence of information
that people have discovered so that
they can share it with each other.
And so in response to this
I built the SearchTogether prototype,
and this is a screenshot,
so this is what software looked like 12 years ago.
I think this is an old WinForms application.
And so there's couple of things that I think
were most interesting so one is we had this idea
of this set of people that you're working on the search with
and you could see the queries
that the other people in your group were issuing.
So that you had an awareness
of what people had already looked for,
what kind of division of labor was emerging,
if you were really interested in a query
someone else in the group issued
you could click on it to be taken to see
the results that they saw at the time.
Another interesting aspect of the interface
was the search results list.
What's really interesting about this,
probably looks very mundane to you now
but was brand new in 2006, 2007 this is the idea
of having social annotations on search results.
So I could see which members of my working group
had already visited certain webpage in the list.
And whether the liked or didn't find those webpages useful,
whether they had annotated those pages with comments
and this could help direct my attention
towards or away from certain pages.
And of course now with the rise of social networking sites
these kinds of social annotations are much more common.
One of the other important features of SearchTogether
was this this idea of creating
a persistent artifact for the collaboration.
So the system would automatically generate
these summaries that would include any webpage
that any member of the group had marked as being relevant
and had added comments to and it would provide you
with links to get back to those pages
and the details of their comments and information
about what queries led them to the pages
and you could share this with other people and export it.
So that you have this persistent artifact
of what had previously been a more ephemeral activity.
And again, this inspired later on features at Microsoft,
in the Bing search engine for example.
Being able to share search results via various social media
with other people that interest you.
And then of course we did some follow on work.
So one of the fun features of SearchTogether
to help it be more efficient
was that you could issue a standard search,
by pressing that button on the left,
but you could also do something fun with this middle button,
it was called a split search.
So this was the idea that you would type in query key words
and then it would divide the results up
so that each member of the group
had a non-overlapping subset of the results.
That you could triage things more quickly.
And the original SearchTogether just did this
in a really naive way, just Round-Robin splitting things up.
But then my colleagues and I at MSR
did some subsequent work where we looked
at more intelligent algorithms.
So applying personalization algorithms
from information retrieval to this group setting
so that you could assign subsets of search results
to the group members whose expertise or interests
best matched them and we showed
that this greatly increased the relevance of--
So, SearchTogether covers kind of one point
in the possible space of collaborative search interfaces.
So it's focused on supporting remote collaboration
and most of the innovations of SearchTogether
really focus on innovations in the user-interface
and maybe split searches starting to get a little bit
into the back end of how search algorithms go.
But there's a lot more exciting research that followed on
after SearchTogether that covers more parts of this space.
Of course, I spent a great deal of time in my own career
working on this but it was really exciting to see
how SearchTogether inspired a lot of follow on work.
And I particularly want to point out one piece of work
that I think was really influential
and covered a very different point in the design space.
Really starting to think about,
from the algorithmic perspective,
how search engines would change if you had multiple users.
And this is the work that Jeremy Pickens
and Gene Golovchinsky published at SIGIR
the following year after SearchTogether emerged.
What I think was really great about this
was it really showed how two different communities,
the HCI community and the information retrieval community
could take different perspectives on the same problem
but then could also bridge and work together.
So Jeremy and Gene were both great mentors to me,
we worked together and held a series of workshops
on the topic of collaborative search
where we took the workshop series to both different HCI
and different information retrieval conferences
to bridge across those communities.
And Gene in particular was really key
in founding the HCIR workshop
which cleverly blends HCI and information retrieval
and that has grown in recent years
into the CHIIR conference.
So CHI and information retrieval
is jointly sponsored by SIGI and SIGIR.
This year's event is in Glasgow
and I think it's really inspiring to see
how these two communities can achieve
great things when they work together.
So again thank you so much for this award.
I'd especially like to thank Eric,
Sue, Gene, Jeremy, Dan, Marti, David and Gary
for really encouraging me to work
on the SearchTogether project and take it further.
You can find the original paper at aka.ms/searchtogether.
And if you have time I really encourage you
to watch the original video, aka.ms/searchtogethervideo.
In this video I somehow convince George Robertson
to pretend to be Jamie Teevan's grandfather
so that they could do a fake collaborative
search together about his health.
It's awesome, it's a blast from the past.
And you can also check out a lot of our follow on work
at Microsoft Research on the topic of collaborative search
at aka.ms/collabsearch, so thank you very much.
(audience applauding)