BCS Search Industry Awards Reza Rawassizadeh and Yi Rong for Best Search User Experience
The Information Retrival Specialist Group of the BCS recently honored Dr. Reza Rawassizadeh. and Yi Rong (MET’22) with an award for Best search user experience. This was given for their work on ODSearch, searching large amounts of data on resource-constrained devices, such as smartwatch, close to real-time.
Professor Rawassizadeh and Yi Rong made a conversational agent for a fitness tracker. Like ChatGPT, users can communicate with their fitness tracker and get data about their fitness.
Fitness trackers and mobile health applications present information only in graphs and numbers. In this work, they proposed a fast and resource-efficient search engine that enables humans to ask questions to their fitness trackers in plain text.
Why is it important? Many users who suffer from graph illiteracy, numeracy, and Mathematical anxiety can not benefit from their fitness tracker information. Besides, users can not conduct comparative queries on their fitness data with the existing interfaces. The team enabled users to ask questions from their fitness trackers in natural language and get the answer back in natural language.
Read the full paper online at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3569488