  Themed collocated events, such as conferences, workshops, and seminars,
invite people with related life experiences to connect with each other. In this
era when people record lives through the Internet, individual experiences exist
in different forms of digital contents. People share digital life records
during collocated events, such as sharing blogs they wrote, Twitter posts they
forwarded, and books they have read. However, connecting experiences during
collocated events are challenging. Not only one is blind to the large contents
of others, identifying related experiential items depends on how well
experiences are retrieved. The collection of personal contents from all
participants forms a valuable group repository, from which connections between
experiences can be mined. Visualizing same or related experiences inspire
conversations and support social exchange. Common topics in group content also
help participants generate new perspectives about the collocated group.
Advances in machine learning and data visualization provide automated
approaches to process large data and enable interactions with data
repositories. This position paper promotes the idea of event mining: how to
utilize state-of-the-art data processing and visualization techniques to design
event mining systems for connecting experiences during collocated activities.
We discuss empirical and constructive problems in this design space, and our
preliminary study of deploying a tabletop-based system, BlogCloud, which
supports experience re-visitation and exchange with machine-learning and data
visualization.
