Markets, Products and US U of T talk

Markets, Products and US talk

Having problems connecting to Blogger, so I’m making notes instead of putting it on the blog.

Dr. Dennis Tsichritzis
Fraunhofer Institute

Abstract

The commercial world is witnessing many shifts. While this situation does
not affect Universities immediately, eventually it forces some rethinking
of plans, programs and student career possibilities. We will outline the
new trends and try to point out some necessary changes. The legacy issues
and the cultural aspects who may be an obstacle to such changes will be
openly discussed.

Brief Biography

Dennis Tsichritzis obtained his PhD at Princeton (1968) in Computational
complexity. He then joined as a faculty member the CS department at
University of Toronto (1968-1985) where he worked in different areas,
eventually concentrating in the area of Database Systems. During that
period he helped set up the CS department and the Research Institute on
Informatics at the University of Crete, Greece. He returned to Europe as
professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1985-2001) where he
mainly worked on Object oriented Systems. He then became the president and
chief scientist of GMD the German National Research Center on IT
(1991-2001) where he undertook a major restructuring. In 2001 GMD was
merged with Fraunhofer, a major European Research Center, where until
recently he was senior VP and member of the Executive Board.

Talk

Dennis was a professor at University of Toronto and was hired by Kelly Gotlieb, and now he’s back at U of T, so he's coming full circle. His talk is on Markets, Products and US, nobody understands the consumer market and how it relates to corporations. Graduate students come out of university with all this knowledge, but they don’t know how to apply them in the corporate world. If we look at what the big companies are doing, they are hiring in Asia and Europe. We now see a transition in companies from building boxes to building systems. There is an emphasis from technology to business solutions, and business models are changing from selling products to selling services. This is where IBM is going where IBM has initiated a services business and IBM Research is involved with services research.

OK, Blogger is working now, so I'll continue blogging on Blogger.

OK, here's the interesting part of the talk. What happens to the research value chain? How does research fit into the company, and how can grad students get jobs in corporations with the research that they have. Hmm, something that definitely I need to know, as I will graduate hopefully within a year and a half from now. Dennis is now addressing this through curiosity-based research. Humbolt's model is based that high-quality education is based on research. You're doing your own research, you're in this balloon and you pump papers based on the research. What is the pool of the results? The pull effect is zero, nobody is knocking on your door to find out what you are doing (marketing plug: if you're reading this and reading my research, and would like to discuss about my research and want to know more about what I'm doing, contact me). The pull effect is minimal. The basic innovation model is research to applied to research to R&D in corporations. Now, we are going to a fast innovation model where research goes to prototype to start up then to a new product. The pull effect is considerable and the pump effect is strong. The financial pull model is different, it is research to patents to start up to trade sale, the pull effect is extreme and the pump effect is drastic. The next model he is showing is a financial turbo model where you have research to startup to IPO, the pull effect is unbearable and the pump effect is strategic.

Things are changing now. IPOs are getting difficult to get, trade sales are under financial scrutiny (witness all the scandals like HP, Enron, Nortel), venture capitalists are keeping companies to stay afloat longer, venture and private capital is chasing other opportunities, and there is a global economy effect. Therefore, there is no pull and no pump.

So how does this affect us? We need to look at the trends in media, investment choices, employment opportunities, in students' plans and in research programs' emphasis. We basically have to look at the big picture, which is getting more and more complex than before. There are many various factors, which create push and pull forces. Now, info/bio/nanotechnologies are losing ground but energy/health/aging/water/materials are gaining ground in attention and popularity. Customers are looking for solutions and not technologies. Well, that's not really new. We need to listen before we talk, we have to think before we do.

We now see that almost everything in our world is revolving around IT. He suggests that we should enter into new alliances like bioinformatics, geoinformatics, etc. We are now beginning to see this interdisciplinary programs where computer science is being used in different applications. In U of T, we now have a bioinformatics program that is a collaboration between Biology and Computer Science. Computer science algorithms can be used to solve biological problems like for example genetic algorithms and genetic programming for sequencing DNA and for deciphering the human genome. To develop new tools, we need to understand the area.

