Jacob Lillard
Evin Schuchardt
Reference Information
Lawrence Bergman, Jie Lu, Ravi Konuru, Julie MacNaught, Danny Yeh, IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China
Summary
This paper deals with the common practice of creating new presentations from old presentations. Currently the process is a painful one looking through old powerpoint presentations in order to find the one slide that is needed for the new presentation. Current search technology is not catered to looking for specific slides and topics. The groups proposal is a system called SlideRiver that will index all slides in order to easily be searched or perused. Now obviously slides usually have topics on them that can be searched for but SlideRiver will take it a step further by searching the entire context of the presentation allowing the user to get better tailored results to what they are looking for. The system can also find multiple slides on what is being searched for because a lot of the time a topic that needs to be looked at is over multiple slides rather than just a single one in a presentation.
Discussion
This article has a very good idea, however I believe that it has been innovated over in the past year or two. The article seems to have been written using the 2003 version of PowerPoint. In the recent versions, however, searching through presentations has been made much easier through better file formats from Microsoft. Now the search in many operating systems can search within these files and yield pretty good results. The results that this group got are good, I just think that they should integrate their research into Windows Search or something similar rather than their own system.
I agree that it is fairly easy to search for a concept in a slideshow, but if the organization was better I think they could make a design that would still be beneficial for the user.
ReplyDeleteYeah, this paper does sound a little out of date since it is easier to search within a slideshow now. Because of this, I'm not sure this system would catch on since most would just stick with the programs they have.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the idea proposed in this paper. It would seem really beneficial to compose new presentations from existing presentations. I am not really familiar with PP's searching capabilities so I am not sure if their research is outdated or not, but thanks for pointing that out.
ReplyDeletePowerpoint is just for pretty pictures anyways. If you really need to find a word in one, just ctrl+f.
ReplyDelete