Last day to vote for Round 1 of Canadian Blogging Awards

Today is the last day to vote in Round 1 of the Canadian Blogging Awards. So please vote for my blog as Best Personal Blog, and while you're there vote for How About That Melody as Best New Blog, CASCON blog for Best Group Blog and Best Business Blog, and Accordion Guy as Best Blog!

Behavioural Graph Colouring CS talk - Michael Kearns

Today, I attended a Computer Science talk by Michael Kearns about Behavioural Graph Colouring.

Abstract:
The pioneering work of Travers and Milgram in 1969 established the
now-familiar folklore of "six degrees" of separation in natural social
networks. More recently, researchers including Jon Kleinberg and Duncan
Watts have explored the algorithmic aspects of how messages are forwarded
in such networks. Perhaps the computer science view of this fascinating
line of thought can be best summarized as follows: Using relatively local
information, distributed human organizations can compute good
approximations to the all-pairs shortest paths problem. What other sorts
of distributed optimization problems can humans solve?

In this talk, I will first overview our more mathematical research at
the intersection of computer science, economics and social networks that
led us to be interested in the empirical question above. I will then
describe the preliminary findings of a behavioral study we held recently
at Penn. Human subjects attempted to perform distributed graph coloring
using a system that controlled network structure, information conditions,
and a variety of other variables of interest. The experiments shed early
light on whether such problems can be solved by humans, under what
conditions, and what algorithms they seem to adopt.

The behavioral experiments are joint work with Nick Montfort, Huanlei
Ni, and Siddharth Suri.

Bio:
Michael Kearns is a professor of Computer and Information
Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the National
Center Chair in Resource Management and Technology, and is co-director of
Penn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. He has published
extensively in the theory of machine learning, probabilistic artificial
intelligence, and related disciplines. His most recent interests lie at
the intersections of computer science with economics, game theory, and
finance.

This was an interesting talk, he talked about social network theory and how humans can collaborate to solve complex computer science problems, as shown from his preliminary results. It looks like social networks are being applied everywhere now, so it's good that my research is into this area and I switched professors in my PhD to continue along this line of research.

Alias TV series ends in May 2006

Oh too bad, I just heard, my favorite TV series Alias is ending its fifth season at the end of May 2006. Apparently, Alias cost too much to make, have you seen Alias with all the props, the special effects, the gadgets and the high-tech stuff? So it was canned by ABC. I've been into Alias since I first started watching it like 5 years ago, but I haven't been watching it lately since season 4 last year, so I don't know what's been going on. Partly, I didn't know what time Alias was on for this season.

Modblog is still down

Did I mention how much I hate Modblog?. Well the site is still down where we host our research blog. Sacha, one of our research group members, just told me that Bloglines keeps a cache of the feeds you subscribe to. Well lone and behold, she's right! So, I guess I'll take the cache and then import the feed into our blog platform (we're going to be using WordPress), which we are using for all our other blogs (the Indie music blog, and the CASCON conference blog).

I really love WordPress and how you can customize by adding plugins and edit the blog pages. Kudos to the WordPress development team! Maybe I should move over my blog here on Blogger to WordPress. I might do that, when I have time and am not so busy. I am busy right now getting the analysis of data from the CASCON blog and the Indie music blog.

Vote for my blog as Best Personal Blog at Canadian Blogging Awards

Round 1 voting has begun for the Canadian Blogging Awards. Please vote my site as Best Personal blog. Round 1 voting ends November 30th. While you are there, other nominations from our research group include How About That Melody for Best New Blog, and the CASCON blog for Best Group Blog and Best Business Blog. Also vote for my friend Accordion Guy as the Best Blog.



Technorati tags: canadian blogging awards

How About That Melody Indie music blog has a new home

Our research group has moved the How About That Melody Indie music blog to our own hosted blog site.  We control the content and the blog, and can make whatever changes we want.  We're using WordPress which by the way, is a great blogging platform. It allows you to edit your php pages and the sky is the limit as to what you want to put on your blog.  Even Robert Scoble, chief blogger from Microsoft has switched his blog to WordPress from Movable Type.  Come and check us out at our new home!

Catholic Insider podcast

I've been listening to this Catholic Insider podcast on my iPod mini. It's a great podcast recorded by Father Roderick, and it provides great inspiration in the Catholic faith. This is a great example of reviving back Catholicism and encouraging youths to be active in their daily Catholic life. He talks also about the happenings around the world, the gadgets, Harry Potter, Star Wars chronicles. It's amazing, he even got his bishop interested in podcasting, and how it can be used as a new medium to spread and evangelize the word of God. Or in other words, provide a Godcast.

