A study of awareness in multimedia search

Awareness of another's activity is an important aspect of facilitating collaboration between users, enabling an "understanding of the activities of others" (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992). In this paper we investigate the role of awareness and its effect on search performance and behaviour in collaborative multimedia retrieval. We focus on the scenario where two users are searching at the same time on the same task, and via an interface, can see the activity of the other user. The main research question asks: does awareness of another searcher aid a user when carrying out a multimedia search session? To encourage awareness, an experimental study was designed where two users were asked to compete to find as many relevant video shots as possible under different awareness conditions. These were individual search (no awareness), Mutual awareness (where both users could see the other's search screen), and unbalanced awareness (where one user is able to see the other's screen, but not vice-versa). Twelve pairs of users were recruited, and the four worst performing TRECVID 2006 search topics were used as search tasks, under four different awareness conditions. We present the results of this study, followed by a discussion of the implications for multimedia information retrieval systems. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.