In 2005, Greg Conti [2] presented a paper at the IEEE conference hosted by Georgia Tech and at which Rita Katz spoke. Included below is the abstract of his talk. The proceedings were published by Springer, linked here for subscribers. An extended version of the paper is also available directly from Conti, along with PowerPoint slides.

Intelligence analysts are flooded with massive amounts of data from a multitude of sources and in many formats. From this raw data they attempt to gain insight that will provide decision makers with the right information at the right time. Data quality varies from very high quality data generated by reputable sources to misleading and very low quality data generated by malicious entities.

Disparate organizations and databases, global collection networks and international language differences further hamper the analyst’s job. We present a web based information firewall to help counter these problems. It allows analysts to collaboratively customize web content by the creation and sharing of dynamic knowledge-based user interfaces that greatly improve data quality, and hence analyst effectiveness, through filtering, fusion and dynamic transformation techniques. Our results indicate that this approach is not only effective, but will scale to support large entities within the Intelligence Community.

I'd be interested in whether Conti had any recollections from the conference that he might be able to share.

Filtering, Fusion and Dynamic Information Presentation: Towards a General Information Firewall, by Greg Conti, et. al.

If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.

The open source text editor Vim (Vi IMproved) will be used here to present the ideas about effective editing, but they apply to other editors just as well. Choosing the right editor is actually the first step towards effective editing. The discussion about which editor is the best for you would take too much room and is avoided. If you don't know which editor to use or are dissatisfied with what you are currently using, give Vim a try; you won't be disappointed.

Seven habits of effective text editing

Developers are just beginning to understand the meaning of personal time. Most obvious is calendars, scheduling, events, resource allocation over time (aka project management). But there are also less obvious ways time matters in software: how people work and think over time; how human relationships, article relevance, and purchase intentions and other commercial considerations change over time; how time patterns infuse a variety of applications; and how a sense of timing can improve the utility of everything from search results to social-network-driven tools.

The online world needs to get better at time-stamping content and activities and at standards for representing time and events - both times and durations, and all the patterns in time: speed, decay, growth, recurrence, (changing) frequency of events.

MemeStreams is a gold mine of untapped timing information.

When 2.0: Time and Timing

Steven Johnson's latest Discover column.

We're not doing our best thinking in front of a computer screen. This is the dark side of the connected age: We have vastly more information at our fingertips than ever before but less time to make sense of it.

... email-free Fridays ... individual employees send and receive, on average, 178 messages each day via email, phone, voice mail, fax, and pager.

What we really need are better screens: interfaces built for focus and contemplation and not a barrage of distractions.

BusyBody, a new software package under development at Microsoft, is designed to sense the “cost of interruption” at any given point in a user’s interaction with the machine.

Email makes you stupid

To anyone watching, it seems like magic. To a user, it becomes indispensable.

Crafting a Revolution with the Brother of the Macintosh

When designing a groupware application, build both the formal communication and the informal conversation channels. Structure is important, but so is the ability to work freely around it. Look for the right balance.

Groupware Communication & Conversation