NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
Principal Investigator
David Wolber
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, CA. 94117
(415) 422-6451
List of Suggested Reviewers
Henry Lieberman
MIT Media Laboratory
20 Ames St. 305 A
Cambridge, MA
02139 USA
(+1-617) 253-0315
lieber@media.mit.edu
Kristian Hammond
Director
Intelligent Information Laboratory
Department of Computer Science
Northwestern University
(847) 467-1012
hammond@infolab.nwu.edu
Jay Budzik
Intelligent Information Laboratory
Department of Computer Science
Northwestern University
(847) 467-1771
budzik@infolab.northwestern.edu
Steve Lawrence
NEC Research Institute
lawrence@research.nj.nec.com
4 Independence Way, Princeton NJ 08540
Phone: +1 609 951 2676 Fax: +1 609 951 2488
NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
Project Summary
B.Table of Contents
NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
4. References Cited
1. Adar, E., Karger, D.R., and Stein, L. Haystack: Per-User Information
Environments, Proceedings of the 1999 Conference on Information and
Knowledge Management (CIKM), 1999.
2. Alexa, Inc. www.alexa.com
3. Armstrong, R., Freitag, T.,Joachims, T, and Mitchell, T. WebWatcher: A Learning
Apprentice for the World Wide Web. In Proc. of AAAI Spring Symposium on
Information Gathering from Heterogeneous Distributed Environments, March
1995.
4. Budzik, J., Hammond, K.J., Marlow, C.A., and Scheinkman, A., Anticipating
information needs: Everyday Applications as interfaces to Internet Information
Sources. In Proceedings of the 1998 World Conference on the WWW, Internet,
and Intranet.
5. Cameron, R., A universal citation database as a catalyst for reform in scholarly
communication. First Monday, 2(4), 1997.
6. Chakrabarti, S. van den Berg, M. Dom, B., Focused Crawling: A New Approach
to Topic-Specific Web Resource Discovery, Proceedings of WWW 8, Toronto,
Canada, May, 1999.
7. Chen, H., Chung, Y.M., Ramsey, M. and Yang, C.C., An Intelligent personal
spider (agent) for dynamic internet/intranet searching, Decision Support
Systems, v23, n1, 1998, pp. 41-58
8. Chen, H., Chung, Y.M., Ramsey, M. & Yang, C.C. "A smart itsy bitsy spider for
the web", Journal of the American Society for Information Science v49, n7, 1998,
pp. 604—618.
9. Diligenti, M. Coetzee, F., Lawrence, S. Giles, C. and Gori, M., Focused Crawling
Using Context Graphs, Proceedings of the 26th VLDB Conference, Cairo, Egypt,
2000.
10. Google, Inc., www.google.com
11. Hong, J., Landay, J. WebQuilt: A Framework for Capturing and Visualizing the
Web Experience, Proceeding of WWW 10, Hong Kong, May 2001
NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
12. Kleinberg, J. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. Proceedings of
the 9th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998.
13. Lawrence, S., Bollacker, K, and Giles, C., Index and Retrieval of Scientific
Literature, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference on Information and
Knowledge Management (CIKM, November 1999), 139-146.
14. Lieberman, H., Fry, C., and Weitzman, L., Exploring the Web with
Reconnaissance Agents, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 44, No. 8, August
2001.
15. Mackinlay, J., Rao, R., and Card, S., An Organic User Interface for Searching
Citation Links, Proceeding of the Conference on Human-Computer Interfaces
(CHI ’95).
16. Maglio, P. Barrett, R., Campbell, C. Selker, T., Suitor: An Attentive Information
System, 2000 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, New
Orleans, Louisiana, USA, ACM Press.
17. Miller, R. and Bharat, K., SPHINX: A framework for creating personal, site-specific Web
crawlers. In Proceedings of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference, Brisbane,
Australia, April 1998.
