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

Google Street Maps, cool but can be scary

I've just read about Google Street Maps (which again is not available for Canada) which allows you to see the actual buildings and even people on the streets at that level of detail. It didn't work for trying to find out where I live (as there was no Street Maps tab), but it did work for where I lived last year at this time when I was at PARC in Palo Alto. You go to Google Maps, find the address you're looking for, then start clicking on the blue outlined street and then you can see at street level the houses, buildings, streets, cars and even actually people! It's as if you were there. I was able to see the apartment where I rented last year and it was exactly how I remembered it.

Many people are touting this a really cool feature of Google Maps and online mapping in general. However, several are specifying how it can be scary if there is something there that you feel is inappropriate and don't want others to know that you went to a place where you shouldn't have gone. This is where apparently you can flag it as inappropriate by filling out a form.

On Technorati: Google maps, street maps

Paper accepted to Hypertext 2007 conference

I just got notified that my paper called "Structural Analysis of Virtual Community in Social Hypertext Networks" has been accepted at the Hypertext 2007 conference which is in Manchester, UK this year from September 10 to 12. I had a paper last year at Hypertext 2006 called "A Social Hypertext Model for Finding Community in Blogs" which was in Odense, Denmark.

On Technorati: ht07, Hypertext2007, social hypertext

Vote Aodhan Cullen from StatCounter as Europe's Young Entrepreneur 2007

I did not know this but apparently Aodan Cullen who is the man behind StatCounter which I use for tracking statistics on this blog and my research group's blog and my web site, is nominated for Europe's Young Entrepreneur 2007 award.

I love StatCounter and the way I can grab the statistics and download them to do statistical analysis and see if my blog and web site is gaining any traction. These factors could be possible indicators of a sense of community, something I looked at in my blog research at a presentation I did at the CASCON workshop on The Business of Blogging.

Anyways, vote for Aodan Cullen!

On Technorati: StatCounter, Aodan Cullen

Malcolm Gladwell and Jim Balsilie to get honourary doctorate degrees at UW

It seems like Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, along with Jim Balsilie who is Co-CEO of RIM, are getting honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Waterloo at the Spring convocation in June.

On Technorati: Jim Balsilie, Malcolm Gladwell, UW

Facebook on your Rogers mobile phone!

Yes, besides having YouTube on your Rogers mobile phone through Rogers Vision, now you can get Facebook as well. Of course with Rogers Vision, you need to have a phone that supports that. This is what Rogers says about accessing Facebook on your mobile phone:

Everything you love about Facebook is now on your wireless phone. Poke, get messages, find family and friends — it's all here!

To access Facebook, launch your mobile Internet browser and click on Facebook or text FB to 4751 and we'll send you the link!

Facebook costs 5¢ per KB or as per your mobile Internet plan. Can't get enough of Facebook? Get a mobile Internet plan and browse for less. Plans start as low as $5/month for 5MB or $10/month for 10MB.

I suppose if you really need to be in contact and have to use Facebook, then this is a good service. Otherwise, you could probably just wait to get back to a computer with Internet access to use Facebook. I mean do you have to really have Facebook on your mobile. I guess if you're paying an mobile Internet plan, then it's ok.

It looks like Facebook is becoming the social network OS, and with the ability to create Facebook applications and opening up the API to developers, it does look like Facebook has the capability to become the social OS of the internet on the web. Now, since Facebook is getting into the OS and applications arena, it's going to compete with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Facebook resisted the buyout from Yahoo, so it looks like Mark Zuckerberg has something up his sleeve with his creation.

On Technorati: Facebook, Rogers, YouTube

Tom Rodden talk at U of T

Tom Rodden from the University of Nottingham in the UK who spoke on Interacting in Ubiquitous Computing Environments at the Pervasive conference a couple of weeks ago in Toronto, is speaking at U of T today. So, I'm in this talk right now which is on Ubiquitous Computing in the Real World. There are many synonyms for ubiquitous computing, such as pervasive computing, smart artefacts, smart spaces. A lot of the vision of ubiquitous computing is technical, but according to Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, "what matters is not technology, but its relationship to us" (Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown from PARC). However, since ubiquitous computing involves having technology embedded in the environment, is the future of ubiquitous computing mean that every device has a user manual? How many of you read the user manual for every new gadget that you get (well, I usually don't, cause I just want to use it, and I feel stupid if I have to look at a manual). He gave an example of a picture of a faucet in a US airport where there is an instruction manual that explains how to operate the faucet. You go near the faucet to turn it on, and you walk away to turn it off. If you wear black clothing, then the faucet does not work.

