Did You Know

Here's an interesting video, thanks to one of the guys from TorCamp. Check it out on dotSub.com. Oh yes, and also, he apparently found this video using a tool called StumbleUpon (neat name!) that helps you find recommendations of content on the web, so I just installed it for Firefox browser and will see if this helps me in my daily activities. I know I spend lots of time searching for things in my research using primarily Google and then sifting through the content, or then refining my search queries.

Let me see if StumbleUpon helps to make me even more productive with less effort, that will give me even more time to do some more work!

Robert Kahn talk at U of T

Robert Kahn is talking today at U of T on Managing Digital Objects on the Net, as part of the Distinguished Lecture series. He is the co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol and worked on open-access networks. His bio is below:

Dr. Kahn has had a distinguished career; in 1972 he demonstrated ARPANET,
for which he was a principal architect. After becoming Director of DARPA's
Information Preocessing Techniques Office, he started the United State's
billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research
and development program ever undertaken by the federal government.
In 2004 he shared ACM's Turing Award along with Vict Cerf for their design
of the TCP/IP protocol which is at the basis of the Internet. Among his many
other honours are the National Medal of Technology, presented by President
Clinton, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Bush.
Dr. Kahn is now President of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives,
a not-for-profit organizaton which performs research on strategic development
of networked-based information techniques.

Bob is talking about how he is now turning his attention to managing information and digital objects. The particular topic he is working on is archiving and about Digital Object Architecture. Managing information on the net is all about trust, will people trust the information? We are moving beyond a world of static information but dynamic. He helped to design the internet architecture to be evolving and open. Any object or person can be represented in digital form and have a presence on the net, this is similar to the vision of HP Lab's CoolTown project. Before, the internet was packet communication and moving the bits. Now that is done, the next step is information management.

His motivation for the Digital Object Architecture is not just be open, but also to be able to access it over very long periods of time, similar to accessing old books and articles from the library. The digital object is structured data and interpretable in machine-independent fashion, just like a packet on the network or a file on your computer. What are the technical components? Digital objects need to have a unique identifier, a resolution system, repositories and registries. Does that sound familiar to something else? It's just like web services or object-oriented programming objects, the same type of architecture, nothing different. There needs to be a data structure for a digital object, just like a literary work starts as an idea, there needs to be a format in a fixed form. Network resources can be identified and then managed, just like we have MAC addresses to identify hardware. This is all deja vu based on object-oriented architectures, so it's nothing really new as it's all been done before. But the protocol for managing these digital objects is not universal, since everyone is doing their own thing for managing digital objects. Just like managing contacts, people use VCS formats, or a Palm format, or an Apple contact format, or XML format, there is no unified structure.

The repository is where digital objects are indexed and can be accessed directly through the Digital Object Protocol. The idea is to get rid of the underlying infrastructure of finding objects and access them directly. He gave the example of trying to find an e-mail from a particular person at a particular point in time. You have to go through files and folders and possibility different operating systems and laptops if you had more than one. There is a Digital Object API to get access to the digital objects through different client interfaces such as FTP, HTTP, IMAP and SMTP. You also want to have a digital object client that interfaces directly with the digital object. The different client interfaces are used so that digital objects can be accessed through traditional means on the net.

The handle is an identifier or pointer to the digital object and the Digital Object Architecture has been implemented in the Handle system. The Handle system actually works today and many library and cataloguing system are using the Handle system for managing their information like the DOI system. The Handle system software is written in Java. If a client wants to access the handle, it uses a proxy server (hdl.handle.net) to get access to the Handle system, so it uses the existing internet architecture without any change to the DNS.

The Digital Object Architecture can also be used to manage items of value such as digital cash. MetaObjects in the architecture are like generalized folders and metadata registries are like web service registries (like UDDI). CORDRA is a federated collection of metadata registries, just like in the Jini architecture as well. In the demo, there is a version for using the digital object architecture with Adobe Acrobat PDF files. Bob is mentioning how digital object identifiers are growing at a rate of 4-5 million per year and being used by customers today.

One of the intellectual questions that Bob is addressing is what information do companies want to share and make public? A very interesting and complex question to address. There are many different applications of digital objects like network storage and archiving, identity management, PKI infrastructure, authentication of information, personal locator information, digital cash, publications, cataloguing, and even social networks (in my opinion).

So one of things that the talk is based on is that it uses the existing internet architecture. My question to Bob was whether the Digital Object Architecture will work with new internet architectures such as Internet 2.0 being proposed by MIT and other research institutions, and the planetary internet by NASA and Vint Cerf. His answer was that the Digital Object Architecture is independent of the network, so it is agnostic to whether the internet radically changes. However, I'm a little bit skeptical of that because what happens if all the concepts that we think about the internet totally change? What happens if there is no DNS resolution system? Would the architecture still work?

Very interesting talk and he was great in answering questions, where he repeated the question to the audience before answering. Something that I should follow in my talks as well.

On Technorati: Robert Kahn, Digital Object Architecture

Really funny Web 2.0 video

Check out this really funny Web 2.0 video. And the serious part, it really is all true!



On Technorati: Web 2.0

KMDI Alumni Talk: Dave Gillis from Teehan+Lax

Today is the first talk in the KMDI alumni series, who is Dave Gillis from Teehan+Lax. Dave is a user interaction designer who graduated from the KMDI Collaborative program in 2005 and is talking about what he does at Teehan+Lax and how his education in the KMDI Collaborative Program helped him in his work today. Participatory design and user-centered design are some of the primary design methodologies that he uses in his work. Corporate clients don't really use or value user-centered design. When working with clients, you have to avoid using technical and design jargon and simplify the language.

Top 10 wedding videos on YouTube

Seeing that now my wedding is over and my wife and I did a first dance, it does not compare with what these couples did for their first dance. The one that is the craze right now is Baby Got Back.



Personally, I like that one, the wedding thriller video is awesome,



as well as Dirty Dancing.



Check all of the top 10 wedding videos on YouTube as compiled by ViralBlog.

Facebook and business

Everybody knows that Facebook is the social network out there. It's not just for teens or students anymore, as Facebook has opened its platform to developers and to anyone out there. This is great that Facebook has done that because now, we have seen so many applications written for Facebook, one of the more popular ones is Scrabulous which is addictive but doesn't require both people to be online at the same time to play. Other social networking applications and companies out there are competing with Facebook, not Google. Google has not gotten close to what Facebook has done, although they are getting into the social networking game with their OpenSocial API. And then there's word that Google wants to create a social graph of all your networks. Of course the term social graph has been used before in Computer Science even though Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has used this term.

Anyways, what am I trying to get at? Facebook IS useful and increasingly so according to Harry Chen from UMBC. He talks about why people should be using and joining Facebook. He specifies three reasons for this:

1. Interact with friends who you don’t see often
2. Gain new competitive advantages
3. Learn by playing

This means that businesses need to be getting on board which many are by tapping the social networks within Facebook by writing Facebook applications.

On Technorati: Facebook, Google, OpenSocial

Google going green

I just read an article about Google's push into renewable energy resources which is based on Google's ambitious announcement on Tuesday that it intends to generate one gigawatt of electricity--the equivalent of a few power plants--from renewable-energy sources. Many people that this is a distraction and this is a PR thing in order to generate news about Google and make them feel like energy stars. However, I think that this is a good move on Google's part and shows that they are taking the lead in addressing environmental issues and global warming. Tech companies should not just be doing things in tech, I mean sure tech is the core business, but it should also lead by example in other philanthropic areas. Google has the money anyways, so it should spread the wealth.

On Technorati: Google, renewable energy

Social graph - is it overhyped?

