Listening to a research talk on mobile learning approaches via culturally inspired group games from Tian Feng from ISCAS #mobilelearning

Google Chrome OS: An new OS for the 21st century?

I'm sure that everyone has heard of the Google Chrome OS, Google's foray into creating an operating system running on Linux where everything is centered around the browser especially Google Chrome. Well, the Google Chrome OS has already been reviewed, with source code available. Engadget has the story. Apparently, the Google Chrome OS is much different than regular operating systems, it has been designed in the beginning for simplicity, security and ease of use.

Google Chrome OS is not meant to totally replace existing OSes like Windows, MacOS or Linux. In my opinion, it is meant for totally web-based computing. There are certain things where a native application is much faster and you can do more than with a web-based application. However, with AJAX and JavaScript, the performance of web-based applications is nearing that of native applications, which makes the game change. But it reminds me now of how the computer will become just like a dumb terminal in the 1960s and 1970s before the PC era. All you need to do is just boot up and everything is on the web, just like before on the mainframe server. Now that everything is going to the cloud, what does this leave for the native client?

Will the PC return back to a dumb terminal? Will rich native clients be replaced with web-based applications running in a browser. Will a browser-based OS make the computer more secure so therefore there isn't any loopholes to have viruses running on the native system exploiting ports from native applications like Outlook and the OS?

What do you think?

All in one email, instant messaging and social networking in one client: Nokia Messaging http://ping.fm/fu6Y1 #nokia

Exertion Interfaces talk from Floyd Mueller

Today, I attended a talk from Floyd Mueller who is visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne. He is talking about exertion games.

Abstract

Exertion Interfaces are interfaces that require intense physical effort. Their recent success stems mostly from their use in games, as demonstrated by the Wii and Natal. It is believed that these games facilitate not only physical health, but also more social play than traditional computer games. Over several years, Floyd has investigated the influence of technology design on exertion games. His research has contributed to an understanding of how people play computationally-augmented exertion games and how we can support exertion and social play in future designs. Floyd's research has produced several prototypes, including 'Jogging over a Distance', a system that allows joggers who are located in different cities to motivate one another while running using mobile technology, which was used last month between expat joggers in London, UK and Melbourne, Australia. Floyd will focus on the 'Jogging over a Distance' work to describe challenges and opportunities in using mobile technology to enhance people's fitness activities through a distributed social approach that aims to enhance the engagement with the activity while it occurs, unlike most pedometer work that focuses on post-reflection after the exercise.

Floyd is talking about how Dance Dance Revolution and the Nintendo Wii really changed the face of gaming using physical activity. There is an exciting research for engaging people over the internet using physical activity. For example, a group of cyclists come together and can connect with and cycle with other cyclists over the internet using Skype video conference. How to do the design between exertion play and social play? According to Floyd, we need to focus on mediated environment which can extend opportunities for social interaction.

The first research project was on Table Tennis for Three which involved a table tennis table with one side showing a screen and video conference to show the remote players. A player uses the table tennis racquet to hit the ball onto the screen which the other player on the other side will see and will hit the ball.

The second research project was Jogging Over a Distance, using spatial audio for showing whether your partner in jogging is close to you. Using a heart rate monitor, joggers can then speed up depending on the other partner in order to catch up to that person based on the spatial audio.

The third research project was Remote Boxing, which is boxing over a distance where users would hit the screen and get points for doing so when they saw objects appear on the screen.

All in all, very interesting research work and something that really brings HCI and ubiquitous computing to real every day life.

China HCI seminar series in Beijing - First session

China HCI Seminar Series
October 26, 2009

This is what I wrote from the first session in the China HCI Seminar Series which kicked off last night. This seminar series is meant to foster research and collaboration among HCI researchers in the Chinese community as well as abroad. It was held at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. There was lots of people for the first session, so the turn out was really great like a large lecture hall! There were two talks after introduction by the organizers and distinguished Chinese HCI researchers.








Prof. James Landay, University of Washington, Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia

Jonathan Grudin: A Moving Target: The Evolution of HCI

Keynote Speech

HCI started with Human Factors and Ergonomics with operation and data entry from 1905 to 1945, and then came the invention of general-purpose computers. HCI was one of five major IS research streams since 1967 (Banker and Kaufmann). Then there was HCI in Information Systems for managerial use. Finally Computer-Human Interaction happened in the 1980s with the beginning of the CHI conference and the establishment of SIGCHI. There was a focus shift from non-discretionary use to discretionary use. The Computer-Human Interaction stream started from the work of computer-engineer interaction and the work done at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The actual goal behind human-computer interaction actually started with the work of Grace Hopper.