18. Rhodes, B.J., Maes, P. Just-in-time information retrieval Agents, IBM Systems
Journal, Volume 39, No. 3 and 4.
19. Salton, G., McGill, M., Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. McGraw Hill,
New York, 1983.
20. Wexelblat, A., Maes, P., Footprints: History-Rich Tools for Information Foraging,
In Proceedings of CHI 99, Pittsburgh, PA., pp. 270-277, May 1999.
5.Biographical Sketches
David Wolber, Principal Investigator
NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
a. Education
University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
University of California, Davis
B.S., Computer Science, 1986
M.S., Computer Science, 1988
Ph.D. Computer Science, 1991
b. Appointments
Associate Professor, University of San Francisco, 2000Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco, 1993-2000
c. Publications
Note that an asterisk next to a name denotes student co-author.
(i)Closely associated to project
Wolber, D., Kepe*, M. Ranitovic, I., “Exposing Document Context in the Personal Web”,
Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2002 (to
appear).
Wolber, D., Witchell, J.*, Kepe, M.*, Ranitovic, I., “The Personal Web”, submitted to the World
Wide Web (WWW) Conference, 2002.
(ii) Other Significant Publications
Wolber, D., Su Yingfeng*, Chiang, Yih Tsung*, “Designing Dynamic Web Pages in the
WYSIWYG Interface”, Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces, 2002 (to appear).
Wolber, D., Myers, B., "PBD Interface Builders: Demonstrating the When as Well as the What",
Chapter in Your Wish is my Command, pp. 321-344, Lieberman, Henry, ed., Morgan Kauffman,
2001.
Wolber, D., "Pavlov: Where PBD Meets Macromedia Director", Your Wish is my Command, pp.
345-350, Lieberman, Henry, ed., Morgan Kauffman, 2001.
Myers, B., McDaniel, R., Wolber, D., "Demonstrational Interfaces", ACM Communications,
March 2000.
Wolber, D., "An Interface Builder for Designing Animated Interfaces", Transactions on
Computer-Human Interface( TOCHI), December 1997.
Wolber, D., "Pavlov: Programming By Stimulus-Response Demonstration", Proceeding of the
Conference on Human Computer Interface (CHI '96), 1996.
Wolber, David, "A Multiple Timeline Editor for Designing Multi-threaded Applications",
Proceedings of the User Interface and Software Technology (UIST) Conference, San Francisco,
California, 1998.
NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
Wolber, David, "Reviving Functional Decomposition in Object-Oriented Design", Journal of
Object-Oriented Programming (JOOP), October 1997.
Fisher, G., Wolber, D. and Busse, D.*, "Adding Rule Based Reasoning to a Demonstrational
Interface Builder", Proceedings of the User Interface and Software Technology (UIST)
Conference, Monterey, California, 1992.
Wolber, D., and Fisher, G., "A Demonstrational Technique for Developing Interfaces with
Dynamically Created Objects", Proceedings of the User Interface and Software Technology
Conference (UIST), Hilton Head, South Carolina, 1991.
Wolber, D., Janne, E.*, Chen, K.*, "Creating Animated Interfaces With Stimulus-Response
Demonstration", Proceedings of the Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (CHI '95),
1995.
d. Synergistic Activities
While teaching computer science at USF, PI is also working on a Master’s degree in USF's
creative writing program. This rather uncommon combination provides an excellent opportunity
for targeting the power of software agents at the creative process. Specifically, the PIs peers and
instructors within the writing program are an excellent pool of test users for the proposed tool,
and potentially could provide some excellent insight into how software agents can help one
create.
The PI has experience integrating research into the curriculum of the courses he teaches. For
instance, the development of a programming by example animation system, based on the PIs
Pavlov system, has become a popular project in his Software Engineering course. In the past
year, the PI also assigned a simple reconnaissance agent as a development project for his
freshman programming students. Though it takes time to pare down such projects to make the
work within a short-time period with sometimes inexperienced students, the payoff can be
incredible in terms of motivating students (it can also lead to enthusiastic research assistants after
the course ends).
e. Collaborators and Other Affiliations
(i) Collaborators
The principal investigator served on the dissertation committee of Richard McDaniel, one of
Brad Myer’s students at Carnegie Mellon University. He also coauthored two papers with Mr.