You can subscribe to the Catholic Insider podcast, the Praystation portable podcast, the Harry Potter podcast, and the Star Wars chronicles podcast.

Modblog sucks

Our research group's blog is on Modblog, but I think it's time that we switch over to WordPress and install it locally on our server. I've been delaying this, but now it's the second time that Modblog has been down. They have some technical issues, once they're up, I am moving our blog out of there!

Google to Go

I'll take a Google to Go please. Yes, Google Local is available for your mobile phone. I don't know if it will work with Rogers Wireless in Canada, but it does show my phone (Motorola RAZR V3), so maybe I'll try it out and see how it goes. Having Google Maps on your phone or PDA would really be good so you don't get lost, which I know I do get lost very often!

Grad student's productivity curve

Ha, this is funny!  The curve of a grad student's productivity.  How many students have this kind of productivity?  Where there are certain days when you get a lot of work done, and others when you get absolutely no work done?

Technorati tags: grad student productivity

Quotes about operating systems

Here are some neat quotes about operating systems. I particularly like the following:

"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix." (Kieran O'Shaughnessy)

"Operating systems are like underwear — nobody really wants to look at them." (Bill Joy)
- Ha ha, that's funny

"Develop for it? I’ll piss on it. [the NeXT Computer]" (Bill Gates)
-This one, I didn't hear about, and this coming from Bill Gates?

"Linux is just a file system and a file manager." (Steve Ballmer)
- Well Steve, that's kind of wrong, because your Apple OSX is based on BSD version of Linux.

When you say: "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say: "Hey, I got those with the system -- for free." (Linus Torvalds)

"Every operating system out there is about equal. We all suck." (Brian Valentine of Microsoft)
- Wow, this coming from Microsoft, interesting. So that means Microsoft Windows sucks! But didn't we know that already?

"It's not the technology, folks, it's the people. When we trace [the errors] back, it's always human error." (Bob Herbold of Microsoft)
- Isn't that what technical support always says to the end-user?

"Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS." (Alan Kay)
- Hmm, I found that one a little strange, I think Java is a good thing, and I use it for programming most of the time

"I think it would be pretty bizarre if OS/2 finds any popularity." (Bill Gates)
- I remember Microsoft supported OS/2, because they helped build it along with IBM
- but then when Microsoft came out with Windows, they totally abandoned OS/2 and OS/2 finally dug its own grave, even though it was a more superior OS. I remember having it installed on my computer, and it rarely crashed. But there was lack of support for programs, although you could run Windows applications on OS/2 through the Windows emulator

"Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable." (Dave Barry)

"Of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in the Linux source code.... He had my book.... But the code was his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up." (Andrew Tanenbaum)
- Ooh, that's pretty harsh

"I'm not one of those who think Bill Gates is the devil. I simply suspect that if Microsoft ever met up with the devil, it wouldn't need an interpreter." (Nicholas Petreley)
- here's a person who really hates Microsoft!


What are your favorite quotes?

Peter Norvig talk from Google today

Peter Norvig from Google came to talk today at the Distinguished Lecture in Computer Science at U of T today. His talk was about AI in the Middle: Mediating between Author and Reader.

Here was the abstract of his talk:

The system of publishing the written word has made more knowledge available to more people than any other technology. No other system comes within a factor of a million. Now that a good portion of this written material is available online, it can be processed by computer. But the written word is notoriously imprecise and ambiguous, so currently the best way to make use of it is to leverage the intelligence and
language understanding ability of author and reader, and relegate the computer to the more modest role of connecting the two. Even this modest role still leaves a number of challenges in computer science, computational linguistics, and artificial intelligence, which will be discussed.

His bio is here with an excerpt below:

Peter Norvig has been at Google Inc since 2001 as the Director of Machine Learning, Search Quality, and Research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field.

Previously he was the senior computer scientist at NASA and head of the 200-person Computational Sciences Division at Ames Research Center. Before that he was Chief Scientist at Junglee, Chief designer at Harlequin Inc, and Senior Scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

Dr. Norvig received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a Professor at the University of Southern California and a Research Faculty Member at Berkeley. He has over fifty publications in various areas of Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common
Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.

