Odysseus

HeyStaks is a novel approach to web search that is designed to help people to search more effectively by leveraging the wisdom of their social graph. It is designed not as an alternative to mainstream search but as an enhancement and, as such, integrate seamlessly with existing mainstream search engines. HeyStaks started life as a research project in CSI UCD and is now a campus company in the process of spinning out of the CLARITY Centre for Sensor Web Technologies.

Currently HeyStaks takes the form of a Firefox browser toolbar, which allows the HeyStaks server to interact directly with the results pages of search engines such as Google and Bing. Accordingly the HeyStaks toolbar can make recommendations to the user as they search, promoting results that their friends and colleagues may have found interesting for similar recent searches.

Recently Google have extended their Chrome browser to include an plugin architecture which sets the scene for the extension of HeyStaks to include a Chrome toolbar. In this internship project the successful candidate will develop a Chrome toolbar to replicate the HeyStaks functionalty that it available through Firefox. The outcome of the project will be a working Chrome toolbar.

Workplan:

Weeks 1-2: Background research. The candidate will need to understand the HeyStaks technical architecture and core functionality. In addition the candidate will learn about Chrome browser extensions and the development of browser toolbar. This is primarily a javascript development task and there is plenty of supporting documentation available online (see below).

Weeks 3-4: Toolbar Extension and Initial Prototyping. During this period the candidate will develop a detailed toolbar specification. This will be based closely on the current HeyStaks Firefox toolbar and so it amounts to adapting this rather than creating it from scratch. The main focus of this phase will be on the development of an initial prototype, which will focus on prototyping some basic HeyStaks functionality (creating staks, parsing a results page, tagging a page). This is not an exhaustive list of functionality but will allow the candidate to understand the essentials of what they need to know during the main toolbar development task.

Weeks 5-10: This is the primary development phase and will include the full development of the HeyStaks Chrome toolbar including all of the functionality that is available through the existing Firefox toolbar. This will include all of the basic user functions (user sign-in, stak creation/sharing, recommendation integration, session management, wrapper management, etc). This phase will also include an evaluation of the finished toolbar including laboratory testing with real users.

This is very much a development project but the student will learn from closely working with the HeyStaks research team. They will be exposed to leading-edge search technology in the process and will learn some new technical skills. In addition, they will learn from the evaluation of the project and the management of user studies and trials.

Supporting Materials:

All you need to know to get started with Google Chrome Extensions - http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/overview.html.

Barry Smyth, Maurice Coyle, Peter Briggs: The Altruistic Searcher. CSE (4) 2009: 360-367

Barry Smyth, Peter Briggs, Maurice Coyle, Michael P. O'Mahony: A Case-Based Perspective on Social Web Search. ICCBR 2009: 494-508