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

这个PFI: AIR技术翻译项目专注于翻译分布式语义平台，以满足理解复杂在线信息的需求。分布式语义处理很重要，因为人们每年花费700多亿小时在网上收集信息，其任务从理解他们的医学症状到学习一个新的科学领域。然而，在收集和组织这些信息方面所做的所有工作都丢失了，每个人每次都必须从头开始。相反，这个项目将开发一个新的信息收集平台，在这个平台上，个人为自己所做的工作可以被收集起来，并对有类似需求的其他人有用。这种分布式语义构建方法将超越现有的搜索引擎，后者只关注提供相关网页，它将帮助用户构建丰富的信息景观，从多个来源和站点获取信息、证据、判断和观点。该项目解决了以下技术差距，因为它从研究发现转化为商业应用。尽管分布式语义生成方法在加速人们对新领域的了解和改进他们的决策方面非常有用，但在现实世界中采用这种方法的一个根本障碍是，如果没有足够的初始用户和他们提供的处理，使用该系统被认为不如从头开始有价值。这个提议的目的是开发一个新的平台，可以帮助个人自己管理复杂的搜索，同时捕捉他们在搜索时所做的丰富的意义。在短期内，这个平台将帮助人们在从智能手机到台式机的各种设备上从多个网页和多个任务中为自己查找、管理和综合信息。从长远来看，这个平台将是启动分布式语义良性循环的基础，随着越来越多的人使用它，将网络从越来越碎片化的模式转变为越来越综合的模式。此外，参与该项目的人员，包括研究生和本科生，将通过迭代的、以用户为中心的开发和测试机会获得创新体验。

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.