Here are the notes that I made from the talk:

Peter talked about the 3 different methods for combing knowledge from information. The first method is knowledge engineering which involves general level human intelligence therefore this requires logical axioms and encoding knowledge. However, the problem is too expensive and it takes time to process and analyze, we don’t really need all that knowledge. The second method is machine learning (of which U of T Computer Science is renowned in, as it has the largest group in AI). Machine learning involves examining trends, and with machine learning algorithms, you can do spelling corrections. So, Peter gave an example where his Google colleague's name using dictionary-based schemes becomes Tehran Salami. The audience laughed. However, if you use corpus based, then you get a better result. Even though the more data you get, then the algorithms work (shown by Google's graphs and prediction scheme), we need to worry more about the data rather than the algorithms. So this method is not really good for general AI.

Enter AI in the middle as a hybrid that connects the authors and readers together, between knowledge engineering and machine learning. There is a book by Andy Clark called Being There Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again – the brain is not the sole part, Clark says that the brain is the mediator. If we apply this to search, the idea is this. We predict something, present it to the user, and the user provides feedback. We let the human do the decision, and don’t try to approximate human intelligence. We would be happier by getting material from an authority rather than an aggregator.

How to make author and reader become more intelligent? We need to know about the What, Who, How, Where, When, and Wallet (which is very important to get money!). Google uses Statistical Machine Translation. For example, to translate Arabic into English, some words are not fluent, there is 1 disfluency for each sentence. For translating Chinese into English, there are 2 disfluencies for each sentence. So Google uses a probabilistic model based on word statistics, don’t use syntax (parser), or semantics (ontologies, Wordnet). More data is better, this doubles the parallel training corpus.

Another way for searching words is using Named Entity Extraction. For example, Sun Microsystems is in the group of software companies. They use word clustering and use a Bayes network to assign words into clusters to infer what the word is, and use that to return results of query.

There was a question period after the talk. I asked question about Google’s take on social searching and searching based on others that have searched for that term before like for example My Web 2.0 Beta from Yahoo and from del.icio.us and flickr and tagging. Peter replied that he doesn’t believe tagging works well but Google is working on personalization of searches and in the labs for sharing searches with others. Before they based their searching algorithms on stateless, but now beginning to add state. However, he believes that in certain situations, tagging does work like for example in pictures but it doesn't work well for web pages.

Another question that was asked was about structural searching. For example, finding apartments with a certain price and at a certain location. Google can't answer that query for you. Peter said that Google hasn't really looked too much into this. On the topic of searching on mobile devices, Peter mentioned the need for a different type of interface because of the constrained space and that this will become important in the future. This is probably the work of the summer intern as a wireless engineer at Google Labs.

The last question dealt with visualizing searches and showing clusters. Should we have clustering at all? Peter and Google say no, for the majority of queries, you don’t want clusters, but for the minority audience then it may be good to have clusters, but for most queries, it won’t help to show the clusters in the results. One of the problems with clustering is that what happens if the cluster is incorrect then have to correct the cluster where it would be easier to just redo the text then revisualize it. Another problem with clustering is what to name the cluster.

All in all, it was a good talk, hey it's from Google! It's the work at Google that makes Computer Science still the discipline that students want to get their degree in.

Splogs and Dr. Seuss

I just read this comment from the post in Slashdot about splogs clog blog services. Splogs are basically spam blogs, a program is written which creates a blog and proliferates them all over the place (but the content is garbage and has no meaning to the topic of the blog whatsoever), polluting the blogosphere. In fact, using this method inflates the PageRank on Google of that blog because it links to other valid web sites, but the spam blogs are in no way related to them. Then someone commented about splogs clog blog services should be called splogs clog blog logs. And then this guy started talking about how that is a tongue twister and started other tongue twisters as shown below:

Splogs clog blog logs.
Spam jams Stan's LAN.
Guy's WiFi goes awry.
CERN confirms worm, firms squirm.
Forget cassette and diskette, USB key snazzy.
Nimrods applaud iPods abroad, while tightwads called slipshod clawed screen fraud.
One Phish, Two Phish.
Red Phish, Blue Phish.

Ha, that's funny!

Regarding about splogs, whenever any new technology comes out, there's always going to be people trying to find ways to circumvent it for prestige, to show that the technology is flawed, for fun, etc. That's never going to change. We need to somehow find methods to detect them and have ways to combat them. Kind of creating a digital nervous system like in the body, where the body can fight the viruses. This is the hope of autonomic computing.