Myers, one in ACM Communications (along with Rich McDaniel) and a chapter in a recent book
on programming by demonstration.
Brad Myers
Senior Research Scientist,
Human Computer Interaction Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 USA
412-268-5150 [FAX: 412-268-1266]
<bam+@cs.cmu.edu>
(ii) Graduate Advisor
Gene Fisher
Professor
Department of Computer Science
California State University, San Luis Obispo
(iii) Thesis Advisor
Gene Fisher
6.Proposal Budget
Annual Budget
Student Research Assistants’ Summer Salary
Student Research Assistants’ In-Session Salary
Principal Investigator Salary
Fringe Benefit (9.4% of all salary)
Travel Expenses
Sub-Total
USF Indirect Costs (50.9%)
Total (1 year)
Total (3 years)
$24,000
$36,000
$16,606
$ 7,201
$ 8,100
---------$91,907
$46,781
--------$138,688
$416,064
Four students will be hired during the school year and the summer. The students will work
twenty hours per week during school, and forty hours a week during the summer.
Summer
School
Students
4
4
Weeks
10
30
Hours/Week
40
20
Total Hours
1600
2400
Pay ($15/hr)
$24,000
$36,000
The principal investigator will be paid at his regular pay for two months in the summer. His
projected nine-month salary for 2001-2002 is $74,730, which computes to $8303 per month, or
$16,606 for two months.
Travel expenses are requested for the attendance of three conferences annually by the principal
investigator and one student assistant. Costs are estimated at $1500 per trip for the principal
investigator, and $1200 per trip for the student (taking into account student discounts for
conference fees). For three conferences, this computes to (1200+1500)*3=$8100.
NSF Proposal
Exploring the Personal Web
Budget Justification
USF has the lab facilities and computers necessary for the project. The vital need is to fund
student research assistants throughout the year and the PI in the summer, and to fund travel for
both students and the PI.
USF has some internal funds available for research assistants (approximately $2000 per summer
for each professor). USF also provides a small amount of funds for scholarly travel, generally
one trip per year for each faculty member. These amounts are not adequate to fund a research
team of three or four students, or allow them and the PI to gain adequate exposure to the synergy
that conference attendance provides.
The PI would like to devote the summer months completely to research and specifically the
proposed project. In past summers, he has consulted in the area for his summer salary. Though
the proposed salary is significantly less than a consultant salary, it would allow him to do what
he likes best—work with students on interesting problems.
Prior to the PI coming to USF in 1993, little research was performed in the computer science
department, as USF was known as a "teaching" school (professors teach three courses a
semester), and all of the computer science faculty's degrees were in math or some other field
besides computer science. Over the past eight years, the PI was able to publish a number of
research papers in prestigious conferences and journals. Subsequently, two more computer
scientists have been added to the faculty, and USF is now on the cusp of gaining a reputation for
research in computer science. This grant could propel the department to new heights and provide
the Bay Area with another academic research program alternative to Stanford and Berkeley.
7.Current and Pending Support
This is an initial funding proposal for this project.
8. Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources
The USF Computer Science Department currently has two labs of 15 computers each. A new
Computer Science Lab/Classroom is now under development and should be completed by the
summer of 2002. These labs are shared by courses, research teams, and students working on
homework projects.
Though space is quite limited at USF, the administration has provided small labs for research
projects in the past. The goal of the proposed project is to obtain such a lab and install two or
three standard computers in it.
The proposed project does not require special equipment or software other than is now available.
9. Special Information and Supplementary Documentation
10. Appendices (Include only if approved in advance of proposal submission by
NSF Assistant Director/Office Head, or designee, or by program solicitation)