In April, I visited Trento for an EU project meeting:

We stayed in a hotel in Sardagna and had this beautiful view from the balcony. The Grappa was fantastic and I loved eating pizza with freshly cut Speck. See a few more photos in the slideshow.

I visited Toulouse in April to present a workshop paper at the European Conference on Information Retrieval:

Toulouse had a wonderful atmosphere and the confit du canard was delicious. See a few more photos in the slideshow.

Finally, in June, I visited Madrid for an EU project meeting:

A colleague recommended a particular cafe for churros, and we were not disappointed. I also managed to visit some friends and see parts of Madrid that were a little off the beaten track. See a few more photos in the slideshow.

I recently filled in an online request to return my iPhone headphones for a replacement. Apple quickly sent a jiffy-bag containing return instructions, the replacement headphones, an envelope to put the defective headphones into, and a pre-paid return envelope.

For a company that seems to be taking steps to focus on the environmental impact of their products, as can be seen in the Environmental Status Report of the iPhone Tech Specs, the size of the pre-paid envelope is absurd.

I thought that online shopping was supposed to herald a new era of consumer-supplier interaction. The promise of being able to purchase from any supplier, regardless of their geographic location, has only partly come to fruition and the reason for this partial success is a combination of closely linked technical and social issues. I’m only going to speak about the social issues.

In 1995, Amazon.com and eBay were founded and this seems to have heralded the beginning of 24-hour online shopping. Amazon has grown into a massive online store where you can purchase almost anything you want at any time of day, perhaps it could be considered as a Web equivalent of Wal*Mart… eBay has developed into an online auction center where you can probably buy or sell almost anything you desire.

But lets consider the following, over simplified, scenario of buying a music album.

I read a review for the latest Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavillion, on my favourite music review website, and based on hearing some samples on their MySpace player, I decide that I want to purchase the album.

Scenario A: Bricks and mortar
I walk into town to check our the prices and packages available in the record stores. The album is priced at £8.99 in HMV, a major retailer, £9.99 in Fopp, a national retailer, and £9.99 in Avalanche Records, a local and independent retailer. I decide to purchase the album at the local and independent retailer for £9.99 and pay using my Visa Debit card. I take a copy of the album to the cashier, hand it over, provide my payment method and PIN when asked, and leave with the album.

Scenario B: Online shopping
I open up my Web browser and visit a some online music retailers selling both physical albums and digital downloads: 7digitial.com MP3 Store, eMusic.com MP3 Store, iTunes AAC Store, Amazon.com physical and MP3 Store, Play.com physical and MP3 Store, HMV physical and MP3 Store, to name a few in the sea of choices. I decide to purchase an electronic copy of the album and find that a store I don’t usually use can provide it in the quality / drm-free / price category that interests me. The expectation seems to be that I will create a new account with a username, that I most likely cannot have so I get stuck with something like desmond1832, and yet another password and I need to yet again enter my payment card and address details. After entering all these details, I can download the album but I might need to install a piece of software to help me with my download. What?

In the Bricks & Mortar scenario, there is no cognitive friction involved in making a purchase. I can pay using cash or using a card; in the case that I use a card, the Chip & Pin system means I only need to remember four digits before I can leave the store.

In the Online Shopping scenario, I am almost certain to feel frustrated by the experience if I want to purchase from a retailer I have not used in the past. The repetition of typing the same details into Site X that I’ve already typed into Site Y is enough to drive you to distraction.

There are a few promising attempts to simplify this problem. Amazon Marketplace allows retailers to sell their goods through the Amazon.com website, it feels like a Flea Market; eBay Stores offers almost exactly the same thing; Google Checkout lets retailers use the Google payment system to process their transactions; and Paypal Business offers a similar system to Google Checkout.

Perhaps one of the reasons for none of these systems becoming the defacto standard is that they are all instrinsically linked to a business. Amazon Marketplace and Amazon.com, eBay Stores and eBay, Paypal and eBay. From a consumer and retailer perspective, it doesn’t feel like Visa Debit is linked to HMV or Mastercard is linked to Tesco, and maybe that helps retailers to trust that processing Visa Debit or Mastercard payments is less likely to cause them problems at any time in the future.

Since completing my research internship at HP Labs, I have been a Research Assistant at the University of Glasgow. The focus of my research is user modelling for contextual information retrieval under the supervision of Dr Joemon Jose.

Our research focuses on building representative user models of the long-term and evolving information needs expressed through human-computer interactions during Web search sessions. The implicit and explicit interactions are considered to represent the intentions driving a person’s information needs and their behaviours are used to model their intentions. Multiple-aspect user models are created and maintained based on these actions and are used to retrieve new information on behalf of the people they represent to attempt to assist them with the ongoing search tasks.

I recently presented a paper at the Contextual Information Access, Retrieval, and Evaluation Workshop at the 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval in Toulouse, France. It was quite a challenging experience to present my work in 15 minutes so I chose to focus on the evaluation challenges of multi-session experiments in interactive information retrieval.

We are currently investigating and experimenting with evaluation methodologies for multiple-session retrieval processes and hope to publish our progress soon.

The nearest cinema has ten regular screens and three Gold Class screens. I took the opportunity to watch Frost/Nixon in a Gold Class screen on Saturday night because the premium over a regular ticket was only £2. (£7.20 to watch a film in a regular screen on a Saturday night was expensive enough that I didn’t consider the premium a deterrent.)

The Gold Screens were situated in a different part of the cinema than the regular screens and I was able to buy a bottle of beer to take into the screen. The seat had enough leg-room to stretch out and enough arm-rest space to avoid knocking against the person sitting next to me. There was a large sideboard to rest my beer on and any space for a small box of salted popcorn. The only thing lacking was a coat stand.

Will I purchase a Gold Class ticket in the future? Almost certainly because it was a more relaxing and ‘grown-up’ experience.

Would I purchase a Gold Class ticket regularly? Perhaps not because £9.20 is a scary price to pay for every visit to the cinema.