Tom is the director of the Equator project. One of the research works he is explaining is an online game that incorporates location and mixed reality called Can You See Me Now. In this game, players use a PDA and run to catch other players in different cities, and online players can see the interactions happening online. Visualizations can be used to show the coverage of Wi-Fi and GPS, which exposes the gaps within the technology to seamlessly integrate with the real world. What needs to happen is to reveal and make the infrastructure a resource for interaction. One of the games they created involves exploiting the wireless access points as resources within the game.

In order to have ubiquitous computing in the real world, Tom says that we need to expose the invisible. For developers, what gets in the way of creating location-based applications is the infrastructure. Content triggering does not depend on just the location but also the infrastructure. Another neat application they created is Savannah, in which they used a playing field to make a virtual savannah. Children used PDAs to look at a savannah based on where they are positioned in the playing field. But the problem was that the children started to stop and form a circle. The hidden features of the technology need to be revealed to designers, researchers and individuals.

One thing that really struck me and is really true is that the more intelligent the technologies, the more they will frustrate. If we look at the original definition of ubiquitous computing, it is not the technology that is important, but its social effect on people. I think this is where social context needs to be exploited.

I asked a question to Tom after he finished his talk about the option for opting out of the ubiquitous computing system. This comes from what Adam Greenfield talked about in his keynote to the Pervasive conference, about having users be able to abort or revert back away from the system because sometimes the user may not want to conform or follow the ubiquitous computing system. Tom's answer was yes for sure, there needs to be a way for the user to opt out. He even elaborated further that there should be a method for a user to counter-act what the ubiquitous computing system does. This then reminded me of hacking, cause isn't that what hacking is, to counter-act the system and break in?

Nonetheless, it was a great talk and inspiring, a great perspective on ubiquitous computing from someone who is not just building the ubiquitous computing systems because they're cool, but for a purpose and demonstrating that in real life.

On Technorati: pervasive computing, Tom Rodden, ubiquitous computing

Palm Foleo: what?

Just read today from Engadget that Jeff Hawkins unveilled a new product from Palm, and no it's not a Palm handheld or a Treo. It's something totally different, it's what he calls the Palm Foleo mobile companion. You can see it below.



The Foleo is meant to complement your Treo smartphone, in the sense that if you want to read your e-mail on a large screen, you can just press a button on the Foleo and it will transfer the e-mail via Bluetooth to the Foleo and you can read it there. So, when I read about this, I thought so what? What's so cool about this? I mean we already have 10-inch laptops which can do more, we have Ultra Mobile PCs that Microsoft unveilled whose size and form factor lies between a handheld and a laptop. What does Palm add that makes it so exciting, and why is Palm adding it to its lineup, rather than focussing on making a better Palm handheld, something like one similar to iPhone that can do video, MP3, cell phone, handheld?

I really am not quite sure what Palm is thinking, I mean most executives have a laptop and a smartphone or RIM or Treo, so why would they need a Palm Foleo? The only thing I can think of is that to transfer the data from the Treo onto the Foleo, so you can see it in a bigger screen. You could probably do that with a regular laptop although it probably wouldn't be that easy or seamless. For e-mail, you would probably have to connect to the Internet on the laptop and then download the e-mail but there may not be Internet or wireless on the train for example. Then, that might be a reason to use the Foleo. But other than transferring documents over to see at a bigger screen, I don't see any other benefit.

On Technorati: Palm Foleo, Palm, mobile companion, Jeff Hawkins

mesh: Canada's web 2.0 conference starts tomorrow!

Tomorrow and May 31 is mesh, Canada's Web 2.0 conference. There seems to be a lot of speakers and workshops lined up including David Crow from TorCamp, Amber MacArthur, and Mark Evans. The schedule for mesh is here. Unfortunately, mesh is already sold out, the student tickets were really quickly sold out, they were going for like I think $25, while the actual conference fee is like $200.

I hope there will be some podcasts from mesh, so I can listen to the speakers and sessions that I missed.

On Technorati: mesh, web 2.0

Facebook opens site to developers

Facebook has now opened its site to developers. What does this mean? Developers can add Facebook functionality and tools to their own web site, essentially tapping into the Facebook social network and community. I think what this will lead to is 'social mashup', adding social networking features to web sites and make web sites more 'social'. Web sites don't have to create their own social networking tools and features, when they can use Facebook. It will be interesting, perhaps there might be a logo on a web site that says "Facebook certified", or "Facebook approved", or "Facebook enabled", or "Facebook compatible". I believe this is the start of creating an open social networking platform for the web, and in essence, "socializing" the web. Perhaps, using Facebook on a web site, is a way of creating and maintaining a sense of community part of my PhD research.