Here's a story from The Economist regarding about how the term "social graph", even though it is hot, is not really any thing new. Social graph is being mentioned everywhere on the Net because of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and how Facebook is touting and is being given credit to the term "social graph". However, the social graph is something that has been done in Computer Science, according to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

It seems that social graph is the new hot thing in Silicon Valley, and everyone is getting on the bandwagon. It'll be interesting to see if it will still remain hot for a while, or go like the dot com companies.

On Technorati: social graph, Facebook

Updated my web site, check it out!

I've updated my web site with a new layout which makes it easier to read and easier to navigate. Let me know what you think and if there are any problems.

World Usability Day 2007

Today is World Usability Day, where the focus is usability in healthcare. In Toronto, the Toronto chapter of SIGCHI called TorCHI is having a meeting of usability experts and presentations at the Bahen Center at the University of Toronto. Ilona Posner is introducing World Usability Day, she is talking about the problems that she experienced in trying to see the webcast of World Usability Day from Boston, explaining about the usability problems of web software and computers. The organizers of this event are TorCHI and Usability Professionals Association Worldwide. Last year World Usability Day 2006 had 40000 participants, 225 events, in 175 cities and 35 countries. In Toronto, there were 2 events and 200+ attendees. Tonight's program is the following:
1) Web 2.0 and Healthcare, 2) Patient Safety and Human Factors, and 3) Reality Checkup: A Conversation with a Physician.

The first presenter is Holly Witteman, PhD Candidate in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. The topic is Usability, eHealth and Web 2.0. Within eHealth, Web 2.0 is characterized by open community and communication in the health area, and the technologies applied to health. Blogs can be used for personal expression. Wikis can be used for collaboration for medical education, for creating repositories of information. Social networks are embedded within the Web 2.0 web sites like patientslikeme. CarePages is also another example of social networking site for health care, also sermo is another example. Mashups can be used to look at disease outbreaks around the world, and sicknesses around locations using mapping tools like Google Maps. Tags are also another technology used in health context like in YouTube. Podcasts are also a popular medium for distributing information in audio. So what does this have to do with usability? User-generated content introduces the notion of credibility, is the information credible and valid. In health care, the information is evaluated by a community of experts to determine the credibility. When it comes to health information online, one size does not fit all. There are individual differences and need to be incorporated in usability assessments.

The second speaker was Anjum Chagpar from the University Health Network who talked about a Systems Approach to Patient Safety. She is the manager of a lab looking at next generation medical devices. She gave an example of Denise Melanson who died because she was infused with 4 days of a drug dose within 4 hours. The cause of this accident was multifold. The label on the drug was difficult to find the dose information, the dose information was in brackets (1.2 mL/hour) instead the nurse read the first number which was 28.8 mL/24 hour (which was given in an hour). Second, there were interface issues with the infusion pump. There was no check for unsafe values to enter so the pump allowed the nurse to enter 28.8. All this shows that there is a need to design systems that minimize errors. Health care is changing from secrecy to disclosure, from a blame culture to a just culture. Why do we have poor design in healthcare systems? Because the devices used in healthcare have different market drivers from consumer technology, the devices are not high tech because there is high risk. Human factors is not incorporated in the design process because due to the complexity of the health care environments and there are no consistent user interfaces. Therefore, health care needs human factors.

I didn't attend the third presentation as I head to head back home.

Happy World Usability Day!

On Technorati: World Usability Day

Google's OpenSocial API

It looks like my thoughts as to why Google hasn't explored the social networking space is now answered. Besides having Google creating a large social network graph (according to Eric Schmidt), Google is also creating APIs to allow applications to easily use social networking information. Google has something called the OpenSocial API, more information from one of Google's employees on their blog. It seems Google has quite a number of partners on board using their API. This is something to definitely look at, as you can't reckon with a force like Google.

On Technorati: OpenSocial, Google, social network

Social Networking in the Learning Sciences - Social Networking Conference @ U of T

“A Wiki-Based Exchange Community for the Learning Sciences” Jim Slotta, Associate Professor OISE/ UT

In this talk, some of the information that Jim talked about overlapped during his talk at the CASCON Second Working Conference on Social Computing and Business. Social networking is providing new opportunities for knowledge communities. The whole idea is to connect students in the classroom with social computing tools that students are using. WISE is a research platform that allows students to collaborate and is available on SourceForge. Jim says that to make a community is not SourceForge. To create a community around SourceForge is through wikis to build online community.

On Technorati: Social Networking Symposium

Making Personal Network Analysis More Accessible - Social Networking Conference @ U of T

Making Personal Network Analysis More Accessible
Bernie Hogan, Research Director, NetLab, UofT

In this talk, Bernie is talking about tools to make use of personal network analysis and make it accessible to the average user. In yesterday’s presentation, Bernie talked about the Connected Lives project which studies individuals from East York. It is difficult to analyze data that comes about from name generators. So the idea is to create a software to help to analyze the data that come out from name generators. Bernie and his colleagues at NetLab created visualizations of network data using participant-aided sociogram.

He is talking about how there is a problem with existing applications. They are designed for a single network (UCINET, NetDraw, Pajek), they have no GUI and steep learning curve (R, JUNG). So what they have done is modify existing applications, for example, GUESS (from Eytan Adar) + GraphModifier. Another problem is that the applications have virtually no interactive analysis. Batch processing of data has high fixed cost (have to know loops in R). So, the applications currently push in data, and then answers come out. What we want is data that goes in, answers come out and become source of new data. To address these issues, they created Egotistics software which is available on Sourceforge. In Egotistics, users can program, and batch process cohesive subgroups like k-plexes (I could have used that for my analysis!). One of the things to improve and encourage others to use Egotistics is to provide a web API to enable people to do analysis (not yet but should do).

I believe this talk really addresses how we need tools to discover communities and our social networks, so I'm going to look into these tools in a little more detail.

On Technorati: Social Networking Symposium, Egotistics

Networks, Job Search and Labour Markets: Information Sharing as a Structured Process - Social Networking Conference @ U of T

"Networks, Job Search and Labour Markets: Information Sharing as a Structured Process"
Alexandra Marin, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, UofT

In this talk, Alexandra talks about how to use information sharing for job search. She is applying social capital to the process of job search and how social networks of contacts can be used for finding jobs. I asked the question about studying job search using social network sites like LinkedIn and getting a job through the LinkedIn network. Alexandra mentioned how people do not really use LinkedIn and use their physical contacts rather than from a web site.

On Technorati: Social Networking Symposium"

A New Research Agenda: The Emergence of Online Social Networking Systems - Social Networking Conference @ U of T

A New Research Agenda: The Emergence of Online Social Networking Systems
Stefan Sariou and Nick Koudas
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto

In this talk, Stefan discussed about research work that their groups are doing with studying and improving online social networking systems. Before, you didn't see much work in Computer Science on this area, but now, this is a hot topic with fertile areas for research. Specifically, Stefan is looking at social networks for access control to content, search, and content delivery and aggregation. Stefan is researching on social networking-based access for personal content. He says that the push model is an inefficient way to share content. For example, e-mail is a push model and e-mail was never designed to push content. Another way to share content is to use social networking sites for sharing content. However, sharing content online is a mess because you can start creating so many social identities and be part of so many social networks as a result. In real life, users have just one social network, but online, they have multiple social networks from different social networking sites. For example, you may have an account on Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, and you have social networks in these sites. But the people that are in your actual social network, is just one network. The online networks are just instances of your own social network. Therefore, there is a need to separate social information from content serving. I wholeheartedly agree with this.

