Developing a Symbiotic System for Scientific Information Seeking: The MindSee Project

Abstract

This paper describes an approach for improving the current systems supporting the exploration and research of scientific literature, which generally adopt a query-based information-seeking paradigm. Our approach is to use a symbiotic system paradigm, exploiting central and peripheral physiological data along with eye-tracking data to adapt to users' ongoing subjective relevance and satisfaction with search results. The system described, along with the interdisciplinary theoretical work underpinning it, could serve as a stepping stone for the development and diffusion of next-generation symbiotic systems, enabling a productive interdependence between humans and machines. After introducing the concept and evidence informing the development of symbiotic systems over a wide range of application domains, we describe the rationale of the MindSee project, emphasizing its BCI component and pinpointing the criteria around which users' evaluations can gravitate. We conclude by summarizing the main contribution that MindSee is expected to make.

Assessing the Depth of Cognitive Processing as the Basis for Potential User-State Adaptation

“…Overall, the present study is a step forward toward applications that estimate the level of cognitive processing in realistic settings of human-computer interaction (Gamberini et al, 2015 ) and in safety critical workplaces (Venthur et al, 2010 ). A further step in order to discriminate the ongoing level of cognitive processing is to apply a regression approach, as in Naumann et al ( 2017 ).…”

“…While Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research primarily targets medical applications (Birbaumer, 2006 ; Dornhege et al, 2007 ; van Gerven et al, 2009 ; Wolpaw and Wolpaw, 2012 ; Guger et al, 2014 ; Hassanien and Taher Azar, 2015 ), more and more perspectives are being explored that go beyond communication and control paradigms (Blankertz et al, 2010 , 2015 , 2016 ; Zander and Kothe, 2011 ; Borghini et al, 2014 ; Zander et al, 2016 ). One of those perspectives are systems that take the ongoing user mental state into account and automatically adapt according to the user's mindset (Müller et al, 2008 ; van Erp et al, 2015 ) exploiting implicit information (Gamberini et al, 2015 ).…”

A task-based scientific paper recommender system for literature review and manuscript preparation

“…interventions. The former involves manual assistance from experts and librarians (Du & Evans, 2011b;Spezi, 2016) while the latter involves deployment of specialized information systems for helping researchers (Atanassova & Bertin, 2014;Chou & Yang, 2011;Gamberini et al, 2015). The current research assumes that researchers would use the system developed as a part of this research, along with the other interventions proposed from prior studies.…”

“…On the other end of the interventions spectrum, technology-oriented interventions from prior studies include search systems with faceted user interfaces for better display of search results (Atanassova & Bertin, 2014), stage-specific search user-interface features (Huurdeman et al, 2016), symbiotic systems (Gamberini et al, 2015), meta-search systems and engines (Hoeber & Khazaei, 2015;Sturm, Schneider, & Sunyaev, 2015), personalized search (Salehi, Du, & Ashman, 2015), bibliometric tools for visualizing citation networks (Chou & Yang, 2011) and scientific paper recommender systems in both embedded mode (Joeran Naak, Hage, & Aïmeur, 2008) and stand-alone mode (Huang, Wu, Mitra, & Giles, 2014;Küçüktunç, Saule, Kaya, & Çatalyürek, 2013).…”

“…This limitation is addressed by BCI since the information can be directly retrieved from the brain. The usage of BCI in SPRS has already been initiated by the MindSee project (Gamberini et al, 2015) where there are plans for integrating peripheral physiological data with eye-tracking data so that systems could adapt to users' relevance and satisfaction with search results. If this research reaches a mature state for actual implementation, it could be of utmost benefit to researchers as wading through scientific literature could become a simple activity.…”