On Technorati: Facebook, social web, social mashup

Google 2.0

This article from Time Magazine shows that Google today has unveiled an upgrade to their popular search, called "universal search". The idea here is that when you're searching, instead of searching for video using videos.google.com or images like images.google.com, you just enter the search in the box, and all relevant search results will be categorized accordingly. If it's an image, the image will be shown, and if it's a video, then a video will be shown.

I just tried going to Google now, but it's still the same Google, I guess they haven't initiated the change quite yet on the google.ca site. Google is still the king of search having a commanding 64% of the search market, Yahoo with 22% and MSN with 9%. However, this begs the question how far can Google have the lead? Remember how Palm used to have a commanding lead over Microsoft? Now, Palm is not the disputed leader in PDAs. Same for Windows NT or for Internet Explorer, Microsoft seems to always catch up. However, Microsoft is having a tough time competing in the search space, so it'll be interesting to see how Microsoft will try to combat Google. Yahoo is going real strong into social networking, and I wonder when Google will start to realize that social networking will power searching, that sometimes you want to find things through your social network. But it seems so far, the Google search is king, even if you can't find your search result within the first 5 results.

On Technorati: Google, search

Doctoral colloquium slides, podcast and paper from Pervasive

I've just uploaded my slides, talk and paper from the doctoral colloquium talk from the Pervasive conference last week. Thanks to all for the great feedback. Pervasive was a great conference, and I really enjoyed meeting new and familiar faces, and explaining about my research. It was also great to be a student volunteer and helping out in whatever way I could. Next year's Pervasive is going to be Australia!

If you haven't already, check out my Pervasive photos on Flickr, or all the Pervasive photos on Flickr. At the same time, I've also updated my publications list and my web site so go and check that out.

And for those in Canada, have a happy and safe Victoria Day! For those in the US, have a happy and safe Memorial Day!

On Technorati: Pervasive07, Doctoral Colloquium

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Context-Aware Computing

The last tutorial of the conference is Context-aware computing presented by Anind Dey of Carnegie Mellon University. Context is all the stuff that is important for understanding a user's goals and motivation. What is the important part for context is reminders, when and where to deliver context? It is easy to grab context, but more difficult in my opinion, to infer context. Context is a very difficult and slippery word to define because it means different things to different people. Inferring an activity or task as context is difficult. Finding social norms as context is, according to Anind, is slippery. My PhD work is looking at community as a metaphor for finding social context. I believe that there is some way that we can infer social context automatically from the links within the social hypertext. As a pervasive computing community, we need to look at real problems instead of recycling over the same applications like location guides. Anind says that grad students should not do work in context infrastructures because it is extremely difficult to publish your work.

One of the challenges of context is how to leverage real human context and realize that you're not really getting at human intention. Anind showed some videos of examples of context, one video was about an automatic door made in Japan that conforms to the type of body you have and will open that much.

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Machine Learning for Ubicomp

Bernt is presenting the tutorial on machine learning for ubicomp. Machine learning comes from artificial intelligence and I think this is needed to make ubicomp systems intelligent and more smart. How to learn to perform a task from experience? Learning has a lot to do with optimization. We can use Bayes decision theory to classify some class based on some previous class. We can also use naive Bayes classifier, we need the probability given a class, and the probability of the class. There are graphical models of Bayesian networks such as Hidden Markov Models (directed, dynamic Bayesian network).

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Evaluation of Real Deployments in Ubicomp

Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech is giving the tutorial on Evaluation of Real Deployments in Ubicomp. He is talking about what are the issues you need to think about when deploying a ubicomp system. Very often papers get rejected because there is no evaluation of the system in a deployed environment. What is important is how to do research with human subjects, how there needs to be an ethics approval, compensation, getting the right demographic and retaining participants. Sometimes it is OK to be the end-user and the designer. We also have to ask users what they think through surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. You need to spend a lot of time to prepare the survey or interview, but in the end the analysis is much easier, so basically you should not rush writing a survey or questionnaire.

In designing a study, you need to be a devil's advocate and ask yourself what things could affect the interpretation of the study and controlling variables. What kind of study is it, within subjects design or between subjects design. How do we get information from a person's every day life? We don't want to follow them every hour, every minute, by instrumenting a camera or recording device. Instead, the better way is to use experience sampling, where you interrupt the person to gather relevant information.

With experience sampling, you can use a diary where you ask the participant to record what they were doing, where they were doing it, why they were doing it. However, there are social-legal implications of recording this. Basically, in the end, we need to balance tracking participants with asking participants questions so that can be able to match between them.

