PFI:AIR-TT: Supporting Complex Sensemaking on Mobile Phones

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This PFI: AIR Technology Translation project focuses on translating distributed sensemaking platforms to fill the need for understanding complex online information.   Distributed sensemaking is important because people spend over 70 billion hours on gathering information online each year for tasks ranging from making sense of their medical symptoms to learning a new scientific field. However, all the work done in gathering and structuring this information is lost, with each person having to start from scratch every time.  Instead, this project will develop a new information gathering platform in which the work that individuals do for themselves can be captured and made useful for others with similar needs. This distributed sensemaking approach will go beyond existing search engines, which focus only on providing relevant web pages, to helping users build rich information landscapes that capture information, evidence, judgments and perspectives across multiple sources and sites. This project addresses the following technology gaps as it translates from research discovery toward commercial application. Although the distributed sensemaking approach can be tremendously useful in accelerating a person's knowledge of a new domain and improving their decision-making, a fundamental barrier to this approach being adopted in the real world is that without enough initial users and the processing they provide, using the system is perceived as less valuable than just starting from scratch. This proposal aims to develop a new platform that will be useful to individuals themselves in managing complex searches, while simultaneously capturing the rich sensemaking they do while searching. In the short term, this platform will help people find, manage, and synthesize information for themselves from multiple web pages and for multiple tasks on a variety of devices ranging from smartphones to desktops. In the long term this platform will be the foundation to kickstart a virtuous cycle of distributed sensemaking, moving the web from a pattern of increasing fragmentation to increasing synthesis as more people use it. In addition, personnel involved in this project, including graduate students and undergraduates, will receive innovation experiences through iterative, user-centered development and testing opportunities.