Get your own Google logo or personal search engine!

Ah, this is cool, I just read this post about how to make your own Google logo! Everybody loves Google. This web site will allow you to make your own name in Google logo format and have your own personal search engine. Here's mine:

Paper submitted!

I've been pretty busy the past couple of days preparing a paper for a conference based on my research and I've just finally submitted it tonight at 11:55 pm before the deadline of 12:00 am!

Talk about intense work activity. I actually started writing the actual paper 2 days before the deadline, and worked non-stop, at school, at home, on the train. I thought I couldn't get it done, but I was able to. I was so tired after, so I took the entire weekend to do no research, just relax, watched a movie, spend time with family, and went shopping.

I think now my rest time is over, so it's back to work on Monday, for more cutting edge research! Ah, the life of a PhD student.

RIM Blackberries now have Bluetooth and one has a camera!

Well, it looks like RIM is now widening their turf from a straight e-mail device and getting into the PDA/smart phone/all-in-one mobile device market. RIM is going to release some new Blackberries that will all have Bluetooth. One model, the 7130E, will have 802.11b, a QWERTY-landscape keyboard and camera. Wow! I remember I had a discussion with a friend of mine who was working at RIM about why RIM Blackberries didn't include Bluetooth, I thought it would be easy to put in, so you could use your Bluetooth headset with the Blackberry phone or transfer data to another Bluetooth device, like swapping contacts, or syncing with your desktop.

I find Bluetooth to be a great feature, of course, I was into Bluetooth in 2000 when I was working at Classwave Wireless in Toronto. I was an advocate for Bluetooth then, I envisioned having Bluetooth in every electronic device and that infrared would be killed because of Bluetooth. Well, my prediction was wrong in terms of infrared being non-existent, but you do see new devices have integrated Bluetooth and it does make sense. I can transfer my pictures from my Bluetooth Motorola RAZR cell phone to my laptop, sure it's slow, but it works and it's instantaneous. I did this while blogging at the CASCON conference.

So now this makes me think about how you have two camps, an integrated all-in-one device, or a device that does one thing. There's pros and cons to both. You can have one device that works well on one thing but then have to have different devices for different functions, eventually carrying them on a belt or pocket and becoming like BatMan. Well, that's what I have right now, that's why they call me GadgetMan.

Tony DeRose talk from Pixar

Today is the talk from Tony De Rose from Pixar at the Computer Science colloquium at the University of Toronto. He is talking about Math in the Movies, and started with a teaser trailer of Cars, which will come out on June 9, 2006. There's lots of people in the room as almost everyone has watched a movie made by Pixar like Monsters Inc, A Bug's Life, and Finding Nemo. It's interesting in that when Tony graduated from his PhD, he had a tough decision to decide to become a professor at University of Washington or at University of Toronto. So, he became a professor at University of Washington before going to work at Pixar.

Here is his abstract and bio:

abstract --
Film making is undergoing a digital revolution brought on by
advances in areas such as computer graphics and computational
physics. This talk will provide a behind the scenes look at how
fully digital films, such as Pixar's "Finding Nemo" and "The
Incredibles", are made, with particular emphasis on the role that
mathematics plays in the revolution.

bio --
Tony DeRose is currently a Senior Scientist and lead of the
Research Group at Pixar Animation Studios. He received a Ph.D. in
Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in
1985. From 1985 to 1995 Dr. DeRose was a Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. In 1998, he
was a major contributor to the Oscar winning short film "Geri's
game", and in 1999 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics
Achievement Award.

In his talk, Tony talked about how the animation is done in the movies. In a progression reel of the movie, first there is a story reel of frames which are drawn out on paper. Then each frame on paper is then animated with layout, then simulation and adding actors and audio. There's also lighting that needs to be added to the frame, and there is a mathematical formula that calculates the amount of lighting L(x, y) which involves an integral of L(y,z) and shading R(x,y,z). The problem is solving for L(x,y) which is usually done with an approximation.

I've always been fascinated about the making of animation movies and the technical process involved. Tony mentioned about subdivision surfaces where you take the points of a surface, split and average in a subdivision matrix and then as you interate through the subdivision, you can have a smoother surface. He showed how subdivision surfaces was applied to Woody's hand and face from Toy Story 1.

