Reading #23: InkSeine: In Situ Search for Active Note Taking (Hinckley)

Comments:
Francisco
Summary:
The paper presents a pen-based active note taking system, called InkSeine. It offers rapid, minimally distracting interactions for users to seek, gather and manipualte the "task detritus" of electronic work. It has several important design properties: levereages preexisting ink to initiate search, promotes queries as first class objects that are commingled with ink notes, interleaves inking, searching and gathering, tightly couples queries with application content.

The design goal of the system is as follows:
In situ search experience: No switch, shift or force transcription
Optimum workflow or maximum flexibility: Allow interruption at any point, and can resume from where it left off.
Enable rich trade-offs: Lower computional time
Gather content: allow users to gather beneficial task detritus
Minimize search screen real  estate: result returned by search should be smaller than the screen
Span application boundaries: enable access to information from a variety of sources
Tailored to pen input: easy gestures

Then the paper introduce all components of the system in detail. And user studies are also conducted to help improve the system.

Discussion:
Excellent work for note taking in sketch recognition! A promising direction in sketch recognition. The system provides complex interface that almost supported kinds of operations for users. And the design of the system is from users' view and verified by user studies. However, what I am concerned is whether there is a robust handwritting recognizer to support such a system. The paper doesn't give any information about the recognition accuracy of the recognizer. Maybe the paper is just to provide the excellent idea of an human-interaction interface.