Therefore, Stefan says that people should manage their social networks and maintain one social network. Everyone has a personal address book which they are familiar with and use. Let sites serve content and offer access control based on your social network in your address book. He says that there should not be a person or company that should manage your social network or even aggregate social networks, something of which Google is trying to do to create one huge social network (aggregations of multiple social networks combined together).

So from this, Stefan's research group is looking and developing new internet applications: Social Flickr will be released November 2007, Social BitTorrent in December 2007, and Social Google calendar in January 2008. Those are pretty aggressive time schedules for releasing the software.

Nick's work deals with social media aggregation to build a system to share information with others. His research group has created a system called BlogScope that mines the blogs in the blogosphere and it is currently tracking over 14.28 million blogs with 127.61 million posts. BlogScope can assist the user in discovering interesting information from these millions of blogs via a set of numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related terms, and geographical search. From social media, based on content, we can extract communities for recommendation (which I believe they could use my work).

On Technorati: social networking symposium, blogscope

Conversations in Social Hypertext: Telecommunity and Post-Industrial Work - Social Networking Conference @ U of T

Conversations in Social Hypertext: Telecommunity and Post-Industrial Work - Social Networking Conference @ U of T
Mark Chignell
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
University of Toronto

In this talk, Mark talked about social computing tools for telework using a software that the Interactive Media Lab created called Vocal Village which is a great tool for spatializing audio (better than Skype!). The software was tested in a Japanese company. As well, Mark introduced work about looking at community in online environments, specifically the vaccination groups which is part of my PhD research work.

On Technorati: social networking conference, Vocal Village, Interactive Media Lab

Content-based Social Network Analysis of Online Communities - Social Networking Conference @ U of T

Content-based Social Network Analysis of Online Communities
Anatoliy Gruzd and Caroline Haythornthwaite
School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois

In this talk, they analyze online communities like bulletin boards to gain more information and insight about nodes, relations and ties. Very few systems look at relational information so they focus on nodes and tie discovery. Their goal is to identify who are the actors in the network. Their approach is to use natural language processing to enhance the current techniques of building social networks. So how to obtain the social networks from online communities? There are two methods. First, you can do a chain network which is based on the chain of posting of posts and comments (like what I do for my PhD research). One of the problems with the chain network (which I also encountered as well) is what is the relation of the 3rd commenter, do they comment on the posting or the previous comment? A solution around this is to look at tie strength to the previous commenter or the poster to determine if the person is posting to the previous commenter or the poster. The second method is to do a name network by pulling the names from within the body of the text. Here is where the NLP comes into play.

The idea in the name network is to make use of node and information in text of posting. How to disambiguate names/nicknames from text, those that mean the same person. How to know the name is in the subject, is it being discussed? To determine this, they did hand coding of the items to see the categories of names. They then compared the name network with the chain network and performed ego network analysis for posts and comments. Another problem is that many times when you reply, the previous message is embedded in the post so you don't want to include this in the name generator to duplicate this. So, they removed the previous message embedded in the reply to the post.

Social Networking conference at U of T

I just finished presenting my talk on "Structural Analysis of Social Hypertext for Finding Sense of Community" at the Social Networking conference at U of T this morning. The gremlins of presentation attacked me today. During the last couple of slides of my talk, I accidentally kicked the AC plug (which seemed to happen to the previous speaker), and then the digital projector turned off. So, I had to finish my talk without slides, but I was fortunate that I could still read the slides off the laptop and my notes, though I wasn't quite happy with that and it kind of throwed me off. Second of all my slides didn't show up properly on the laptop in the room, normally I use the laptop in the room instead of mine to avoid switching and having my laptop reboot in the process (it's actually happened couple of times, the last time at the CASCON conference). Third, I recorded the talk on my iPod but for some strange reason it actually didn't save on the iPod (it actually didn't even start recording). Aghh!

But I do have the slides from my talk so the slides that I wanted to show, are available on my web site.

This is the first time where I could not rely on the laptop in the room, than use my own laptop.

Anyways, if you have any comments on my talk, feel free to contact me at my e-mail (achin AT cs DOT toronto DOT edu).

Jon Kleinberg CS lecture at U of T

Right now is the lecture by Jon Kleinberg, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University which is on Challenges in Mining Social Network Data: Processes, Privacy and Paradoxes. He has generated seminal results in social networks and document retrieval. I've read his research work on the HITS algorithm which uses hubs and authorities in order to classify search, and from which Google's PageRank is somewhat related to. I've never heard Jon speak so I'm very glad to hear him speak.

He will also speak tonight to kick off the Social Networking Week at U of T. What can computer science contribute to social networks? Today there is a convergence of social and technological networks, computing and information systems with intrinsic social structure. Social network data is a very active area in sociology, social psychology and anthropology. So what can the different fields learn from each other (sociology, social psychology, anthropology from computer science)? This is the research area which I am also part of as well, and it's an exciting research area in my opinion with the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Mining social networks has a long history in social sciences eg. with Wayne Zachary's PhD work on the university karate club, observing social ties and rivalries. Split in the network could be explained by the minimum cut in the social network.

Social network data spans many orders of magnitude. For example there were 240 million nodes of all IM communication over one month on Microsoft Instant Messenger (Leskovec-Horvitz '07), 4.4 million nodes of declared friendships on blogging community LiveJournal (Liben-Nowell et al., 2005). How can we find the point where the lines of research in large scale and small scale networks converge? In social networks, we can find behaviours of diffusion in social networks that cascade from node to node like an epidemic, which is identified by radial structures in the graph. There have been empirical studies of diffusion in the social sciences like the spread of new agricultural and medical practices (Coleman et al., 1966). The diffusion curves are based on the probability of adopting new behaviour which depends on number of friends who have adopted (Bass 1969, Granovetter 1978 and Schelling 1978). All of the diffusion curves seem to have diminishing returns property, for example in editing a Wikipedia article (Cosley et al., 2007) and joining a LiveJournal community (Backstrom et al., 2006).

These results can then be used for general prediction. Given a network and v's position in it at t1, estimate the probability v will join a given group by t2. Kleinberg has formulated this as a probability estimation problem (Backstrom-Huttenlocher-Kleinberg-Lan 2006). Do disconnected friends or connected friends make joining more likely? Disconnected friends provide an informational advantage but connected friends provide safety/trust advantages. For example in LiveJournal, joining probability increases significantly with more connections among friends in the group (in otherwise friends that are within a clique than not).

If connectedness among friends promotes joining, do highly "clustered" groups grow more quickly? Kleinberg defines clustering to be # of triangles / # of open triads and you can determine community by examining the growth from t1 to t2 as a function of clustering. Leskovec, McGlohon, Faloutsos, Glance and Hurst (2007) have looked into the diffusion of topics in networks of news media and bloggers which shows cascading behaviour. Leskovec, Adamic and Huberman (2006) describe how incentives can be used to propagate interesting recommendations along social network links. How to push questions to people within the social network? (Kleinberg, Raghavan, 2005)

One of the most important questions in mining social network data is how to protect privacy in the dataset. There has been some research where anonymizing data actually caused problems from using on-line pseudonyms and using search engine query logs. If you are part of a small network and based on connectivity, you may be able to find yourself, so anonymization doesn't help. An attacker can attack an anonymized network by being part of the system. Kleinberg has done some work on this by creating a template (Backstrom, Dwork, Kleinberg, 2007). The idea is an attacker creates a small network of nodes through creating accounts called subgraph H and attach them to targeted nodes in the original network. From Ramsey theory, in a random n-node graph, H is unique.

Take home message: how do we build deeper models of the processes at work inside large-scale social networks? How do we make data available without compromising privacy?