According to Jonathan, there is a shifting focus of interface development from the large hardware mainframes, to the PCs, and now in groups and mobile devices where it is used collaboratively. The graphical user interface (GUI) changed the field of human-computer interaction in 1985 with the Apple Mac computer. Jonathan showed a curve of Moore’s Law showing how as you move the number of years, there is a longer tail on the curve. The next big impact was in 1995 where there was unanticipated changes in audio, video and graphics. Now, if we continue the curve, what is the next big bomb and it is predicted that it will happen in 2015. Design started coming into HCI since 1995, but we have been neglecting design for a decade or so. There is now new research trend into emotional design.


History and evolution of HCI


Interface development

The amount of information will dramatically increase exponentially and increasingly significant focus in HCI. H.G. Wells made a quote which sounds very much related to what the vision of human-driven Web 2.0 systems is, and this was in 1905! There is now the emergence of information schools. James Martin from 1973 talked about the era of information scarcity and according to Jonathan, we are still in the age of information scarcity. Now, there is a merging of the physical and virtual world. We can learn something from the kids domain like WebKinz where kids can buy a stuffed toy, enter the code, and then can enter the virtual world where they have to feed their toy and can share with other kids’ toys. He says why this can’t be the same in the adult world like buying a car?



Desney Tan: Creating Novel Human-Computer Interaction with Physiological Sensing
Computational User Experiences Group, Microsoft Research
Desney's web site


Following Jonathan’s footsteps, the next big thing in the evolution of computing paradigms is natural user interfaces. Mind reading devices are now hitting the consumer market, and is now becoming a science. At Microsoft Research, Desney and his team is looking into classifying brain activity tasks and uncontrolled game tasks with greater than 80% accuracy. The goal is to have only a few sensors as possible with high accuracy. They can use the brain sensors to accurately classify images based on brain activity using EEG. Another goal is to take science fiction like Minority Report as reality, and use detection of hand gesture recognition. At Microsoft Research, there is Project Natal which is controller free interaction which will be shipped with Microsoft XBox. In order to make this reality, they use EMG armbands to use muscle stimulation in order to detect gestures. You can sense gestures on a hard surface like a table top using Microsoft Surface.

Games are a very good test of the research because they require accurate classification and fast classification. Their group created a test application called Air Guitar Hero that uses hand gestures to pretend playing the guitar. A third research theme is mouth gesture interactions for example using tongues that can be used with paralyzed people who cannot use their hands or arms. Desneyäs group created a device to be placed on the tongue with electrodes in order to sense the tongue with a micro+controller. The idea is that some children wear retainers when they are young but a reluctant to use them because they are not nice to have and make them look ugly. But if they were cool by using sensors to make them technologically advanced to use, would help adoption of them. An example is using your tongue to control a Tetris game. All the technology is now embedded in the tongue retainer. So what are some applications of tongue gesture interaction? According to Desney, we can use tongue gestures to control mobile devices like for example building a music player within your mouth. Another application is in medical sensing for salivary analysis and food analysis.

The last project is Bionic Contact Lenses where technology is embedded in the contact lens. An application could be to project information into the eye, for example, remembering who a particular person is by looking at that person. Another application is medical sensing such as glucose sensing with bionic contacts.

In closing, Desney is talking about the next evolution of HCI that will help bring computing into the real world.



At the end, there was some questions addressed to Desney and Jonathan.



All in all, a great start to what looks to be a great lecture series on HCI in Beijing, something that I miss from my alma mater at University of Toronto.

My talk and photos from the Social Networking Conference in London, UK on Sept. 24 and 25, 2009

I was an invited speaker at the Social Networking Conference in London, UK from September 24 to 25, 2009. I spoke about Advances in Mobile Social Networking, of which my slides are available here for download and also on SlideShare below.

Advances In Mobile And Social Networking Alvin Chin

View more presentations from ubiquitousdude.

It was a business conference with many attendees and speakers from industry, I was the only one from research.  However, it was nice to see how other companies are using social networking especially how Facebook is being prevalently used, as quoted by Clara Shih who promoted her book, The Facebook Era, of which I bought and I am reading.  Clara mentions how Facebook and social networking sites are the new CRM, that is where your customers are and so you should utilize them to its full potential.  

IBM gave a great talk on enterprise social networking and how it forms a core in their organization, where employees can use DogEar for bookmarking URLs which automatically propagate to a social media portal that is similar to Facebook for aggregating social media content from all your colleagues and friends within the company.  IBM has been a huge proponent and model for other companies to follow, about how a social media strategy can vastly transform a company to become more responsive and have a better reputation with customers.

Photos from the conference are up here on Nokia Ovi.

