Prateek Hejmady

Text 2.0

Libra to the rescue….

“Lets explore some publications on ‘Programmer Psychology with software visualization’! ” said my prof.. Hmmm… that didn’t sound great! Out I go into the world of Google Scholar and search with all possible keywords. The result – Urrrgh… I move on to Citeseer & snap, it just topped up the haziness already created. Nevertheless, I decided to move over to something new I found a couple of weeks back – Libra! And boy…. life has been lot more easier ever since. Currently in beta, Microsoft Academic Search is a free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research Asia, and also serves as a test-bed for their object-level vertical search research.

Their library boasts of a whopping 5.1 million search-able academic papers in the computer sciences discipline(yeah just CS guys are kept interested at the moment!). The web interface is a clean uncluttered design, with tabs which allows you to search for papers by title, by author, by conferences, and by journals.

The papers tab is the default and searches for keywords in the title and in the abstract. When you search for a key say “Program Visualization” in my case, results are pulled up based on the ranking of citations. These results can also be sorted on the basis of the year of publication. Some stand outs of this result that I like the most, being the highlighting of the search term in the snippets, lists of related authors, conferences, and journals are displayed in a column to the right. Here is a snapshot of the same:
An actual result includes the title, authors name(s), publication year, journal or source name, and the number of citations the paper has (in their database). One could also run an advanced search based on several fields like Keywords, Paper Title, Author, Conference, Journal and Year. Selecting the title or citation count links moves you to a page with a complete abstract, links to download the full text of the paper. Also, each paper has a hypertext list of a papers references. The only feature I miss with this list is the linking of my university library subscription to the results of source locations (extremely helpful with Google scholar).

Clicking the author link runs an “author search” and takes you to a page for that specific author (an object detail page). There, you’ll find a listing of all of that particular authors articles, citation counts, research interests, h-index, g-index, a link to the authors home page, etc. I particularly like the idea of h-index, which to measure the productivity and impact of a researcher. Jorge E. Hirsch defined this index as, if a researcher has h-index , h of his papers will be cited at least h times for each while the other papers of him received at most h citation for each.


By far the best feature and undoubtedly the most interesting parts of this search is the, “Visual Explorer” link on the top right of the page located under the “author pages”. This visually appeasing page displays the co-author information of each author. Through visual explorer, a user can browse the top co-authors of authors by clicking one author in the displayed graph. Here is one for “John Stasko”, a premier in the field of Program Visualization:

Looking forward to better days with Literature Surveys!

Web OS?!

The trick is that every Bookmark or search is opened in a new window but links can also be opened in a new tab and the Bookmarks are separated from the browser window.
To compare it to the colorized tabs in the IE 8 the windows are the Groups and the Tabs are the Child Tabs of every Group. Because of this you have much less Tabs in one window you can use the possibilities of an OS (expose,multiple Desktops etc.)to arrange this windows and Web Apps look like real Apps!

Finally

Phew… finally successful in carving out my own niche on the web!! This has been long due and thanks to the summer break and joblessness at its peak, this website has taken shape. Being consistently active with a blog has always been a problem with me, attributed to tons of distractions. But I bet, having a domain/blog/lifestream of your own would drive the rubbish excuses away!! I love to see technology from a design perspective and vice versa. This vision reflects in almost all of my projects and research work as well (one reason I like this blog theme!). The area of HCI, usability in particular has fascinated me a lot over the past year or so… and this blog would serve a good platrom to share my thoughts. I look forward to your comments/recommendations.