It was great to finally meet and talk with Jon Kleinberg!

On Technorati: jon kleinberg, social network

Busy busy week this week

I've got a busy week ahead of me for this week. I'm giving an Ignite presentation about finding subgroups in TorCamp at DemoCampToronto15 tonight at Hart House, then have to finish marking assignments, then finish writing a paper, and then giving a talk at the Social Networking Week at U of T on Friday.

But I enjoy doing this kind of stuff, so I don't mind it. So don't expect too many blog entries this week!

Pervasive 2007 Conference trip report in IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine

Just found out that the Pervasive 2007 conference trip report which I helped co-author is now out in the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine Vol. 6 No. 4 (October - December 2007). You can read the article here.

On Technorati: Pervasive2007

Finished my CASCON short paper talk

I just finished my CASCON short paper talk on "Identifying Active Subgroups in Online Communities" about an hour ago. It went well, I had some great feedback. I'll post the talk which I recorded and slides soon. Now, I can concentrate on the rest of my PhD work. No rest for a PhD student! But I enjoy giving talks and meeting with people and discussing about my research, it's exciting and engaging. If you have any comments or feedback from my paper or talk, write some comments on this blog back to me!

CASCON 2007 Conference, Day 1

I just finished co-chairing a session on Tagging as a Social Contract along with Mark Chignell and Sara Darvish, where we had 4 talks about issues surrounding tagging in a business environment. This was the second session as part of the Second Working Conference on Social Computing and Business at the CASCON 2007 conference. It was a great workshop and great session, and great discussion. I talked about how community can be inferred from tagging using the YouTube vaccination videos as an example. Podcasts and slides from the workshop should be available, so check the CASCON blog.

I also showed a demo of a community-based web portal that our lab created to support vaccination groups in our exhibit at the Technology Showcase called "Video Web 2.0: Collaborative Tagging in Web Video". If you're at CASCON, check it out!

Photos from CASCON are on my Flickr account.

Google hints at social network plan

I've been wondering when Google would start to think about social networking and how it could be used. So far, Yahoo has been the leader in social networking, with Flickr and Upcoming and Yahoo My Web Beta. Google's Orkut still does not compare in the same calibre with Facebook or MySpace, huge social networking web sites. However, Google is now beginning to hint how they will use social networking data in their own web search and to share the social data with others. According to Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, from this article from NY Times, Google has something up its sleeve.

Will Google be able to top Yahoo and other social networking sites like Facebook? Only time will tell.

Passed the thesis proposal!

I just did my thesis proposal today and passed! Just need to make changes and do some more analysis and I should be hopefully done before April of next year.

Thesis proposal and busy rest of October!

I just finished writing the thesis proposal which I will send to my committee, because I will have a meeting with them on Wednesday. Hopefully, everything goes well and if everything goes according to plan, I can finish the dissertation and defence by end of this year!

It's going to be a busy rest of the October. I'm co-chairing a workshop at CASCON called Tagging as a Social Contract on Monday, October 22. If you're going to be at CASCON, sign up for this workshop, it promises to be an interesting one. For more information, check the CASCON blog. After that, I'm going to be presenting my paper at the CASCON conference on Wednesday, October 24 called "Identifying Active Subgroups in Online Communities". And then, I will be giving a talk at the Social Networking Symposium at U of T on Friday, November 2nd from 9:50 to 10:15 am called "Structural Analysis of Social Hypertext for Finding Sense of Community" right after my supervisor talks.

Married!

Yes, I just got married about a week ago, the wedding was great and the weather was just perfect. Couldn't have asked for a better day. Thanks to everyone who helped out in the wedding and for those that attended. My wife and I were so happy to see you there, and even though it was a tiring day, we thoroughly enjoyed it and will treasure this for the rest of our lives.

I'm very thankful this Thanksgiving for such a beautiful, amazing and considerate wife. And marriage life feels so great, I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

For those that are interested, I'll post wedding photos online soon.

Thanks for a great Hypertext conference!

I'd like to thank all the organizers for a great Hypertext conference! I thoroughly enjoyed it and meeting with lots of familiar faces and new ones. To remember the moments we shared together, I have placed all the photos that I took from the conference on my Flickr site. I had some people come to me to ask if I would put some notes from the talks on my blog. I'll do that when I have time and head back to Toronto.

See you all in Pittsburgh in Hypertext 2008!

On Technorati: Hypertext07, Hypertext2007

Day 2 of Hypertext conference

I'm at the Hypertext conference on Day 2. Some interesting talks on semantic web, web accessibility and user profiles. I'm really enjoying this conference, meeting lots of interesting work and interdisciplinary research. I'm going to present my research work tomorrow at 12 pm on Identifying Subcommunities Using Cohesive Subgroups in Social Hypertext. If you're at the conference, come and attend my talk!

More photos from yesterday and today are on Flickr.

On Technorati: Hypertext07

End of Day 1 session at Hypertext conference

Just finished the end of the technical sessions at the Hypertext conference, and am now in the Graduate BOF where there are lots of grad students chit chatting and just socializing. Then, there will be the SIGWEB business meeting and then the tour of the Manchester Museum.

Day 1 of Hypertext 2007 conference

Today is Day 1 of the Hypertext 2007 conference and I'm in Manchester, UK. Yesterday, I did my own tour around Manchester, going to the Whitworth Art Gallery and going to Curry Mile which is the Indian and Pakistanian area of Manchester of restaurants. Pictures of that and today's first day are available on Flickr.

Hypertext conference starts next week

There's only 4 days until the Hypertext conference starts in Manchester, England. It looks to be a great programme of papers and events. I'll be presenting my paper on "Identifying Subcommunities in Social Hypertext" on September 12 at 12 pm, yes right before lunch!

I look forward to meeting with people from last year's Hypertext which I presented, and meeting with new people.

On Technorati: hypertext07

Difference between social graph, social network web site, and social OS

Here's an article that explains what's the difference between a social graph, social network web site and social OS. An example of a social graph is the people connected to each other. AN example of a social network web site is Flickr or Twitter. An example of a social OS is Facebook, although I don't really kind of agree with that. I think of Facebook as a social network application or social network web site. It's not really an OS, because it doesn't permeate through all my computer's applications and it's not tied with Windows or Linux. All my applications I'm using do not all tie in with Facebook (at least not yet).

What do you all think about this?

Gmail redirects to garbled site

Yesterday, something strange happened. For some reason, when I went to Gmail, it would redirect me through ora.3168a.com to a garbled web page. I thought that I had contracted a virus or spyware, so I used Norton Antivirus and Lavasoft Ad-Aware to check, but found nothing. I tried to check Gmail with Internet Explorer, and it would also cause the same problem. I then cleared out the cache and history, and tried to access Gmail but I still got the garbled web page. This really puzzled me, so I tried to isolate the problem if it was a machine problem, by going to another computer and accessing Gmail from there. On another laptop, it was fine. Oh by the way, I was using Mozilla Firefox browser. But then when I went to another computer in the house, with Gmail, I still got the same redirect. What was worse was that not even Gmail but other web sites were redirecting through ora.3168a.com. Doing a Google search on ora.3168a.com resulted in a list of malicious and spam web sites of which ora.3168a.com was on the list.

I found out that another person also had the same problem as well, but apparently he was able to solve it by going through some several reboots and following some removal instructions translated from Japanese. I didn't do that, but today it seems like I can read Gmail now. It's kinda scary though what happened.