Wow, a lot of the math relates back to signal analysis that I studied in a course about more than 7 years ago. Tony is talking about wavelet noise construction and Perlin noise. Fourier transform, sampling, deja vu for me. I remember I used to have to manually compute the Fourier transform!

2005 Canadian Blogging Awards

The 2005 Canadian Blogging Awards are coming up which I got from the GTA Bloggers. Nominate your favorite blogs in one of the following best categories:

Best Blog
Best Political-Left Blog: for blogs that are politically left.
Best Political-Right Blog: for blogs that are politically right.
Best New Blog: for blogs that started in 2005.
Best Group Blog
Best Humour Blog
Best Photo Blog
Best Culture Blog: for blogs about art, literature, movies, music, etc.
Best Personal Blog: For blogs about the lives of their authors.
Best Media Blog: for blogs by professionals in the media.
Best Business Blog
Best Religious Blog
Best Sports Blog
Best Blog Post: For an individual post by a blogger.
Best Blog Post Series: For a series of posts that relate to each other.

I nominated the CASCON blog for Best Group Blog and Best Business Blog.

Apparently, AccordionGuy is up for the Best Blog, you should check it out, it's really good!

I also nominated How About That Melody, our research Indie music blog as Best Culture Blog, and Best Blog of 2005.

Need help to write a conference paper?

I'm sure many people find it difficult and very time consuming to write a conference paper. Not anymore with SCIGen from the folks at MIT. Automatically, get a paper written within less than 30 seconds! It randomly generates a paper for you.

Apparently, one of the papers that the MIT students computer generated got accepted to a conference! Kind of makes you think about the peer-review process for reviewing papers and the quality.

Blog data for research

One of the issues for researchers in mining blogs is to find blog data to test their algorithms and research on. It's currently difficult to find blog data since it's not publicly available or you have to ask a certain researcher to see if you can have access to them. I just read a post today about making blog data available. I just wrote a comment back to Anjo's blog (Anjo also worked with Lilia Efimova, who's prominent in the academic blogging community) proposing that there should be some forum or group or web site where people could submit their blog data traces for other researchers to use.

By doing this, we can foster greater community and help those with mining the blog data and advance the research on blogs. We could perhaps build an open-source community for sharing blog data (maybe under a Creative Commons license?). There's already something like this with the wireless community. CRAWDAD is a group that maintains wireless traces for Wi-Fi from Dartmouth College. What do people think about this?

Technorati tags: blog data, blog research

RSS feeds for mobile devices

For the longest amount of time, I've been looking for a feedreader to install on my Palm Zire 71. I tried various feedreaders for Palm. I wanted to try out the FeedBurner feedreader for Palm but unfortunately it requires Websphere Micro Edition which only runs on Palm Tungsten C, Palm Treo 600, Palm Z22, Palm Tungsten T. So that really sucks. I tried Vagabond and AvantBlog. AvantBlog sounded pretty good, because it can sync Blogger blogs and I have this blog using Blogger. It's just an AvantGo channel that you add to AvantGo which you can download on Palm or any other mobile device that supports AvantGo. However, you have to remember to sync the channel. I tried doing this, but then it didn't sync properly, and I had to sync again from the Palm and HotSync back to my computer. It's not foolproof though, sometimes it does work and sometimes it doesn't. So, I got sick and tired and I don't use that anymore.

Then I was browsing my AvantGo channels on my Palm when I saw that AvantGo now supports RSS feeds with AvantGo RSS. I thought this is great, because I use AvantGo all the time to read my news from the web offline on my Palm. So I tried it out and synced one of the feeds I subscribe to. I think I didn't do it properly, because not all the posts showed and it was difficult to scroll. Also, AvantGo RSS also supports creating an AvantGo RSS channel for your blog. So, that's what I am going to do next and put that on this blog.

Now, I just found out through Google search on feed reader for Palm that there is a standalone Palm feed reader application called Quick News for PalmOS. So maybe I'll try that and see how that goes. Will keep you updated.

Technorati tags: palm feed reader

Subscribe to my podcasts!

I've made my podcasts available for subscribing now. Go here to subscribe to my podcasts!

Notes from Mik Lamming's talk

Here's the notes of the talk today with Mik Lamming that I wrote with my laptop.