It was great meeting with all of you at the conference, please keep in touch with me as gadgetman4u on Twitter and FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

I would like just to wish all my Chinese friends and family a happy mid autumn festival. The Social Networking Conference in London was really great, and even went sightseeing. In London, I went to see Big Ben, Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Thames river cruise, Buckingham Palace, Victoria and Albert museum, British Museum, Trafalgar Square, Kensington Palace, and Wimbledon. I cannot believe that I was at Centre Court! It was great!

Now I am in Guangzhou and spending time with my inlaws and eating great Cantonese food. There is Cantonese food in Beijing but it is not that great, so I am so glad that I am here. The weather is hot in Guangzhou, much hotter than in Beijing.

The 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People's Republic of China. If you thought the fireworks anywhere else in the world is great, it probably cannot beat Beijing's fireworks, even more spectacular than the Beijing Olympics. Only China could do this massive scale of celebrations. It was about more than half a year in the making.

Second day of the Social Networking Conference

After a good night sleep, I'm now in the second day of the Social Networking Conference. Met lots of smart people yesterday and last night at Lloyd's Bar and Distillery, and lots of them were very interested with what I am doing in China and my job as researcher in Nokia Research Center. They were very intrigued by the concept of using the mobile phone as an integral part of your social network, true real mobile social networking, recording real social interactions and creating social networks based on that.

Anyways, I'm in the first talk of the second day of the conference on Enterprise Social Networking in France by Andre Dan of Challengy. He helps companies understand enterprise social networking and how to use it. Companies are really opening up and becoming more human to their customers by incorporating enterprise social networking functions. The leading tools in Enterprise Social Networking are Ning, IBM Lotus Connections (as presented by Ian McNairn from IBM yesterday and IBM is a huge advocate of social networking and they extensively use it internally), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Jive. Two French tools are blueKiwi and Inspheris. The open environments are LinkedIn and Facebook and are also used in enterprise social networking. A French open tool is Viadeo. Boostzone Institute is an enterprise social networking tank in France. BlueKiwi Software is the leading European provider of enterprise social software. A lot of companies are now using enterprise social networking software companies to integrate social networking within their business.

Second talk on 2009 Overview of the Social Networking Industry in Europe

Mark Brooks from Social Networking Watch is giving an overview of the social networking industry in Europe. Apparently, Facebook is the number 1 social network, Bebo and MySpace are losing the share of the market.

In first talk at Social Networking Conference

I'm now in the first talk at the Social Networking Conference called Enterprise social Networking at IBM presented by Ian McNairn. He mentioned about most of the people in IBM have been there for less than 5 years and IBM uses enterprise tagging and social networking extensively in the company. It is part of their company strategy. Heath McCarthy from IBM mentions we use social networking software is for connecting with people. In IBM, approximately 60% of employees are actively using social networking mostly outside IBM. IBMers used LinkedIn as the most popular social network. The benefits of Web 2.0 social networking is improving the productivity of knowledge workers and building communities. It helps you to find people, find information, sharing, socializing and promoting yourself.

But why run social software internally? It is to increase innovation, employee cohesiveness, work quality, knowledge sharing and reduces risk. In the company, we have many profiles in the organization and right now there are different systems and it is not connected together. We need software to link all these resources together.IBM has harvested the data and have taken the homegrown solutions and created an internal product. IBM has a social networking software called Lotus Connections.

Ian just asked the audience how many people have an online CV (all the attendees raised their hands). How many updated the CV within a month, all hands went down. But it is easy to update your status on social networking sites. With tagging, we create knowledge communities and knowledge sharing. Also IBM's social networking software can help to make connections with other people in the organization based on mutual systems and things that are in common and tells you how you know that person. At IBM, you can use social bookmarks of particular web sites that you bookmark and then it gets harvested and put into Lotus Connections. Ian just showed the tag cloud of Sacha Chua, an IBM social networking expert, and also a colleague of mine from my PhD days at University of Toronto in the Interactive Media Lab.

One more day left before leaving to London for the Social Networking Conference, can't wait! http://ping.fm/CpjSa

Remember Vannevar Bush and the Memex? It's now going to become a reality in the new book Total Recall by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, researchers from their project MyLifeBits from Microsoft Research http://ping.fm/odw41

Slides and paper from my SIN09 talk at IEEE SocialCom'09

I'd like to thank all the organizers for organizing a great conference for IEEE SocialCom even though it was co-located with the CSE, PASSAT, and EUC conferences all together. It will be nice to have just SocialCom and PASSAT together in one venue, so it will be more focussed. I found out that it was hard to go to different talks because they were all in parallel. Nevertheless, some things for improvements next year (if the Program Committee is listening, please make a note of this).