Social network web sites don't really social network

This article from Washington Post describes how social networking web sites like Facebook inundate us with more connections and actually alienate us than connect us. Duncan Watts feels that these web sites fail to do what they are supposed to do, which is "network". In a sense, I believe that he is right. When you social network, you meet with someone and start connecting and talking. With present social networking sites, it's more like just for getting in touch and updating your life to others. The number of social networking web sites are ballooning and multiplying like crazy. People really want to get on the social networking bandwagon, but they don't really understand the value of social networking.

On Technorati: social network

Prayers with the family and colleagues of Bill Richards

I just heard that Bill Richards, president of INSNA and long time contributor to social network analysis has just died. Apparently, he died of injuries sustained in a fall at his home. This is a great loss to the social networking community. I remember Bill as a vibrant person, full of energy, when I first met him at the Sunbelt conference in Vancouver last year. He also organized the hospitality suite at the conference at night where I remember talking with him. In the short time that I knew him, he came out as a sincere person and dedicated to his work and his graduate students.

Prayers and thoughts are with the Richards family, SFU, his grad students, colleagues and friends around the world. You will be surely missed Bill, but your charisma, energy and warmth will still remain with us.

On Technorati: Bill Richards, INSNA, social network analysis, Sunbelt

Did you know you can be banned from Facebook?

Well, I sure didn't until I read this post. Apparently, this guy tried to upload his 4600 contacts from Gmail into Facebook to allow invites, and then he got banned for unusual activity. I guess the Facebook application thought that he was a spammer uploading that many contacts. This then really begs the question, how does an application know that activity is spam or it is legitimate?

On Technorati: Facebook, banned

Howard Rheingold teaching virtual communities and social networks

Howard Rheingold, the author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs, is teaching at Stanford University this fall. His course is on Virtual Communities and Social Networks, in the Stanford Communication Department. The syllabus for the course is here.

Sounds interesting, the course material seems very relevant to what I'm doing. Students will be using social media technologies like forums, blogs, chat, etc. I'd be interested in attending this course if it was offered as a web cast, or even if there are lecture notes that I could download and have a look, as it is much related to my PhD research work on virtual communities.

On Technorati: Howard Rheingold, virtual community

Mapping the sky

Here's an interesting article from a fellow Computer Science student at U of T called Dustin Lang. He's in the AI group with Sam Roweis, designing an astronomy engine that given an image, it will be able to spit out exactly what that image is. How they do it, is that they check the list of images in an astronomical database to see what it is similar to. This doesn't have to be limited to astronomy, I can think of many applications where I have an image that I've taken or seen before, but I don't know what exactly it is or where it came from. I could then do an image search to determine what that image exactly is. This is kind of the reverse of what image searching is now, where you give a keyword, and an image pops up.

It just shows you the many applications that Computer Science can be applied to, that you don't have to just do math and algorithms all the time.

On Technorati: sky mapping, Computer Science, U of T

The next RAZR 2

The successor to the Motorola RAZR is here, it's the RAZR 2. The RAZR is Motorola's successful cell phone to date, that comes in different colours, although I still like the original black version. You can see the RAZR 2 below.



Looks like a nice phone, obviously I don't think it will compete with the iPhone though, but the iPhone is too pricey and big. It will be branded as the RAZR V8 or V9.

I wonder when the RAZR 2 will come to Canada, no word on the Motorola Canada web site. I'm still going to stick with my Motorola RAZR for now until I see another phone that catches my eye and is a good price.

On Technorati: Motorola, RAZR2

Looking for faculty positions or industry research jobs

I'm planning to finish my PhD by the end of this year, and will be on the market for a full-time job in academia or industry research for beginning to middle of next year 2008. If you know of any openings for next year in social computing and pervasive computing, let me know by e-mailing me at achin AT cs DOT toronto DOT edu. You can see my list of publications here.

Cimple Project for Community Information Management talk

Anhai is giving his talk now, the project deals with community information management. There are numerous online communities, with each community having many data sources and many members, such as the movie fan community. Members often want to find information about what is new in the community, the connections between members in the community, and the topics in the community. The whole idea is to create structured data portals via extraction, integration and collaboration of information sources. The extraction of information from the data sources will create entities which then connections between entities are inferred, by creating a graph.

Building a structured portal semi-automatically like Citeseer is not new. Prior work involves collecting a large number of data sources, and then using machine learning techniques. With their approach, they just choose a small set of data sources and do a compositional and incremental approach. To populate the portal, they choose the top 20% of data sources which generate 80% of the rest of the community. They create a prototype of their system called DBLife for the database research community. The 20% of top data sources become a seed for building the portal community. A plan is then created to generate a daily ER graph, they first find entities and then find relations. How to find these entities? They first find entities within the data sources, and then match with other similar ones. For example, my name is Alvin Chin but also my name could also be "Chin Alvin", so the two are related and are matched to the same entity. They also generate variations of names. This technique works well for the majority of cases. Of course there are other cases where this doesn't work like for example Asian names. In this case, they apply a stricter matching approach particular to those cases.

The next step is to determine the co-occurence relations between entities. They also create a plan to find label relations. For addressing the expansion, they look at the nodes of members within the community and crawl those to expand the tree. They then enlist the users who go to the community portal that allow them to edit information in a wiki-style format. Right now, they don't incorporate the changes back into the structured database, but those are plans for future research.

It's interesting that he said that the decisions and research that his group has done has worked very well. But I suspect this is because they've been able to select the right data sources, so the data is clean and there already is a community well defined on the web for the database research community, therefore their technique works well. One of the things where they haven't addresses (one of many) are the capture and extraction of social interactions. This is where my PhD research can help.

All in all, I felt it was a good talk, and shows the potential of research in web communities.

On Technorati: community, cimple

Community information management talk tomorrow

There's a database research seminar talk tomorrow at 2 pm in BA 5256 at U of T on Cimple Project on Community Information Management presented by AnHai Doan from University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yahoo Research. Should be an interesting talk since they are dealing with the data management of online communities, and my PhD research is dealing with finding community in social hypertext environments.

They have a project web page here.

On Technorati: Cimple, community, information, Yahoo Research

iPhone is in Canada now!

Yes, I just saw it on sale at G4Tech kiosk in Oakville Place. I actually touched an iPhone, and it sent shivers down my spine. It was a locked phone, so I couldn't see all the applications like YouTube and Safari browser. But I will go back next week to see the unlocked iPhone. It's apparently going for $1100! Ouch, nope, not going to get it, but when I see and touch the unlocked iPhone, I will take pics for sure!

On Technorati: iPhone, G4Tech

StatCounter wins BusinessWeek's Europe's best young entrepreneur

A while ago, there was a poll to find Europe's best young entrepreneur conducted by Business Week, where I wrote a blog post calling people to vote for StatCounter. For those who don't know about StatCounter, it is a free statistics analytic tool for tracking web sites. I use it for my research group's blog, this blog, and my Windows Live Spaces blog, and I like it.

Well, the votes are in, and Aodhan Cullen who is the creator of StatCounter has won Europe's best young entrepreneur. He started StatCounter when he was 16 and at 24, he's still going strong. Google Analytics is a competitor to StatCounter, but Cullen doesn't mind and feels that StatCounter is different in some respects to Google Analytics.

Way to go Aodhan and StatCounter!

On Technorati: StatCounter, Aodhan Cullen, Business Week

Mashups and Twitterlicious

Mashups are the craze these days, and this week was Mashup Camp in Mountain View. What's a mashup? Basically, it's a fusion of different data sources to create a web application using public APIs. Mashups before were started by the geeky developers. The first type of mashups were those based on Google Maps API, like for example, there is a mashup of TTC stations that are mapped in Toronto. In a way, just like open-source software where people tinker with the code and modify it, mashups are in a sense open-web applications, they really open up the web, and the sky is the limit as to what type of applications you can write.