Where are the obstacles to this line of thinking? It's a result of our culture which encompasses our arrogance, we are worried about pumping publications/visibility/promotion, the research that we are doing is narrow so we need to broaden our horizons, there is an overhead of switching interests and understanding problems, universities are unwilling to change their traditional line of education, etc. There is also a loss of cosy relationships. Basically, we need to have open culture, we need to open ourselves, not close them.

The conclusion of the talk is that if we are not there, then the alliances will come to us.

On Technorati: markets, products, research

Happy Halloween

To all the kids and people celebrating Halloween, have fun, but stay safe. Remember to check the food you have to make sure that it is safe to eat, be careful of not going to dark places without a flashlight, wear a costume that makes sure you are easily seen by cars, and don't walk alone (especially for the kids). Did you know that Halloween actually has a Christian background to it? The day is actually called All Hallows Eve, the evening before the next day November 1 which is All Saints Day.

You can read about the origins of Halloween from this article. Well, anyways, have a Happy Halloween! Here's a great video of a Haunted Mansion Fireworks Display.



On Technorati: Halloween

Get your free Wi-Fi routers!

But only in San Francisco! Spanish company, FON, is giving away free Wi-Fi routers in San Francisco to build up a free city-wide Wi-Fi network. There's already free Wi-Fi in Mountain View courtesy of Google (although I never had a chance to try when I was there over the summer, it was just when I left in mid August).

Toronto is supposed to have Wi-Fi courtesy of Toronto HydroOne and it's supposed to be starting right now, but I haven't been able to connect to one. It's apparently free right now, but there will be a charge since different companies will be charging for Wi-Fi access. Why can't Toronto be like San Francisco, and have free Wi-Fi!

On Technorati: Wi-Fi

Browser wars revisited: Firefox 2 vs. IE 7

VS.

Remember the browser wars of Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer? Well, it's back again, this time Mozilla Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. I've been using both but I genuinely feel Firefox outhandedly beats Internet Explorer and I use Firefox all the time (except that with 1.5, Firefox would very often consume all my resources and my laptop would become hot because it took up 100% CPU utilization). I've just installed Firefox 2, and I'll see if Firefox 2 resolves my problem. With Internet Explorer, look at all the spyware and viruses you can get from ActiveX controls and popups. Reminds me of someone who I had to fix his computer because of the spyware and popups.

Anyways, CNET has this article where they put Firefox 2 against Internet Explorer 7 to see which browser is better? And their result, well I think you know the answer, but for the details, check here.

On Technorati: Firefox, Internet Explorer

Barry Wellman S.D. Clark lecture at U of T

Live from the George Ignatieff theatre at U of T, it's the Barry Wellman talk about the Internet in Everyday Life. I couldn't find it, it was located around the corner. Of course, I've never been to this part of U of T, I'm located in the Bahen Centre. The room is getting packed. I see a whole bunch of cameras so maybe this lecture is going to be recorded by ePresence. Everyone is getting a copy of the slides from the lecture. This lecture is a long version of the talk that Barry presented at my CASCON workshop on Social Computing Best Practices.

Barry Wellman is the S.D. Clark Chair in Sociology. The first S.D. Clark chair is giving an introduction to the S.D. Clark lectures in the Faculty of Arts and Science at U of T. He is talking about Barry's accomplishments and achievements. He is being broadcast by video since he is not at U of T but travelling. This is the 8th S.D. Clark lecture, and Barry is the new incumbent as S.D. Clark chair.

Barry is starting the talk. The Internet is not killing community but adding ways to communicate, the talk will be a breadth talk rather than a depth talk. The videocast will be put on ePresence as well as on TVOntario is also recording this as well. The American Sociological Review published an article saying that there is social isolation in America due to the internet. The Globe and Mail and Macleans talked about how the internet sucks and social isolation. Community has been falling apart because of industrialization, bureaucratization, urbanization, capitalism and technology change.

