The Google Research Award will enable Professor Amy Ko to fund Ph.D. candidate Parmit Chilana's LemonAid project and give them the opportunity to work directly with Google research scientists and engineers.

Ko's proposal, entitled "Selection-Based Contextual Help in the Wild," was one of 815 submitted to Google Research. The award was given in the category of Human-computer Interaction, one of 21 different areas of focus evaluated by Google and one of 104 awards granted.

Chilana's project, LemonAid, is a way to crowdsource help information for users on the web. Useful online help is often buried in discussion forums or documentation, making it difficult and timeconsuming for users to find what they need to solve their problem. LemonAid is software, installed on the application, that allows users to click on a label or image they believe is the most relevant to their problem and view the questions other users have asked, along with the most popular answers.

The Google Research grant funds efforts to determine whether the application will work in a real-world situation, along with the associated burden and benefits to software teams who may consider implementing LemonAid.

LemonAid is currently used on a trial basis by the University of Washington (UW) Libraries portal. The goal is to reach over 80,000 UW faculty, students, and staff during the trial period which will run through September 2012.