My paper and presentation slides are now available for my talk I gave on August 30, 2009 at the SIN09 workshop called Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network. The slides are up on SlideShare shown below:

Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network

View more documents from ubiquitousdude.

I met lots of new people and had great old acquaintances, and also had a chance to do a little sightseeing around Vancouver as well! Please keep in touch with me and add me to your social network!

Last day of the IEEE Social Computing conference

I missed the keynote address by Victor Bahl today, so if anyone has blogged about this, please send to me. Today is the last day of the IEEE Social Computing conference and right now, I'm in the first session of the day in the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop, listened to a talk on Expertise Modeling and Recommendation in Online Question and Answer Forums where they used clustering on Yahoo Answers. There is an interesting talk on A Language of Life: Characterizing People Using Cell Phone Tracks by Alexy Khrabrov that is exploring whether can determine actions based on sensor data that is captured by Nokia phones with connection to cell towers. They use the dataset from the Reality Mining group of Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle from MIT, and use N-grams from languagemodelsto model the sensor data as text.

The next session of the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop is starting. First talk is on Surfing a Web of Trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing. I never knew that people would actually offer couches to others to sleep on on Couchsurfing.com! Reciprocity is based on whether the two people offer couches to each other. The second talk is on Virtually There: Exploring Proximity and Homophily in a Virtual World presented by Noshir Contractor. People tend to form social relations with those who are geographically close to them (theory of proximity). The implications of understanding proximity and homophily could be used for finding experts in online social networks. The third talk is on The Altruistic Searcher which talks about collaborative web search, their search engine is HeyStaks. An interesting talk now is on Inferring Unobservable Inter-community Links in Large Social Networks where the motivation is that social networks are reconstructed from partially observable data of social interactions, and the social graph is an approximation of the real social graph.

Social Intelligence and Networking workshop

I'm in the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop where I will present my work called Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network. There is a talk now on a model for collaborative decision making. To model this decision making, they create a two-player game where the computer and user have different goals.

Second keynote in Social Computing conference by Fei-Yue Wang. There will be a national conference on social computing in Beijing, China in December. He is giving examples of social computing from Chinese case studies

Ben Schneiderman is talking how social computing is becoming widely recognized in schools.Social computing is a transformative moment. Ben is now challenging the audience on the vision of social computing and how we can provide impact in the world. We need to drive social computing to combat natural disasters. The take home message is that is your work focussing on national priorities and impact

Second day of IEEE SocialCom conference

Yesterday, after the conference, there was a very great reception (thanks organizers!) at the Renaissance hotel where I was able to network with important people and eat great food! Today is the second day of the conference with lots of parallel sessions and workshops, so it's going to be a busy day. There is a workshop on Mobile Phones sensing which I'm attending. The first is an invited talk on Social Computing with Mobile Phones and Sensors and the talk is about creating social computing applications using sensory data from the mobile phone, for example, one application for determining where to put recycling bins based on pictures, tagging, geocoding and location traces. Another application is for health and wellness, one example is AndWellness.

The first paper in this workshop is on Touch Me Wear, which is about physical contact with social networks presented by Aaron Beach. They created a touch me shirt where if you hug people, it will show on Facebook who are the people you have hugged. It uses Bluetooth to upload the hug to Facebook through a contact access point. This group is the author of the paper WhozThat. There are lots of mobile social networking companies like BrightKite that can find out who are around you and what are you doing through activity inference. This is a very good example of merging actual physical interaction with social interaction and bringing it to virtual communities like Facebook.

Session on Social Computing - IEEE SocialCom'09

I'm now in the session on Social Computing, one of the sessions in IEEE SocialCom conference. The first talk that I attended was about Guangxi on the Chinese Web where the presenter showed work that they did in doing an empirical study of Guangxi web sites using PageRank, compared to the general web and structures that come about from the Guangxi web sites by modelling Guangxi and identifying Guangxi links. The question that comes to mind, is how do the Guangxi web social networks compare with regular social networks, and can this help explain why Facebook and Twitter are not popular with Chinese users?

Another interesting paper was on Structure of Neighborhoods in a Large Social Network using a dataset obtained from Orange mobile phone users. They used "characteristic patterns" to identify neighbourhoods. The first talk in the second session on Social Computing is on Deriving Expertise Profiles from Tags. Their assumptions are that the set of tags defines a resource, and that these tags are correlated with skills. They performed a study with Dogear and IBMr, internal IBM social computing systems. They also create a scoring model to correlate tags with skills, and did find out that the tags do represent the skills. It would be interesting to see how finding similar users and experts could be used for tag recommendations. The third paper is on Probabilistic Generative Models of the Social Annotation Process addressing the challenge of uncovering hidden structure in social annotations, can we discover communities of users and categories of related tags. Their inspiration is on text-based topic models and their solution is Community-Based Probabilistic Social Annotation (PSA), instead of modelling tags, they also model users. Users belong to hidden communities so how can we find these communities, also related to my paper that I will present tomorrow. They recover communities and categories based on the Gibbs Sampler and used Delicious for their experiments. The PSA is better at predicting unsessn data, and they also did a user study to determine if the tags were correctly specified in the categories.