Before the internet, Toronto communities were sizeable, this is based on his NetLab studies in East York. There has been lots of false attribution in the media due to the internet. Now, Barry is addressing whether online community is dominating "real" community. For example, are 5000 "friendsters" replacing 50 friends? Is it drawing us away from real life? Barry just mentioned that this talk will be podcast, great! Dystopians say that internet will kill community, but utopians say that internet will change societies. For example, Wikipedia is replacing the encyclopedia on the 'net. S.D. Clark has an entry on Wikipedia. What they found it is that the internet is NOT taking over everyday life. Virtual communities are atypical, a low percentage belong to them. There is a lot of hype in the activity numbers on the internet, for example, a lot of MySpace accounts are mythical meaning that a lot of people create accounts but they never go online after.

So, the question is are real relationships withering because of the internet? What is the internet doing to us and what are we doing to the internet? Barry's research group NetLab has done lots of community studies, and he is showing results of some of those studies. Some of the results show that people that e-mail the most, also spend a lot of time in face-to-face interaction. So, it seems to be that heavy users still spend a lot of time using physical real interaction. E-mail links a wide range of diversified ties. Some of the research questions that they have are what do personal networks look like. They're also doing a community study in Chapleau, Northern Ontario. Email is still very high even though when people are close to each other and are local.

On Technorati: social networks, connected lives

Jim Glass MIT talk at U of T

Jim Glass from MIT is giving a talk now which I am blogging about. His talk is about Speech as Interface and Content: Advances and Challenges. Conversation systems use a mixture of human and computer interfaces. He just showed a funny clip from Saturday Night Live where a guy is going out on a blind date and his date works in customer service and answers him just like a customer service automated attendant would, which was pretty funny!

Here's the abstract of his talk.

Spoken interaction between humans and machines has long been a goal of
scientists and engineers. As computational devices continue to shrink in size,
speech-based interfaces are more relevant than ever. At the same time, audio
and video media are fast becoming significant data types themselves. Without
additional processing however, searching these materials can be tedious.
Spoken language technology offers the opportunity to provide structure for
more effective browsing, summarization, and even translation.

In this talk I describe ongoing research in our group to enable
accessible, multimodal, customizable, and context-aware speech-based
interfaces. I will also present our recent activities in spoken lecture
processing which attempt to transcribe and index academic lecture recordings.
I will also discuss our related efforts to address the long-term challenge of
unsupervised word acquisition. Barring Murphy's Law, the talk will include
web-based demonstrations of recently developed interface and content
processing prototypes.

Bio:

James R. Glass obtained his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1985, and 1988, respectively. Currently, he is a Principal
Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory where he heads the Spoken Language Systems Group. He is also a
Lecturer in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His
primary research interests are in the area of speech communication and
human-computer interaction, centered on automatic speech recognition and
spoken language understanding.

Speech-based interfaces are good methods for interacting with devices where in certain environments make it difficult to use keyboards. Speech-based interfaces are being extended to the web. Right now, he is showing a demo of City Browser where you can talk to the system and find restaurants on a geographic map. It's using a Java applet, he's trying to show it on the web browser but the Internet is slow in the room, it's taking a while to load. Oh, now it is coming up. You ask a question about what type of restaurants you want to get in a particular city, and then the system returns the location of the restaurants on a Google map. If the question you ask is wrong, then you can correct it with a visual interface and allow users to edit the query rather than speak it. Another thing that you can specify is finding restaurants along a particular street or find more information about restaurants when you circle a particular area. So the system combines audio and visual feedback and returns visual results along with corresponding audio.

It makes me think how a lot of research now is not strictly computationally based, it also involves the user as well. And it's nice to see that, because there are certain things that humans do much better and tasks that humans can do easier than computers. This is part of context-aware computing and definitely part of ubiquitous computing. You can take a performance enhancement by restricting the vocabulary to the specific domain, eg. vocabulary for Boston will be different than vocabulary for San Francisco. Given the original query, you can dynamically alter the vocabulary based on partial understanding.