Now apparently, the big businesses are getting into the game, especially the big three of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Google has something called Google Mashups Editor that allow you to create mashups visually in a GUI interface on the web. It's in beta and right now is only limited to a small number of developers. Ever since Google started with Google Maps, they've been speedily enabling desktop applications on the web, like Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Gmail. Yahoo also has a mashup tool called Yahoo Pipes, check out my blog entry about that. Of course, it was inevitable that Microsoft would have a mashup tool (they always come late into the game in almost every new product, but in the end do give a run on the competition). Their mashup tool is something called Microsoft Popfly.

What is Popfly? It's a catchy and cool word. Basically Popfly is a way for non-developers to easily create web applications without having to write code. It's only by invitation only as it's in Alpha. You have to click a button to join and then if you're accepted, you'll get an e-mail back to allow you to login. I did that last week. I haven't really went through the time to test Popfly, being busy with the PhD and finishing writing up the camera-ready of a conference paper. Hopefully, I'll be able to test drive Popfly.

So anyways, back to MashupCamp. Here's a pretty neat mashup, it's called Twitterlicious and as you might guess it uses Twitter and del.icio.us. What it does is that you can browse Twitter feeds on your phone but since it's difficult to browse URLs associated with Twitter posts, you can create clips of the URLs as del.icio.us bookmarks which you can view later on your PC. A video of this is shown here from MashupCamp.

On Technorati: mashup, twitterlicious, twitter, mashup camp, del.icio.us, Popfly

My classmate featured in MIT Technology Review!

I love to read MIT's Technology Review magazine and to see the research and industry articles on the latest technology. My classmate Shengdong Zhao at the Interactive Media Lab has his PhD research featured in MIT Technology Review. His research is looking at creating an audio interface for mobile devices like the iPod which is eyes-free. I know I could use something like this with my iPod when I'm walking to school, especially in winter, where I don't want to have to take out the iPod and then change the tracks, I just want to keep the iPod in my pocket and just use the wheel to move in a circular fashion to select the song that I want.

On Technorati: audio interface, iPod

Life after PhD

I'm right now finishing up the PhD thesis and will be in the market for a full time job next year either in academia or industry. During my job searching, I came across this interesting graph below that comes from the 2006-7 Taulbee survey:



There is a dramatic increase in the number of new PhDs. And this trend is going to increase into 2007 in the US. What does this mean? There is a huge supply of PhDs looking for work, but unfortunately only a limited number of job openings. Huge supply but low demand. From the statistics, more PhDs are getting into industry than academia. You can also see the salaries of the professors at various US universities. How does that compare to Canada? Here's the 2003-4 stats of Canadian professor salaries as compiled by Statistics Canada.

Interesting trends and information to keep in mind when applying for academic positions for next year.

On Technorati: academia, post PhD, university salaries

Jakob Nielsen against writing blog posts

Taking a break from research, I've been reading up on some of the blogs that I subscribe to from my Bloglines. I came across this blog post from AccordionGuy (Joey DeVilla) who's been a speaker at the CASCON workshops on Business of Blogging and Social Computing: Best Practices, which I chaired. It's about Jakob Nielsen and his case for writing articles, and not blog posts. If you don't know Jakob Nielsen, he's famous for his usability guidelines and his usability heuristics for creating user interfaces.

In this article, it's interesting that Nielsen says that writing articles are more world-class than writing blog posts. Specifically on the top of his article, he writes:

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.

He feels that blogs defeat that purpose because people rant and just write stuff off the top of their head, it's not well organized and thought through (like I'm doing right now). Therefore, blogs are not very credible, is what I think he's trying to say. Off course, this brought the king of blogging himself Robert Scoble into the conversation with his counterpoint "Jakob Nielsen says “don’t be like Scoble”" , which caused a huge discussion in the blogosphere. Robert Scoble says the following:

1. Don’t do quick posts like Scoble.
2. Don’t risk being an idiot like Scoble.
3. Don’t put comments on your idiocy like Scoble.
4. Don’t link to other idiots like Scoble.
5. If you want to seem like you know something, unlike Scoble, write long ass white papers with lots of charts.
6. Don’t have fun like that idiot Scoble.
7. Don’t you dare put pictures of cats or babies or other personal details up like Scoble does.
8. Don’t add Web 2.0 mechanisms to your Web site like Scoble does. Definitely no “del.icio.us” or “Digg” voting graphics.
9. Don’t get caught dead inside an Apple store like Scoble does.
10. Don’t give Fake Steve or Valleywag a reason to deride you like Scoble does.
11. Definitely don’t get close to Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce/Facebook like Scoble does. If you can say it in 140 characters you shouldn’t say it at all.

Of course, that is Scoble's interpretation. There are some that agreed with him, saying that Nielsen doesn't really understand what blogging is and the impact that blogging can become (there's many examples of this and how credible a source that blogging can be against traditional media). For more information, you can read Scoble and Israel's Naked Conversations book which I highly recommend reading. I've posted my own thoughts from the book if you're interested. Then there's others, who've felt that Scoble is being egotistical of himself especially saying that Nielsen says do not be like Scoble and that Nielsen was making an attack on Scoble. In Nielsen's article, Nielsen does not even mention Scoble. However, I think what Scoble is trying to say is that Nielsen is against the practices that what Scoble does in blogging, not against Scoble himself. I don't think Scoble intended to say that Nielsen was attacking him, just his behaviour and his beliefs indirectly.

Of course, having this controversy, has caused 88 comments on Scoble's blog post, so lots of interesting conversations happening. In my own opinion, I believe that blogging and writing long thought-out articles, both have a place on the web and that each serve its own purpose. There may be times for example where you want to write something to an audience in a professional manner to make it scholarly and intelligent. Then there may be times, where you want to just start conversation and bring about your own thoughts (like I'm doing here), but it's not meant to be something like a news article. Some people don't have the time to read long articles (I for sure am not with my busy day!), and enjoy just the short blog entries (sorry this blog post I'm writing is not short!). I think one thing that Nielsen misses is the impact of what blogging can do with the linking behaviour. It's powerful, it makes you get noticed, it's self publishing and self-advertisement. Look at Technorati and del.icio.us where you can find conversations and trends on various topics, and search through blogs. So powerful, that I'm studying blogging to find communities from the social networks that get created through the blog links.

On Technorati: Jakob Nielsen, blogging, usability, Robert Scoble

Twittering from the phone

This Twitter thing is really getting pretty hot. If you don't know what Twitter is, read my post here. Now, there is an interface called Twittergram that takes an audio clip and then posts it to Twitter. It's kind of a voice version of Twitter according to this Webware article, where you submit your Twitter account info, then the MP3 file, and then Twittergram will create a Twitter post to a link to the MP3 file. Twittergram was created by Dave Winer, who is the creator of RSS and blogging, where the first blog was considered Scripting News.

Here are some comments on Twittergram from Dave's blog. I guess some people really have too much time on their hands and want to update everything that they do at certain times during the day. There's even now a phone interface where you can send the audio clip if you want to Twitter on the go. I guess this is kind of like a mobile mini podcast. It would be interesting to see if there is some type of community that exists within the Twitter posts.

On Technorati: Twitter, Twittergram

Under the hood of the Apple iPhone

It was just a matter of minutes before the first pics of the inside of the Apple iPhone was revealed. These are really the true engineers and geeks! Of course, by doing so, they voided the Apple warranty, and some even made the iPhone unable to use. What a waste of $500 US to void the Apple warranty.