The next paper is on Detecting Communities from Bipartite Networks Based on Bipartite Modularities.

First day of IEEE Social Computing - Keynote 1

After a series of introductionary remarks to the conference (there are multiple conferences here of which IEEE Social Computing is one), now there is a keynote speech by Stephen Lau on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust in Service-Oriented Environments. Alex Pentland of MIT introduced the IEEE Social Computing conference of which my paper is part of the SIN workshop (Social Intelligence and Networking). If you're in the conference, then please talk to me, I will give a talk in SIN at the last session on Monday called "Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network".

Dr. Lau is talking about information assurance in Service-Oriented Environments. Now, we are entering service-oriented computing. This is nothing new, IBM Research has advocated service-oriented computing for many years, and in academia and research, service-oriented computing is very important. However, there are challenges in service-oriented computing environments, like for example system reliability, must be easy to use, privacy, trust and tracking users. There are XML-based policies to help with this and software engineering is being used to tackle this.

So, what is Dr. Lau's research to address these issues? They have developed a framework for systematically managing and enforcing security policies and a model for flexible security policies. He just showed the workflow of the architecture of their framework. The complicated part of this research is the integrated framework for managing and evaluating security, privacy, trust and risk. We need to have new models for trust and risk considering technical, human and social aspects.

Nokia Booklet 3G

Nokia has just announced the Nokia Booklet 3G, which is a netbook between the size of a laptop and a mobile with 10 inch screen, running Windows with 3G, GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Check out the video below, it looks really nice! It will be fully announced at Nokia World 2009 which is coming soon!



On Technorati: Nokia Booklet 3G, Nokia, netbook

My alma mater, the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto has changed their web site, which seems much cleaner and has a better user interface than before. Congratulations to the team for doing this!

I can't use Blogger because my Chinese ISP has blocked it, as well as Facebook and Twitter. So this is why I'm using Ping.fm to post. Apologies for my silence in blogging for the past couple of weeks as I was at the Hypertext conference in Turin (Torino), Italy, and then I took a week off to travel around Italy.

You can see pictures from Italy from here: http://ping.fm/cSFqZ

Now in the first session of Hypertext: Structure and Usage. First speaker is Mark Bernstein on On Hypertext Narrative http://ping.fm/YnEP9 #ht09

Just found out I got a book chapter accepted for publishing in Computational Social Network Analysis: Trends, Tools and Research Advances

My graduation photos are now up from today http://ping.fm/DUXwz

My paper got accepted to Symposium of Social Intelligence and Networking held in conjunction with IEEE Social Computing conference!

I just received my degree and shook david peterson's hand, the chancellor of the university of toronto and former ontario premier.

Back in Toronto for my PhD graduation!

Hi folks,

Sorry, if I haven't written on my blog for a while, but I usually update my other social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Plaxo Pulse, etc.) more often than this blog. Everything with me is going well at Nokia Research Center. I will be presenting a poster at the Hypertext 2009 conference in Turin, Italy. I'm in Toronto now for my PhD graduation convocation ceremony on Tuesday, June 9.

I also have a new research website which is at the Nokia Research Center site, so please visit there when you have a chance. I try to balance work and personal and family life, so every week my wife and I plan a different place to go to in Beijing. You can see all the trips we've gone to on my Facebook photos page. Just add me (Alvin Chin) to your Facebook.

As I reflect, I can't believe it has been 5 years in the making when I first started my PhD in September 2003 and who knew that now, I would graduate and also find my beautiful wife. Life has been up and down at times throughout the 5 years both academically, personally and family wise, but in the end, I've become a stronger person. Thanks for everyone for helping me to get to this stage in my life.

Too bad my dad cannot be able to see my graduation as he passed away last year, but I know that he is proud of me and looking down on me from heaven. Dad, I'm following in your footsteps.

Apologies, I will not speak at the Social Networking Conference in LA in June but will speak in London http://ping.fm/0RawB

Happy Mother's Day to all mothers everywhere!

happy Mother's Day to all mothers everywhere! Going to church now to say the First Reading

Nokia comes out with the 6216 Classic cell phone that uses NFC technology http://ping.fm/Om2QM

Just installed Google Maps and Latitude on my phone, to test it out

Nokia Xpress Music 5800 is best selling MP3 player in UK, beating iPod! http://ping.fm/Wl7jU

earth day is today, save our planet!

saw a web site called www.mytwitterexperiment.com. The site shows how u can get 5000 followers at least.

great weekend now back to work week

going to church now after coming back to Beijing

at beijing world art museum

back home from wonderful and refreshing team building meeting and can't believe the weekend is here!