Multimodal interaction is interesting because multimodality enables more natural, flexible, efficient and robust human-computer interaction. This may reduce the complexity of the system and the interface. There are multiple research problems that are involved in achieving this which is explained more here. Another interesting multimodal interaction application is person verification using a combination of face recognition and speaker identification.

The next part of his talk is about speech as content. There are lots of media content such as video and audio, which is difficult and tedious to search on. The motivation is whether spoken language technology can be used to structure speech content. Another interesting area of application is how to use speech technology to disseminate and understand lecture recordings, and they've created one called Lecture Browser. Some hard problems include analyzing lectures because spoken word has different vocabulary than the text. Another neat thing is to provide lecture structure induction of certain segments and parts of a lecture and summarization. They have a lecture processing prototype where people can submit videos of lectures and then it can be integrated into their Lecture Browser.

Overall, this is a very interesting talk, with relevant applications.

On Technorati: speech, multimodal interface

So many blogs, how to keep track?

I had that same question. Even though I track and read the blogs that I subscribe to in Bloglines, I sometimes don't check every day especially when I'm busy. I have to consciously decide to go to Bloglines and then I decide which updated blogs I want to read. But I never read them all. However, I always read my e-mail. However, some blogs allow a subscription to e-mail feature (example, the CASCON blog). I've heard of several sites that allow you to receive notifications via e-mail of new posts on blogs that you have subscribed, but I never really had the chance to investigate. Today, I decided I'm going to take control, I've been waiting way too long for not doing this. So, using wonderful Google search, I found this site called RSS Readers-e-mail. There are so many out there, but I decided to try Blogarithm. Why? It sounds cool and it's a CS'y term.



Well, it's cool! You can import an OPML file or any file that has a list of the blogs' RSS feeds, or you can manually enter them in, and then when you upload, then you select from the list of feeds. Then you'll receive them in your e-mail! Sweet! And Bloglines allows you to export your RSS subscriptions to OPML, amazing!

I'm going to try this Blogarithm out, sounds like something that I need to manage my busy busy day!

On Technorati: Blogarithm, RSS Email readers

Another patent for Friendster?

Well it seems like Friendster got another patent. They got their first patent in June which I blogged about. This second patent is about a "Method of inducing content uploads in a social network". I think this is getting a bit ridiculous, when I read the actual patent, it's like nothing new or ground breaking. It's just a bunch of ideas that are coherently explained together to achieve something, it's like a methodology or a system. Does that constitute a patent? I think (and I'm not the only one) that the US Patent Office needs to be overhauled, because many ideas become patented and then others can't use those ideas, since they get infringed upon and then you have all these legal disputes.

What's next, a patent for MySpace?

On Technorati: Friendster, patent

Barry Wellman lectures at U of T on Tuesday

For those who were at my Social Computing Best Practices workshop at CASCON on Wednesday, Prof. Barry Wellman of U of T was one of the speakers at that workshop where he talked about the Connected Lives: The Internet in Everyday Life. He will give a more detailed lecture of that talk at the George Ignatieff Theatre at U of T. And yes, George Ignatieff is the father of Michael Ignatieff, his son who is running for the Liberal leadership. More information here along with map, and flyer.

On Technorati: barry wellman, cascon2006

My Social computing workshop at CASCON 2006 conference

I chaired a workshop at the CASCON 2006 conference yesterday called Social Computing: Best Practices. The workshop featured 4 speakers, Joey de Villa, Sadek Ali, Bryn Harris and Barry Wellman. I first gave an introduction to the workshop mentioning the rise in social computing, social networking, Web 2.0, blogs, and RSS and how they fit on the Gartner hype cycle. Next, I proceeded to give a brief summary of the CASCON 2005 workshop last year on the Business of Blogging, mentioning how there were not many people that knew about tagging, but certainly that has changed this year. Then we proceeded to the talks.