Anyways, I found pics of the inside of the Apple iPhone from ThinkSecret from the box, to opening the box and revealing the accessories, to taking apart the iPhone. They reveal the secret components that make the Apple iPhone work. Interesting. And also, Steve Jobs announced that all Apple full time employees get a 8GB iPhone for free! Man, that makes me wish I worked at Apple!!!

On Technorati: iPhone, Apple

Camera ready of Hypertext paper submitted and CASCON short paper accepted!

I just submitted the camera ready version of the short paper for the Hypertext conference called Identifying Subcommunities Using Cohesive Subgroups in Social Hypertext. It was a challenge to take the originally submitted 8 page full paper and cut it down to 4 pages, but I believe it's more focussed. The Hypertext conference is in Manchester, UK and goes from September 10 to 12. I will post the paper just right after the conference.

On another note, I also got another paper accepted to the CASCON conference in October in Toronto. It's also a short paper and I'm right now working on the camera ready version. So look for both papers towards September, as well as podcasts and slides from my talks. They will be nice additions of case studies to my PhD thesis.

On Technorati: Hypertext, CASCON07

Happy Canada Day!

Today is Canada's 140th birthday since Canada became a nation on July 1, 1867. Happy birthday Canada! From the Great Canadian Wish List that CBC did on Facebook, here are the top 30 wishes voted by Facebook members. The top wish is abolish abortion.

I hope everyone had a safe and happy Canada Day! We are truly blessed to live in such a diverse, multicultural, and free country that is Canada. Bonne fete Canada, vive le Canada!

Happy birthday Canada!

On Technorati: Canada Day, Great Canadian Wish List, Facebook

The wait is over, iPhone is here!

It's finally arrived, the moment we've all been waiting for. It's a bird, it's a plane, no it's the Apple iPhone! Here's the frenzy when the San Francisco Apple store opened its doors at 6 pm tonight to eagerly awaiting customers in line:



So I wonder what Americans will be playing with this weekend? And you know there's going to be lots of videos, commentary and blogs from those that just bought the iPhone, to see really the real scoop on the iPhone, and if it's really as good as what Apple and Steve Jobs says. It will work only work with the Apple MacOSX, Apple probably has something in the works to sync with Windows, just like they did when iPod first came out.

It will be interesting to see how iPhone will stack up in sales with the rest of the other phones. However, I think that Apple has a ways to go before they can significantly get a good share of the cell phone market. I still think it is too expensive. Well, time will tell sure enough.

On Technorati: iPhone, Apple

iPhone comes out today!

People are lining up left, right and center to get their hands on the Apple iPhone. According to this article, AT&T is limiting one iPhone per customer, whereas Apple is limiting two iPhones per customer. Some are buying the iPhone and then selling it up on eBay and taking the proceeds for charity, which I think is smart. David Clayman is just doing that and he's blogging his experience in lining up for the iPhone, he's #2 in line at Apple's SOHO location.

Here's the first 10 people lining up at Apple's SOHO location:



On Technorati: iPhone, camp, Apple iPhone

Communities and Technologies conference starts today

Today is the Communities and Technologies conference which is being held at Michigan State University.



There are some invited great speakers at the conference which I've come across in my literature review for my research. Marc Smith from Microsoft Research's Community Technologies Group is speaking about Illustrating Digital Traces: Visualizations of patterns generated by computer-mediated collective action systems. Marc's done a lot of work with visualizing communities and interaction in newsgroups with their NetScan project. Another speaker is Rob Malda and Jeff Bates from Slashdot who are talking about The Life, Times and Tribulations of Slashdot. Finally, the last speaker is Judith Donath from the Social Media Group at MIT, and she will be talking about Agents and Faces: The Reliability of Online Signals.

There are many workshops at the conference, one that really piques my interest is the Online Interaction Workshop being organized by Thomas Lento, Howard Welser, Eric Gleave and Marc Smith that deals with Studying Interaction in Online Communities: From Data Sources to Research Results. I'd be interested in the presentations and any workshop report that comes out of this.

There are also many papers as well which start tomorrow. Looking forward to the proceedings which I hope will be available on ACM or IEEE.

On Technorati: community, technology, conference

What is your wish this Canada Day?

This weekend is the July 1 Canada Day long weekend. CBC is holding a Great Canadian Wish list on Facebook asking Canadians what they wish for on Canada's birthday. The winning wish list will be announced by CBC.

The top 4 wishes on the list are:

1. Abolish abortion in Canada
2. I wish that Canada would remain pro-choice
3. For a spiritual revival in our nation
4. Restore traditional marriage

Vote for your favorite wish on Facebook! Please vote for #1, 3 and 4.

On Technorati: Facebook, Great Canadian Wish List, CBC

iPhone to come out in 3 days, people preparing

Well the Apple iPhone comes out in 3 days at 6 pm in AT&T stores in the US. Just a note and I just found this out now that Cingular Wireless that bought AT&T is now back to AT&T, the rebranding change just happened this year.



How many people will buy this phone? I just heard the This Week in Tech podcast with Leo Laporte saying that the marketing and advertising on the iPhone is similar to that of Windows 95 and the Sony PlayStation 3, but there are reports that sales may not be as anticipated. In my opinion the phone is pretty expensive about $500 US and Steve Jobs at the Apple WorldWide Developer's Conference (WWDC) announced no third-party development for the iPhone, development is done using the Safari web browser.

Anyways, stories are coming in about how people are preparing for the iPhone launch, this story from Engadget shows the first iPhone camper at the Manhattan New York Apple store.



I wonder how many eBay postings there will be to sell the iPhone over the weekend?

On Technorati: iPhone, Apple

Finally the transit smart card comes to GTA!

It was about time! Hong Kong has a very successful system called the Octopus card where you can use it to swipe at any transportation system (subway, bus, tram, train, ferry). Toronto and GTA needs something like that. I've been wanting something like this for a long time, so I don't have to carry a monthly GO student pass and tokens for the subway. Well, it looks like they are trialling the "Presto" smart card fare system.

Unfortunately, they are first trying this out in Mississauga for those riders that originate their trip from Cooksville or Meadowville stations and take Mississauga Transit shuttle routes, or transfer to Toronto Transit Commission vehicles outbound at Union Station. Apparently, it will come to Oakville in late 2008. I would love to try it now, I've been an avid supporter of having a smart card fare system for a long while. Toronto and the GTA needs to be more modernized and technologically competent. Otherwise, we risk losing our competitiveness to other cities.

Another thing that Toronto and the GTA needs is a good transit web site that tells you if you're starting from your origin and you want to go to your destination, what transit routes you need to take. San Francisco and the Bay area has the 511 system, and when I was there last summer, I loved it! It told me which route to take and what time the bus or train would come so I could plan my trip. Extremely useful and something really needed in the GTA.

On Technorati: GTA, Toronto transit

U of T looking to hire Social Media Officer

I just read this job posting from David Crow's blog. It looks like U of T is going Web 2.0 by looking for a Social Media Officer. Details of the job are available here. Apparently it involves incorporating Web 2.0 concepts and social media technologies to communicate U of T to faculty and students. It's about time that U of T became more creative and technology innovators and motivators like other universities like University of Waterloo and Stanford. This is really great news. I wonder if this job initiative came from the several talks that KMDI has had on Web 2.0 this year and last year.

U of T needs to strengthen their web presence and make it more social. I'm beginning to see that with podcasts and forums to engage students in university life. It looks like we're seeing a U of T 2.0.

On another front, does this mean that companies will have a new title like Social Media Officer? We already have Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), technology evangelist, chief internet officer (which is Vint Cerf's role at Google), chief software architect (which Bill Gates used to be at Microsoft). Because of the technology push, will we see new titles like Social Media Officer, perhaps Chief Geek Officer, Chief Social Officer, Chief Blogging Officer (which was kind of Robert Scoble's role before he left Microsoft to go to PodTech), Chief Podcasting Officer, Chief Video Officer, etc....?