Leaving the hotel called shan ba party or mountain bar party and going to pick strawberries

Beautiful sunny morning up in the mountains on the second day of the team building meeting

Social Mobile Web workshop at IEEE Social Computing conference in Vancouver http://ping.fm/OMpeZ

back at work from holiday, reality kicking in!

Finally back to Beijing from short holiday, and finally have internet!

today is my grandma's 90th birthday party and dinner! Happy Birthday Grandma, we love you!

Shopping in Hong Kong after a great Japanese lunch with family

in guangzhou for good friday service

Another beautiful sunny day in Beijing. Started reading A Dream Of Red Mansions, a famous Chinese classical novel.

Chinese Social Networks ‘Virtually’ Out-Earn Facebook And MySpace: http://ping.fm/JJKJE

Funny, saw a 1 yuan bill last night that had the main function written in C language on it! Last minute studying by a student I suppose!

Check out Bill Gates' Facebook profile: http://digg.com/d1o5C5

Nokia releases 'point and find' technology for adding social location to objects at Web 2.0 Expo: http://ping.fm/ZhOj0

another beautiful warm sunny day in Beijing, summer is here, although i've heard it's snowing in Toronto!

Holiday today in Beijing, importing new contact business cards into my Outlook, going to be 27 degrees, must go out today but where?

At wangfujing for like the 4th time, but it is a warm night in Beijing and many people walking

Nice beautiful day, finished having lunch with church friends

Palm Sunday today on a beautiful sunny day in Beijing! Going to say part of the readings for the Passion gospel today

Today is Palm Sunday and I'm going to be helping out with the readings for the Passion of the Christ for the gospel. This is my first time!

Share on Ovi (http://share.ovi.com) has changed their web UI

Finished first session of retreat about paul's conversion to Christian through his Damascus experience.

at xuanwumen catholic church for retreat, today is ching ming jie

3 day long weekend is here. Retreat today, Palm Sunday reading on Sunday, and Monday is holiday in China for remembering those passed away

XpressMusic 5800 the best? http://ping.fm/tvsjG

Ah, back to internet today after no internet yesterday since had no money on the card from the ISP! How so dependent we are on internet!

april fools day! My wife is not pregnant but thanks for all the congrats anyways!

Giving a research seminar at work today, and my wife is pregnant!

Just received notification that my poster got accepted into Hypertext conference http://www.ht2009.org! Going to Italy in end of June!

another chilly morning in Beijing, when will it be warm again?

heading into work on a chilly monday morning in Beijing, Chinese lesson today

Reading the first reading at xuanwumen catholic church

At the cctv tower observatory

Right now pedaling a boat on the lake at yuyuantan garden park

At yuyuantan park for the cherry blossom festival

Just saw beijing's version of toronto's cn tower!

Switch off your lights for one hour today at 8:30 pm for Earth Hour (http://ping.fm/BAd2k) to conserve power and save our Earth

leaving to take the bus to go home from the workshop, met new friends

Finishing up the 2nd day of the university collaboration workshop, great discussions and brainstorming

University collaboration Workshop is almost over for day 1, good brainstorming

Bright early morning, heading to a 2 day workshop off site, chilly morning but at least no snow!

Great day, was a sponsor for a friend of a friend who is becoming Catholic, then went to Beijing Zoo, and Sarah Brightman concert!

sarah brightman concert is finished, now heading home!

sarah brightman concert is finished, now heading home!

Sarah brightman concert starting!

At the sarah brightman concert sitting down at our seats

Finished church, tonight going to sarah brightman concert

Hypertext 2009 demos/posters for inclusion in proceedings is due in 2 days, March 23! http://ping.fm/tMIRn

Finishing up writing a paper for a poster

Finally at the gym one month later! Better late than never!

One year since my father passed away

I can't believe it but it has been exactly one year since my father passed away. It was just so sudden and surreal, that my family was at his bedside in the hospital one year ago. As I think about the year since he passed away, I know my father would be proud of me that I finished my PhD and found a great job at Nokia Research Center in Beijing, and that I'm learning Mandarin.

So even though life moves on, I will always remember my dad. Remember all those time we shared when I was a child, when we would play catch with the baseball, going out to dinner, asking him help on Chemistry homework in high school, and helping me with my Grade 7 and 8 science fair project.