Sensing Behaviour
Mik Lamming, HP Labs

Before Mik began to talk, he discussed about how before he got into research, he used to work in Photoshop. He met Roy Want (who now works at Intel Research) from Olivetti with the Active Badge. Active Badge is a device which looks like a badge and is equipped with a radio for sensing where you are in the office environment. It was one of the first ubicomp systems deployed. Mik then talked about his work on the Forget-me-not which he worked on at Xerox PARC.

Forget-me-not
Xerox, 1993

- Pervasive over space and time
- Proximity information better than location
- Showed BirdDoc to Xerox, person under surveillance
- Roy Want worked in Xerox to help Mik with Active Badge with a display -> PARCTab was invented
- Log people’s behaviour, who you were with, where you are, log people’s activities by wearing these small devices – they embedded these devices everywhere in the lab
- Built system called Forget-me-not as a memory prosthesis unit
- Want to remember things in the home not just in the lab
- Xerox said no possible use for this system
- Repurposed the system as document retrieval system, how to retrieve documents
- Lessons learned:
- people are working on systems with absolute position (have to make uplink to wireless network, that burns power, it’s more expensive to do that than peer-to-peer pinging, that was their theory)
- there was lack of sympathy to tracking people’s behaviour eg. Participant would come back and the device didn’t work because it was wet
- invasive and privacy – dumb and evil
- installing this infrastructure was extremely tedious
- lots of these applications need to work in your own house, single user value proposition, rather than lots of users

Alzheimer’s and Caregivers Work

This was Mik's work that he talked about while working at HP Labs.

- did caregiver interviews in collaboration with Prof. Linda Nichols, UT Memphis
- caregivers are typically the elderly, they have caregiver burnout
- expensive cost of caregiving
- analyzed logs of data
- Alzheimer’s patient behaviour can fluctuate from day to day
- Designed a system for sensing
- Zone detection eg. In bathroom, in bed,near stove, fire
- Proximity
- Constructed a design rationale for environment sensing for monitoring environment

Out of this came the Minder concept.

Minder Concept
- Personal technology for sensing personal and social context while providing control and privacy of information
- Embed them in everyday things that you carry, wear
- P2P system
- Always on and attentive, yet long-lived, a year without battery change, wear it day and night
- Backed by 3rd party brokered utility services
- Proximity matters without central system to be better than Forget-me-not
- Opportunistic interactions, see proximity and upload the log to a portal for timeline analysis
- Pattern recognition language to apply to the minder device
- Make a network that can’t be heard by others based on shared authentication (privacy model), next version will use UWB

At this point, Mik passed around the prototype being deployed on caregivers and Alzheimer’s patients, very small device with a chip and using IR called the SPEC.

Using proximity for monitoring detection of Alzheimer’s patient
- address problems like leaving the stove on
- attach these devices to stove knob, and find out that it has been moved
- how to build system that will keep going long enough, and easy to change battery so don’t lose tracking information

Sensing own behaviour on a typical day
- Mik showed graph of what he did, he deployed SPECs in different locations
- From here, can tell what Mik did everyday (probably more than he wanted to know and what the whole world to know)
- Wrote analysis software to take the interaction graph to translate into human interpretable terms
- Why keep diary of behaviour? eg. For drug trials
- Does this reveal too much private information, figure out too much about yourself and share with the world?
- By talking to other devices in the environment, keep log on your device

Recognizing and responding to situations in real time
- tested this with a kid
- event queries may be downloaded
- downloaded a pattern
- deployed the SPECs on backpack, scooter, garage, desk and bedroom of the kid's belongings
- could detect whether he forgot his scooter by having LED emit on the SPEC

What learnt from Minder s1
- can do lot of useful things with proximity sensing, and simple pattern recognition
- power, adding sensors saves power if gives hints when device can sleep
- by using knowledge of behaviour, then can turn off power when necessary
- form factor, can now do 24X7 tracking, need to be invisible and fashionable, not geeky
- try to embed in things that people use and wear, example embed in watch

Minder s1 / “Firefly 1”
- wristwatch form factor with RF, accelerometers/magnetometers for walking/orientation
- doing another iteration of this device with range finding to do time of flight to use chirp-mode radio and not UWB
- moving ahead with the home care
- lots of uses that people want for this, eg. Google way for providing ads based on human behaviour

Mik's sensing behaviour work with the SPEC reminds me of the research project I worked on opportunistic interactions using Palm handheld devices. In this case, we used Palm Tungsten T handhelds equipped with Bluetooth and wrote software to make pair-wise connections with other Palms and Bluetooth devices nearby. Of course, we never did achieve great battery life like the SPEC which is like in the order of couple of months. Our Palms only lasted 6 hours on a good day before having to be charged.

