Mira Dontcheva · University of Washington and Adobe
Interaction Techniques for Automating Collecting and Organizing Personal Web Content

The growth of the World Wide Web has led to a dramatic increase in accessible information. Today, people use the Web for a large variety of activities including travel planning, comparison shopping, entertainment, and research. However, the tools available for collecting, organizing, and sharing Web content have not kept pace with the rapid growth in information. Today people continue to use bookmarks, email, and printers to manage their Web content.

In this talk, I will present a set of semi-automatic interaction techniques for retrieving content from the Web using the structure of webpages, presentation principles based on layout templates for user-guided organization of content from any number of Web sources, and a new template-based search paradigm for the Web that transforms keyword search into a goal-oriented rich visual experience. To demonstrate the efficacy of these ideas I combined them into a working system and evaluated them through a three-month longitudinal user study. If popularized by an online Web community, this approach would allow the average Web users to build a machine-readable semantic Web piece-by-piece as they go about accomplishing their personal tasks.

Mira completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science in January 2008 at the University of Washington where she worked with David Salesin, Michael Cohen, and Steven Drucker. Mira is interested in a variety of research problems in the areas of computer graphics and human-computer interaction. Mira joined the Advanced Technology Labs at Adobe Systems in February.