My father is in a better place without any suffering any more and is with God. So even though I miss him, I can feel at peace that he is with God and is watching over me, saying "I'm proud of what you have done son". You never know what life throws at you, but whatever it is, I have my faith in God. It also makes you realize you need to treasure every moment with your loved ones.

It's been a long long day today, meetings and then NRC Day! Another busy day tomorrow!

Traffic bad so taking subway and then short taxi ride to a client meeting

Nokia N97 gets thumbs up: http://ping.fm/OMqYl I'm looking forward to seeing the actual device later this year!

It's St. patrick's Day today, are you wearing green? Well actually I'm not. Have a great day, it's going to hit 24 degrees in Beijing!

Looks like a great line of speakers and panel discussions for Mesh 09 in Toronto in April, too bad I won't be able to be there: http://ping.fm/aH0Nj

Check out this cool demo from TED that merges the virtual with the physical world: http://ping.fm/AKfsJ

Palm Pre: Is Palm back from the dead?

Everyone has heard about the Palm Pre and how it wowed everyone out there at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) including tech geek blogger Robert Scoble. Scoble says how Palm did what Nokia, RIM and Microsoft couldn't do, and that is build a user experience better than Apple. Palm overhauled their previous UI and interface and developed WebOS, it's web-based operating system, where everything is web-based.

The Palm Pre was shown by Engadget's Joshua Topolski on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon:



But don't count Apple out, apparently Apple's iPhone 3.0 software is supposed to be due out for preview on March 17th (tomorrow, St. Patrick's Day) and is going to have a lot of Palm's webOS features. The race is heating up with iPhone 3.0, Palm Pre and webOS, Google Android, and Nokia Symbian. But I'm still looking forward to the Nokia N97.

On Technorati: Palm Pre

Augmenting the real world with annotated virtual and internet data in real time, Pattie Maes and her team at MIT demonstrate their system at TED for creating a sixth sense: http://ping.fm/AKfsJ This is cool, I wish I could have a wearable system like that wherever I go to get any type of information given to me when I see a real object.

at xuanwumen catholic church for third sunday of lent

watching kmdi university of toronto lecture on the xpressmusic 5800, looks nice!

Meetings went well, looking towards a relaxing and fun weekend! Have a great weekend every one!

Just finished my Chinese class today, had a great meeting with my team, so research is going well!

nice sunny day in Beijing, heading into work. Watched Alias season 1 episode 4 last night

playing i mean testing with the expressmusic 5800

Ugh! Gmail has multi-attachments feature but after upgrading to latest Adobe Flash player, in Firefox I can't add attachments anymore! Why?

Beautiful sunny warm day in Beijing, heading to church now on the second sunday of Lent

My PhD thesis is now in the ACM SIGWEB theses repository: http://ping.fm/qtcAP

Skittles' web page is Twitterfied and includes Facebook, YouTube and Flickr feeds, it's a pure social media site: http://www.skittles.com

Nokia Research Center and Corporate Research

There are many research centers that are part of corporate companies. For example, HP Labs is part of Hewlett Packard, IBM Research is part of IBM, Microsoft Research is part of Microsoft, NEC Labs is part of NEC, and Nokia Research Center is part of Nokia. Research is at the pinnacle of a company's innovation and drive to succeed and differentiate from its competitors. Corporate research also allows researchers to get to see the deployment and use of their research in everyday lives, which is usually very difficult to do in an academic environment such as a university.

One thing that I love about corporate research is how it blends both academia and industry, you kind of get the best of both worlds, in my opinion. However with the economy and downsizing of companies, how does corporate research continue to thrive and transform itself into a driving force for a company? Enter Nokia Research Center, where I'm a Member of Research Staff there (if you do not know by now) at the Beijing lab in China. In the video below by Henri Tirri by Nokia Conversations, head of Nokia Research Center, he explains about how Nokia Research Center is different than the other corporate research labs and how the future of Nokia depends on NRC.

I agree with Henri's views on research, and I'm glad to be working at Nokia Research Center to help bring research into reality and on Nokia mobile phones. The full interview with Henri is here from Nokia Conversations.

On Technorati: Nokia Research Center

First sunday of lent, a time to repent and reflect on Jesus' sacrifice of dying and rising. Help others who are less fortunate than us and be better Christians, and to be more humble and to fast.

First sunday of lent, a time to repent and reflect on Jesus' sacrifice of dying and rising. Help others who are less fortunate than us and be better Christians, and to be more humble and to fast.

Another busy day at work, got my hands on a Nokia XpressMusic 5800 aka Tube touch phone. It's geared towards the consumer than business

Nokia N86 8 Megapixel camera phone: http://ping.fm/JPRt3 Still waiting for N97 to come out in June!