The wireless radios out there like Bluetooth, UWB, Wi-Fi were not really designed for opportunistic spontaneous networking. They are power-hungry and take a long time to establish connection. A custom radio needs to be designed for something like this that has almost zero-power.

Do not install Newsmonster!

I came across Newsmonster, web-based feed aggregator for Mozilla Firefox. It's cross-platform, and the GUI looked really nice in the browser and has support for offline browsing. So, I thought hey this is really good, cause right now I am using Feedreader, which is a Windows application. So I have to open Feedreader in order to read my feeds that I subscribe to. Most web-based feed readers that I've looked at like Google Reader, My Yahoo, Bloglines, do an ok job but it looks very crude in presentation at best. This looked like the web-based feed reader that I've been looking for. Alright, then, I said, I'll go and download it, and it's an extension for Mozilla Firefox.

After I finished downloading and installing it, I restarted Firefox, and I saw Newsmonster on the right side of Firefox in the browser. I tried to customize it and play around with it. This is where the nightmare began. I couldn't customize it, and I couldn't go to any web site, and the entire Firefox browser was frozen. But, I couldn't even exit the browser or close it! Then, I went into the Windows Task Manager to kill it. I then ran Firefox again, but the browser wouldn't come up. I thought that's strange, so I killed it again. And again. And again. I thought maybe my computer is acting up, so I'll defrag my hard drive. I did, but still that didn't work, then I decided to reboot my XP machine. Still to no avail. I decided to do a Google search on Newsmonster and Firefox hanging, and lone and behold, many people have complained about Newsmonster and Firefox freezing!

After about 30 minutes, I was able to uninstall the extension and restore back Firefox. Lesson learned, never install any software that has the word "monster" in it! I was about to work on writing some code for mining the data for my research, but it got put off because I decided to install Newsmonster. Bad move. I'm glad that others have posted the solution to uninstall!

So, let this be a warning to you all. Don't install Newsmonster!

Technorati tags: newsmonster

Mik Lamming talk at U of T tomorrow

Mik Lamming, from HP Labs at Palo Alto is giving a talk on Continuously Sensing Human Behaviour in BA 1180 tomorrow at 11 am at U of T. Specifically he's exploring the use of small wireless devices called SPECs that can be embedded on people to continuously sense human context. This is certainly something of interest to me, because one of my research interests is in context awareness. The details and abstract of the talk are described below:

Drug companies, marketeers, HMOs, advertisers, architects, and many others, have strongly held business reasons to learn more about the daily lives of their customers, and users. But as consumers, we yearn to understand more about ourselves: to discover what factors influence our wellness, spending patterns, or progress towards some goal. We all need help to recall details of past events, or to be reminded of things in the future. These are just a few of the things that could be achieved if we could continuously sense our own behavior, and especially if we believed that our data could be kept confidential until we had a compelling reason to share it.

I have been looking at ways to continuously sense my own context and behavior: where I am, who, or what I have near me, and what I am doing. By continuous I mean everywhere I go, all the time - 24x7. I have been tackling three core issues : how to get continuous coverage of my life; how to avoid being snooped upon by Big Brother; and how to make the infrastructure smoothly scale from a single user, to the whole world. I'll present a few things my team learned from our first system.

Recently I have been looking at how these ideas could address the problem of elder care giver burnout, a situation with which I have had personal experience. I'll describe our goal, and the new apparatus we have been building.


Mik Lamming is a Distinguished Scientist at HP Labs Palo Alto. He is exploring how tiny computers can continuously monitor long-term human behavior, but without compromising privacy. He believes this is a crucial key in addressing the everyday information processing needs of every man, woman and child on the planet. He enjoys doing user studies, building prototypes, and then figuring out their shortcomings.
For the past couple of years he has been exploring how swarms of tiny computers called SPECs might reduce the burnout rate for people caring for the elderly at home.
With William Newman is author of the textbook "Interactive System Design".
In '90s he helped found Xerox EuroPARC, and built the Ubiquitous Computing lab. establishing many of the fundamental patents in the field, His team prototyped Forget-me-not a portable prosthetic memory, and Satchel, a tiny ubiquitous document access device.

I will definitely be going to the talk tomorrow, so watch back for updated notes.