Information seeking is a fundamental human activity. In the modern world, it is frequently conducted through interactions with search systems. The retrieval and comprehension of information returned by these systems is a key part of decision making and action in a broad range of settings. Advances in data availability coupled with new interaction paradigms, and mobile and cloud computing capabilities, have created a broad range of new opportunities for information access and use. In this comprehensive book for professionals, researchers, and students involved in search system design and evaluation, search expert Ryen White discusses how search systems can capitalize on new capabilities and how next-generation systems must support higher order search activities such as task completion, learning, and decision making. He outlines the implications of these changes for the evolution of search evaluation, as well as challenges that extend beyond search systems in areas such as privacy and societal benefit.

This lecture presents an overview of the Web analytics process, with a focus on providing insight and actionable outcomes from collecting and analyzing Internet data. The lecture first provides an overview of Web analytics, providing in essence, a condensed version of the entire lecture. The lecture then outlines the theoretical and methodological foundations of Web analytics in order to make obvious the strengths and shortcomings of Web analytics as an approach. These foundational elements include the psychological basis in behaviorism and methodological underpinning of trace data as an empirical method. These foundational elements are illuminated further through a brief history of Web analytics from the original transaction log studies in the 1960s through the information science investigations of library systems to the focus on Websites, systems, and applications. Following a discussion of on-going interaction data within the clickstream created using log files and page tagging for analytics of Website and search logs, the lecture then presents a Web analytic process to convert these basic data to meaningful key performance indicators in order to measure likely converts that are tailored to the organizational goals or potential opportunities. Supplementary data collection techniques are addressed, including surveys and laboratory studies. The overall goal of this lecture is to provide implementable information and a methodology for understanding Web analytics in order to improve Web systems, increase customer satisfaction, and target revenue through effective analysis of user–Website interactions. Table of Contents: Understanding Web Analytics / The Foundations of Web Analytics: Theory and Methods / The History of Web Analytics / Data Collection for Web Analytics / Web Analytics Fundamentals / Web Analytics Strategy / Web Analytics as Competitive Intelligence / Supplementary Methods for Augmenting Web Analytics / Search Log Analytics / Conclusion / Key Terms / Blogs for Further Reading / References

This book mainly aims at solving the problems in both cooperative and competitive multi-agent systems (MASs), exploring aspects such as how agents can effectively learn to achieve the shared optimal solution based on their local information and how they can learn to increase their individual utility by exploiting the weakness of their opponents. The book describes fundamental and advanced techniques of how multi-agent systems can be engineered towards the goal of ensuring fairness, social optimality, and individual rationality; a wide range of further relevant topics are also covered both theoretically and experimentally. The book will be beneficial to researchers in the fields of multi-agent systems, game theory and artificial intelligence in general, as well as practitioners developing practical multi-agent systems.

As information becomes more ubiquitous and the demands that searchers have on search systems grow, there is a need to support search behaviors beyond simple lookup. Information seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Exploratory search describes an information-seeking problem context that is open-ended, persistent, and multifaceted, and information-seeking processes that are opportunistic, iterative, and multitactical. Exploratory searchers aim to solve complex problems and develop enhanced mental capacities. Exploratory search systems support this through symbiotic human-machine relationships that provide guidance in exploring unfamiliar information landscapes. Exploratory search has gained prominence in recent years. There is an increased interest from the information retrieval, information science, and human-computer interaction communities in moving beyond the traditional turn-taking interaction model supported by major Web search engines, and toward support for human intelligence amplification and information use. In this lecture, we introduce exploratory search, relate it to relevant extant research, outline the features of exploratory search systems, discuss the evaluation of these systems, and suggest some future directions for supporting exploratory search. Exploratory search is a new frontier in the search domain and is becoming increasingly important in shaping our future world. Table of Contents: Introduction / Defining Exploratory Search / Related Work / Features of Exploratory Search Systems / Evaluation of Exploratory Search Systems / Future Directions and concluding Remarks

Man-machine interaction is the interdisciplinary field, focused on a human and a machine in conjunction. It is the intersection of computer science, behavioural sciences, social psychology, ergonomics, security. It encompasses study, design, implementation, and evaluation of small- and large-scale, interacting, computing, hardware and software systems dedicated for human use. Man-machine interaction builds on supportive knowledge from both sides, the machine side providing techniques, methods and technologies relevant for computer graphics, visualisation, programming environments, the human side bringing elements of communication theory, linguistics, social sciences, models of behaviour. The discipline aims to improve ways in which machines and their users interact, making hardware and software systems better adapted to user's needs, more usable, more receptive, and optimised for desired properties. This monograph is the second edition in the series, providing the reader with a selection of high-quality papers dedicated to current progress, new developments and research trends in man-machine interactions area. In particular, the topical subdivisions of this volume include human-computer interfaces, robot control and navigation systems, bio-data analysis and mining, pattern recognition for medical applications, sound, text and image processing, design and decision support, rough and fuzzy systems, crisp and fuzzy clustering, prediction and regression, algorithms and optimisation, and data management systems.

Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction is a comprehensive guide to performing research and is essential reading for both quantitative and qualitative methods. Since the first edition was published in 2009, the book has been adopted for use at leading universities around the world, including Harvard University, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Washington, the University of Toronto, HiOA (Norway), KTH (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel), and many others. Chapters cover a broad range of topics relevant to the collection and analysis of HCI data, going beyond experimental design and surveys, to cover ethnography, diaries, physiological measurements, case studies, crowdsourcing, and other essential elements in the well-informed HCI researcher's toolkit. Continual technological evolution has led to an explosion of new techniques and a need for this updated 2nd edition, to reflect the most recent research in the field and newer trends in research methodology. This Research Methods in HCI revision contains updates throughout, including more detail on statistical tests, coding qualitative data, and data collection via mobile devices and sensors. Other new material covers performing research with children, older adults, and people with cognitive impairments. Comprehensive and updated guide to the latest research methodologies and approaches, and now available in EPUB3 format (choose any of the ePub or Mobi formats after purchase of the eBook) Expanded discussions of online datasets, crowdsourcing, statistical tests, coding qualitative data, laws and regulations relating to the use of human participants, and data collection via mobile devices and sensors New material on performing research with children, older adults, and people with cognitive impairments, two new case studies from Google and Yahoo!, and techniques for expanding the influence of your research to reach non-researcher audiences, including software developers and policymakers

The truly world-wide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realisation of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in search interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not. Researchers and practitioners have developed a wide range of innovative interface ideas, but only the most broadly acceptable make their way into major web search engines. This book summarizes these developments, presenting the state of the art of search interface design, both in academic research and in deployment in commercial systems. Many books describe the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems, but the unique focus of this book is specifically on the user interface. It will be welcomed by industry professionals who design systems that use search interfaces as well as graduate students and academic researchers who investigate information systems.