The first talk was from Joey de Villa of Tucows. Joey is a great speaker, I wish I could learn to be a speaker just like him. Anyways, Joey did his talk democamp style, meaning no slides just pure voice, which actually worked really well I think. His talk was about Failure 2.0, how your company cannot succeed using Web 2.0. I think that is a very important topic that many people ignore, people always talk about the successes of companies using Web 2.0, but you also need to consider the mistakes and how not to make those mistakes.

The second talk was from Sadek Ali of the University of Toronto. Sadek talked about the use of blogs within companies and how one can do data mining of blogs to extract relevant information. The third talk was Bryn Harris from IBM who talked about how to write on the web. One thing that striked me from her talk was her recommendation of using a table of contents for blog posts to put some kind of structure so it would be easier to read. One of the attendees mentioned that usually blog posts are not linear, many people will start on a particular topic and then it will lead into another topic. However, she responded that the table of contents would probably help in long posts to help navigate around in the blog, which I kind of have to agree.

The last talk was from Barry Wellman from the University of Toronto. Barry talked about the Internet in Everyday life, and he talked about his Connected Lives project and his studies with net usage from a community in Toronto called Netville. Barry always gives inspiring and entertaining talks, he's giving a more detailed talk of yesterday's talk at U of T next week.

After the talks, we had a panel discussion which discussed the following questions:

1) How can companies begin to see social computing as a viable business tool and not just a teenage or youth fad?

2) Is YouTube worth $1.67 billion and why?

3) Is advertising the best way to make money from Web 2.0 technologies? Are there better ways?

I recorded the discussion which I will upload later, so stay tuned!

Then we had a break, followed by a breakout session. We broke into 3 groups with each group discussing 3 questions which were circulated among 3 facilitators of which I was one of the facilitators. The 3 breakout questions were the following:

1) What can businesses learn from successes of social networking sites and tools such as Ryze, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook? How can businesses leverage these successes in their own companies?

2) With big companies paying big money for small Web 2.0 startups (eg. Google that paid 1.67 billion dollars for YouTube), are we seeing a breakout of Web 2.0 into business or is this a bubble or fad?

3) Are there any Web 2.0 tools that are ready for business applications? Which ones are good ones? Why are they good for business?

There was great discussion and talk especially on Google's acquisition of YouTube and what this means for the industry in general. Each group designated one person to give a summary of their discussion to the rest of the audience.

So, I think the workshop went extremely well and I enjoyed listening and engaging with the attendees on the breakout questions. I think the discussion is by far the most interesting of the workshop, how to engage your participants, the workshop is not just listening but also interacting.

On Technorati: cascon2006, social computing

Vint Cerf talk at U of T

Today is the talk with Vint Cerf from Google. Vint is considered the 'father of the Internet', he is the one that helped to create the TCP/IP protocol, which without, there would be no Internet. Vint talked with graduate students this morning of which I was gladly a part of. Vint asked each of the grad students to talk about their research, and I talked about my work, which he seemed very interested in with the social networking and community. So that was very reassuring. He asked questions to each grad student about each of his research and made suggestions, so that was really great. He's very technical and sharp, especially at his stage in his career. He also mentioned about how if he could go back to the 70s, he would want to change the design of the TCP/IP protocol and decouple the TCP layer from the IP layer, but couldn't at the time because that would increase the header size and it would be hard to sell. So, this is an example of tradeoffs for flexibility.

Vint in his talk right now, gave admiration to Prof. Kelly Gotlieb about his active research, so that was nice. I've realized this talk is being recorded by ePresence of KMDI so I'll be able to see this talk again, as I'll have to leave early to head to the CASCON conference. The title of his talk is Unravelling the Science in Computer Science. There are certain things that we can't predict and that we don't have theories for, and can't answer certain questions like how long will it take to complete a program, is this message spam, etc. He says that this is a serious challenge for the CS community.

When Vint and his colleague Bob Kahn designed the internet protocol, they separated into layers so that each layer is independent of the other, and if the layer changes, other layers will not be affected. Enterprise VPNs and firewalls were not embedded in the network design, but were added on top. Mobile devices were also not included in the IP design.