Nokia ExpressMusic 5800 touch phone now in Beijing

Just read that the Nokia ExpressMusic 5800 touch phone (aka Tube), the competitor to Apple's iPhone is now available in Beijing today. Apparently, there is going to be a line up to get the phone, the phone is already available in Taiwan and Hong Kong.



I'm still waiting for the Nokia N97 that was announced at Nokia World 2008, that phone looks cool. The phone competition is really heating up in the touch display and UI world, but this gives great value and choice for customers. The Nokia ExpressMusic 5800 touch phone has been mainly marketed as a music phone that will cater to music lovers and young people with its hit feel and smaller size compared to the iPhone. So the ExpressMusic 5800 is in a different segment than the iPhone. The Nokia N97 however will be targetted for business users and seems will be made available in June of this year.

On Technorati: Nokia ExpressMusic 5800, Nokia N97

Nokia wins at Global Mobile Awards: Sports Tracker, CEO Environment Award, Best Mobile Handset - www.globalmobileawards.com/winners.shtml

Capturing your social network on Facebook

A friend of mine, Bernie Hogan, has created a Facebook application for capturing your social network of friends on Facebook as a UCINET data file so it can be imported into social network analysis tools. It is called My Online Social Network - Phase 1. Cool! There are also other Facebook applications that show your social networks, one is Nexus, which visualizes the social network as a graph. The Nexus app is cool, it generates the graph in real time and shows clusters or subgroups that represent your close friends together. The graph showed a cluster of my U of T friends, my University of Waterloo classmates from undergrad, my friends from TorCamp and my Nokia colleagues. You can also find a friend from the friend graph, change the layout to be radial instead of a spring graph.

Very cool, so try out these apps on Facebook!

On Technorati: Facebook social network, Facebook friend graph, Nexus

Facebook withdraws data changes, reverts back to previous terms of service: http://ping.fm/iF8XR

second day of meeting and still snowing in Beijing!

second day of meeting and it is still snowing!

Finished first day of meeting, another day of meetings tomorrow!

snowing in beijing todayand having a meeting offsite

Facebook is in talks with Nokia to bundle Facebook applications and connect Facebook through Nokia handsets http://ping.fm/cP6jp

Mobile World Congress next week in Barcelona: http://ping.fm/T9lH7

it sounds like beijing is under attack - by fireworks!

Ahh! Paper has been extended until February 9, and I've been working so hard today to get the paper done in less than 2 hours remaining!

Finishing up writing a paper, it's due in 14.5 hours, working like mad because it's due at midnight tonight!

Google Latitude is out http://ping.fm/YHBPE haven't tried it yet, but hope to after finishing up writing a paper

i'm back in Beijing now and back from holidays and vacation. Now it's back to work!

In Yalong Bay, Hainan Island enjoying the sun, warm weather, beach, and water!

Happy Chinese New Year! 牛年快乐！Wish all a prosperous year of the ox!

Just arrived in Guangzhou, it's 10 degrees outside!

at Tianjin now spending tonight, then leaving tomorrow for Guangzhou

visiting Tsinghua University today, Tsinghua is like the University of Waterloo of Canada

Need to finish up writing 2 papers before Chinese New Year holidays start next week, busy busy, as always but loving it!

Register for Mobile Monday Beijing for Mon. Jan. 19 @ http://ping.fm/E5b0W

Peter Kollock professor and sociologist known in the communities area just died http://ping.fm/j8auv I first heard of Peter when he gave a talk at Web-based Communities in 2006 in San Sebastian, Spain. I was impressed by his talk and his scholarly publications. He will be surely missed. Prayers and thoughts are with his family.

The PhD thesis has just been submitted to University of Toronto and I'm totally done, the PhD is done, complete, finished!

Back at work after a great weekend, reminder that Hypertext 2009 papers are due on Feb. 2, 2009!

Christmas tree has finally been taken down tonight, first Christmas in Beijing officially over!

visiting ming city walls relics park

First tech story of 2009: MacWorld

Well MacWorld is here, but Steve Jobs isn't. This doesn't mean that there aren't any new news from Apple. Quite the contrary, according to the MacWorld keynote, what was new from Apple was their 17-inch thinnest and lightest MacBook Pro which is the thinnest in the world (according to them). They also did some stuff to make the battery last longer. Another new thing that Apple announced was that iTunes is going DRM-free.

Even though if this year's MacWorld doesn't seem as glitzy and glamorous as previous years (like the iPhone and MacBook Air), this Apple gadget that didn't make it to MacWorld hopefully will make up for it.


Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Look ma, no keyboard!

Next tech story, CES in Las Vegas happening this week.

Back to the first day of work in 2009, it's Sunday, but it's mandatory day for work in China after 3 days of New Year holidays