A study of awareness in multimedia search
Robert Villa, Nicholas Gildea, Joemon M. Jose · 2008
Awareness of another's activity is an important aspect of facilitating collaboration between users, enabling an "understanding of the activities of others"[1]. Techniques such as collaborative filtering enable a form of asynchronous awareness, providing recommendations generated from the past activity of a community of users. In this paper we investigate the role of awareness and its effect on search behavior in collaborative multimedia retrieval. We focus on the scenario where two users are searching at the same time on the same task, and via the interface, can see the activity of the other user. The main research question asks: does awareness of another searcher aid a user when carrying out a multimedia search session?