On Technorati: vint cerf

Vint Cerf comes to U of T tomorrow!

Yes, the father of the Internet, um, TCP/IP protocol, Vint Cerf, who's the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google is coming to U of T. He will meet with graduate students in the morning and then give a talk at 3:00 pm in BA1170. Here's his bio and abstract.

Abstract

Internet continues to grow around the world and expand its modes of operation and access most recently to include mobile operation. Geographically based information is becoming a valuable commodity in the Internet environment. Digital information poses a variety of challenges:

Old business models colliding with voice over IP Digital information formats colliding with intellectual property conventions Preservation of information colliding with changing software for interpreting the bits Privacy and the seemingly boundless memory of the Internet IPv4 and IPv6 and the side-effects of running out of address space Expanding the Internet to operate across the solar system poses its own interesting problems.

Please prepare for an interactive session!

Bio

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He will also be an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

Cerf is the former senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. In this role, Cerf was responsible for helping to guide corporate strategy development from the technical perspective. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, leading a team of architects and engineers to design advanced networking frameworks including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.

Widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet," Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M. Turing award in 2004 for their work on the Internet protocols. The Turing award is sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science.” In November 2005, President George Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work. The medal is the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens.

Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.

During his tenure from 1976-1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data and security technologies.

Vint Cerf serves as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Cerf served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992-1995 and in 1999 served a term as chairman of the Board. In addition, Cerf is honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new Internet protocol. Cerf served as a member of the U.S. Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2001 and serves on several national, state and industry committees focused on cyber-security. Cerf sits on the Board of Directors for the Endowment for Excellence in Education, Avanex Corporation and the ClearSight Systems Corporation. He also serves as 1st Vice President and Treasurer of the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation. Cerf is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the Annenberg Center for Communications at USC and the National Academy of Engineering.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet. These include the Marconi Fellowship, Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the Prince of Asturias award for science and technology, the National Medal of Science from Tunisia, the St. Cyril and St. Methodius Order (Grand Cross) of Bulgaria, the Alexander Graham Bell Award presented by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, the NEC Computer and Communications Prize, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, the ACM Software and Systems Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Computer and Communications Industries Association Industry Legend Award, installation in the Inventors Hall of Fame, the Yuri Rubinsky Web Award, the Kilby Award , the Yankee Group/Interop/Network World Lifetime Achievement Award, the George R. Stibitz Award, the Werner Wolter Award, the Andrew Saks Engineering Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Leadership Award, the J.D. Edwards Leadership Award for Collaboration, World Institute on Disability Annual award and the Library of Congress Bicentennial Living Legend medal. Cerf was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006.

Interesting to see what he talks about for a planetary internet and what type of protocols will be required. Certainly TCP/IP is not going to work due to delay and retransmission time, which is much more than here on earth, so there's going to have to be some changes to the protocol. This kind of problem reminds me of the last problem in the ECE628 exam on Computer Networks that was taught by Prof. Gordon Agnew at the University of Waterloo. The question was about how we were going to be hired as an engineer to design the internet and deploy it on Mars. We were supposed to use all the networking concepts that we learned in the course such as transmission protocols, access control protocols, discuss reliability, why we chose a particular protocol, and channel medium, etc. It was a totally free question, which there was really no wrong answer, if you justified it properly. I remember that question being 20 marks out of the total final exam. At the time, I was like, that's a crazy question. But now, it's not really so crazy, now that the next evolution of the internet is going to be the solar system.

On Technorati: vint cerf, planetary internet

Eudora to be set free

Remember, Eudora? What, the e-mail client? I used to use that eons of years ago, my evolution of e-mail clients has gone from Eudora, Netscape Mail, Pine, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, web mail (Yahoo and Hotmail), Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, and Gmail. Anyways, it looks like Qualcomm which bought the Eudora mail client (which doesn't really fit in much with their wireless CDMA/1X/Brew cellular business) is open sourcing it and basing it on the Mozilla Thunderbird code-base. That sounds great!

