Interacting with Information - Challenges in Human–Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval

Today, we are confronted with a flood of information. Research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Retrieval (IR) has both long been working to develop methods that help people to identify, extract and understand useful information from data. The two fields, however, take very different perspectives in tackling the problem; and historically, they have had little collaboration. Let us for example look into the area of health: Medical professionals are faced with an increasing quantity of highly detailed, complex and non-standardized data at the press of a button, however, the time available to make decisions is the same as before the advent of such technological advances. According to (Gigerenzer, 2008) a typical medical doctor has approximately five minutes to make a decision. When everything turns out well no one complains; however, when something goes wrong, solicitors have nearly indefinite time to figure out whether and why a wrong decision has been made. The goal is to support medical professionals to interactively analyse information properties and visualize the most relevant parts without getting overwhelmed. The challenge is to bring HCI & IR to work together and hence reap the benefits, so that we can benefit medicine and health care even more.