On Technorati: social media, U of T, Web 2.0

Best 100 Web 2.0 sites

According to Webware, these are the top 100 Web 2.0 web sites as voted by the community of Webware users.

Let's see if the ones I use are on the list.

For browsing, I use primarily Firefox, not very often IE (unless for some reason I can't run the site in Firefox and I HAVE to resort to using IE). I also use My Yahoo that's where I store by bookmarks using My Yahoo Web 2.0 beta. That's pretty much about it, the rest on the list I don't use.

For communications, for e-mail I use Google GMail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. For messenging, I use Windows Live Messenger and sometimes Yahoo Messenger, I used to use Trillian a while ago but I don't really use any more because it doesn't support some of the native functions that the IM clients have (like sharing and transferring files). Though, I've never tried the new Trillian, so it might have been fixed now. For voice, I almost exclusively use Skype. Meebo, I've tried it but I wasn't successful to connect Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger contacts and I kind of gave up on that service.

For community, I primarily use Facebook and also Digg, sometimes occasionally Friendster (although not very much anymore). I use a lot of LinkedIn and I have a MySpace account but I really never use it.

For data, I primarily use Google, sometimes Windows Live search and Yahoo search but almost Google. I also use YouSendIt for sending files greater than 10 MB. I sometimes use BitTorrent but not as much.

For entertainment, I don't use any of those tools mentioned in the Webware top 10 list.

For media, I use Flickr and YouTube, sometimes a little bit of Yahoo Video if I want to view video that is within a Yahoo news link. I use Microsoft Soapbox for viewing videos and also Sony Imagestation for uploading photos, but I don't see that in the Webware list.

For mobile, I don't use any of the mobile apps on my cell phone because they cost money! And I'm already paying enough with the voice plan I have now so I see no need for paying for more.

For productivity and commerce, I use craigslist to look for any items on sale or if I want to put up something for sale, sometimes eBay, but mostly Google calendar and now exclusively Google Docs and Spreadsheets (which work great for sharing documents with a team).

For publishing, I use Blogger (as I'm writing this blog entry now in), WordPress (for my research lab's blogs), and Feedburner for making feeds. I also use WikiMedia for making wikis but I don't see that in the list.

For reference, I use Google Maps almost exclusively to find a place or how to get to somewhere, and WikiPedia as my online encyclopedia. I've tried Yahoo Local before but not too often now.

So, what do all of you use for the categories mentioned above, do you use the ones that are on the Webware 100 list?

On Technorati: Webware, Web 2.0

Judea Pearl lecture at U of T today

Today, there is a talk jointly organized between the departments of Computer Science, Economics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Public Health Sciences and Statistics, by Judea Pearl who is a professor of Department of Computer Science at UCLA. Professor Pearl just was awarded an honorary doctorate degree at University of Toronto today. He is the father of journalist Daniel Pearl. His talk today is about the Mathematics of Causal Inference. He says that the explanation of causal inference is actually really simple and common sense.

Causal analysis deals with changes (dynamics) whereas probability and statistics deal with static relations. Causal and statistical concepts do not mix. Statistical concepts can be computed given the joint probability distribution. For example, regression and association/independence are statistical concepts. Statistical assumptions and data and causal assumptions combine to form causal conclusions. Causal assumptions cannot be expressed in the mathematical language of standard statistics. Causality then needs special mathematics. In high school algebra, we weren't allowed to wipe out equations, but in causality, you need to wipe out equations. Professor Pearl just mentioned that Computer Science is the science of daydreaming (amid smiles and laughter in the audience).

To make causality mathematical, we need to introduce counterfactuals.

Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPhone: Ofone

Whenever one company has a product, Microsoft has to come back with their own. The new gadget that's the craze out there is the Apple iPhone which is coming out June 28, but only in the US. Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod is the Zune, so what is Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPhone? It is the Ofone, check it out:


Video: Microsoft's oPhone

Let's compare the iPhone with the OFone shall we?




So, which phone would you like to carry in your hand?

Oh, and if you haven't heard by now or can tell from the video, yes it is fake and a prank. But it's funny! I love these kind of videos.

Actually, on this web site, it seems that the OFone was actually shown as a concept mobile device that was previewed at Microsoft Techmela 2007 in Mumbai, India and was presented by Derek Snyder who is the Product Manager, Mobile and Embedded Devices Group at Microsoft. So, then the question really is OFone for real?

On Technorati: Microsoft,
Ofone, Apple, iPhone

CS PhD Production increasing

Well, this is good news. According to the ebiquity blog from UMBC, the number of CS PhDs that got their PhD degree increased 26% between 2005 and 2006. So, if this trend keeps up, then I should be in good shape since I plan to graduate and get my PhD degree next year in 2008! Let's also hope that the percentage of universities hiring CS PhDs for faculty also is on the increase, as well as the number of researcher positions in industry research as well, since I'll be in that boat next year.

On Technorati: CS, doctorate degree

TorCHI talk: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Tonight, Bill Buxton from Microsoft Research is at U of T for the TorCHI talk, talking about his book "Sketching User Experiences".



If you're at the talk, they're selling his book and having an autograph session!

The title of his talk is Design, Design Thinking and Sketching. Bill provides a new way of thinking to design, which is badly needed in industry and business. According to Bill, there are problems in new product development in companies, and frustrated designers within organizations. There should be a chief design officer in the company that works with the chief technical officer, to articulate the requirements for design to translate design technology into products. Bill's book is designed for managers of companies to read, rather than for designers. Design sits within the ecosystem, the design life needs the physical infrastructure. Designers and usability experts need to understand executives, there needs to be cross cultural people to build the bridge.

In the product development process, there is no phase 0 which is the design before building the product (engineering). What is the product going to look like, is it feasible to build, why do we want to build? Bill just kidded around that he was able to publish his book based on the realization that design needs to happen before the engineering phase. We can then think of product design just like digging for artefacts like in archaeology. Design is not a separate phase, it permeates within all the development phases in engineering and also in sales. In fact a product should begin to be developed just like a film is made, and before it is green lighted. There needs to be a business plan, a list of people who are the "actors" in the product, how much the product will cost, etc.

So what is design? Sketching is a method for design, which is used in different types of design like graphics design, fashion design, and industrial design. The design spaces needs to be explored by looking at alternatives. For example, he gave an example of drawing a phone which he claimed most people (even the design challenged can do), drawing a phone's interface (which is much difficult), and drawing the experience of using the phone (which is the ultimate goal in product design). According to Bill, we are going from a materialist design to experiential perspective of design.

So what makes a sketch? First, the sketch is free-hand drawn. Second, the lines are not complete. Third, the sketch is not finished, it is open-loop rather than closed-loop. What is the anatomy of sketching? Sketching is about opening doors, not closing doors, so no higher resolution is required to communicate the intended purpose/concept. Sketching is meant to suggest and explore, you should not have to be complete the first time. Ambiguity is the most important part of design. If you want to get the most out of a sketch, you need to leave big enough holes. If you start to put more detail and close the imagination, then this is not a sketch but more of a memory recording. According to Bill, design is like a funnel, you have a million ideas and then you start reducing ones and throwing them out, until you come out with the idea that becomes the product. There is a continuum between design and usability, from sketch to prototype, along the investment and time axes.

Great talk, as always, Bill is a good speaker, and I think a good example of how you can have a good career in academia, research, and industry.

On Technorati: sketch, Bill Buxton, design, user experience, TorCHI