Personally, I have sticked with either Pine or Gmail because they're fast and I like Gmail for its folders and threaded messages. I used to be a folderer (well actually I still am somewhat), but in Gmail, I love the tagging feature, it's so easy, and it makes sense. It also makes it so much easier to search, than placing it in folders. I find out if I leave things in folders, when I'm searching, it's difficult to find where it is. With Gmail, I can search a particular word, and boom, there pops up the list of e-mail messages that correspond to what I'm looking for. I'd say about 80% of the time, it works really well, much better than browsing. Although, there is the occasional 20% that I do browse, because the search doesn't return the e-mail that I'm looking for. But that's because the search is fuzzy, I'm not sure what the exact term is, but I know the topic of the e-mail.

On Technorati: eudora

Blogging from Erin Mills Park Toyota

While I'm waiting for my car to get serviced, I brought my laptop to do some work, and long and behold, there's wireless internet access in here. Cool! Something to do while I wait for my car. OK, I need to go back to creating some slides for the CASCON workshop on Social Computing: Best Practices which I'm a chair of. If you haven't already, please sign up for my workshop and subscribe to the CASCON blog!

On Technorati: cascon2006, Toyota

Clustrmaps

I just came across this site to visualize the location of your visitors to your web site, so I'm going to try it out on my blog. Neat stuff!

Ben Schneiderman talk tomorrow!

Ben Schneiderman is giving a talk tomorrow at U of T, he's one of the big wigs in HCI. I actually met him at MobiSys 2004 conference in Boston where I was working on content adaptation on mobile devices with another student. Here's the abstract of his talk.

Interactive information visualization provide researchers with remarkable tools for discovery. By combining powerful data mining methods with user-controlled interfaces, users are beginning to benefit from these potent telescopes for high-dimensional spaces. They can begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand. With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration can provide 100msec updates even for million-record databases. This talk will start by reviewing the growing commercial success stories such as www.spotfire.com, www.smartmoney.com/marketmap and www.hivegroup.com . Then it will cover recent research progress for visual exploration of large time series data applied to financial, Ebay auction, and genomic data www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/timesearcher . Our next step was to combine these key ideas to produce the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer 3.0 that now includes the rank-by-feature framework www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce . By judiciously choosing from appropriate ranking criteria for low-dimensional axis-parallel projections, users can locate desired features of higher dimensional spaces. Demonstrations will be shown.

On Technorati: HCI, ben schneiderman

CASCON is coming next week!

The CASCON conference is happening next week. If you haven't registered, tomorrow is the last day for online registration, otherwise you have to register on site next week. There are lots of exciting things this year at CASCON, there's posters on research, there's workshops, keynotes, hack night, and free food! If you haven't signed up for hack night, then please do so, there are still spots available. I'm pretty busy this year for CASCON, once again helping with the CASCON blog (which you should read and sign up for!), and chairing the Social Computing: Best Practices workshop (which by the way, please sign up for!).

See you there at CASCON, and spread the word, mouth, e-mail, blog!

On Technorati: cascon2006

Busy with assignments, just got one done today!

Apologies for not writing on my blog daily, I've just been so busy this term. I'm taking 2 courses, CSC2302 Numerical Methods on Initial Value Problems of Ordinary Differential Equations and CSC2508 Advanced Databases. I just finished an assignment today for the numerical methods course that had to deal with Fortran and Matlab and finding attractors and graphing them. Ugh! Reminds me why I'm not in that area. So am I taking that course? It's to satisfy a breadth area in the CS department. I can't believe I'm learning Fortran, and now I realize why we don't program in Fortran, the olden days of programming with go tos and spaghetti like code! I hope after this course is done, I'll never have to see Fortran again!

Hack Night at CASCON

CASCON is having a Hack Night, a combination of demoCamp and hacking. If you're interested, sign up at the CASCON blog.

First 50 people that sign up get a Hack Night t-shirt!

On Technorati: cascon2006, hacking