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Ethnography

This next tutorial is on Ethnography: Thick and Thin being presented by Ken Anderson of Intel and Paul Dourish of UC Irvine. According to Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge, ethnography is "the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection". Ethnography has started since the 1910s, even further than computer science, with anthropology. People think of ethnography as a tool for studying long-term studies and participatory observation. Ethnography is about not just about capturing the experience, but taking that experience, and determining how this experience can relate to the real world. So, ethnography is not about replicating the experience, making you become part of the culture that you're studying. Tom's talk talked about just because you can do this, doesn't mean that you should, whereas with this talk, just because you should doesn't mean that you can which is the opposite.

Ethnographic data is interpreted, and I believe that culture is important in understanding, deploying and evaluating ubiquitous computing systems. When you deploy a ubicomp system, how is this going to affect the culture? If it starts breaking culture, people won't use it. The systems need to be embedded within the culture, without disrupting it. Ethnography is about writing about people, after the things happen not during. The ethnographer has two roles: one as author and one as participant. So what does ethnography have to do within ubiquitous computing, we can think of technology as a site of social and cultural production. What are the good questions to ask of an ethnography? What are the empirical claims? What theoretical claims are made? How does this contribute to the corpus? What was the context of production?

Pervasive conference, tutorial on Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing

Right now is the tutorial on interaction and ubiquitous computing presented by Tom Rodden of the University of Nottingham. Tom is talking about how do we achieve Mark Weiser's vision? Technology is vanishing into smaller and smaller devices which we don't now even think about, like USB keys and iPods. What are the key issues of ubiquitous computing? First is natural interfaces and an example of this is Stanford's iRoom which is a smart room environment where there are wall-mounted displays and controllers are used to transfer files to the display and to interact with the tabletop display. The real challenge for HCI is how may these things be used in real life. The second part is context, how to use context to provide awareness? We need to ask these questions when we measure and use context: who, what, where, when and why. The challenges of context-awareness to add more context or to fuse data to infer context.
Digital information is being augmented in the physical world, actions on physical objects have meaning in the virtual world and vice versa.

One of the issues that start to emerge is that will each object have a little instruction manual? One of the general theme of this tutorial is that we design interaction in ubicomp, but will they actually be used in everyday life. Tom showed some really neat videos, one with a weight table and key table, that based on weight, the image moves faster or the picture tilts more. Attendees in the audience laughed, because would you have that kind of device in your home? Nonetheless, a great talk, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Pervasive conference, Day 4

Today is Day 4 and the last day of the Pervasive conference, with the tutorial sessions. I'm once again doing my duty as a student volunteer, so if you see me in between breaks, come and say hi! I'm really enjoying this conference, it was a great chance to meet lots of new people, researchers that I've always wanted to meet. Dinner last night at the CN Tower was great, I really liked the appetizers that were given to us while we were in the cafe. I've been to the CN Tower many times, but never to the cafe, and only maybe twice at the 360 revolving restaurant. I took some pictures, although others at the conference on Flickr will have done a much better job than my Palm Zire 71, so you can check them there.

There will be a student volunteer party tonight for all the hard work we the student volunteers did!

Pervasive conference, Day 2

Today is Day 2 of the Pervasive conference. Adam Greenfield is the keynote speaker and will talk about Everyware. Khai is the conference chair and he is now introducing the Pervasive conference and talking about why Toronto is a perfect fit for hosting Pervasive 2007.



This is the first time Pervasive has ventured outside Europe, there are over 300 attendees from Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. Khai is talking about the structure and composition of the Pervasive conference. There will be posters and demo presentations today, along with papers. Khai is thanking all the various people that made the conference possible, including the student volunteers yeah! And now, Khai is thanking the industry sponsors. All photos from the conference will be tagged in Flickr with the tag "pervasive07".

This year, there were 142 papers of which 132 were valid. There were 403 submitting authors from 32 countries out of which 21 papers were accepted for a 16% acceptance rate. For the paper review process, all papers were given to the two PC members, where there were a total of 4 reviews per paper. There were 28 PC members, 178 external reviewers, and 532 completed reviews. Khai is introducing Adam Greenfield and how his work is considered as "soulful" by Bruce Sterling, the keynote speaker at Ubicomp 2006.



Adam had a 200 slide Flickr presentation at the CHI conference. Adam's book on Everyware is the first book on ubiquitous computing that the lay person can understand, trying to make sense of Mark Weiser's vision. Some characteristics of Weiser's ubicomp are embedded, wireless, imperceptible, multiple, post-GUI. Adam says that Weiser's vision is considered still radical, and a lot of the things PARC had to create from scratch, which we take for granted right now like wireless 802.11. We are now beginning to see an emergent "internet of things", a class of systems that tends to colonize everyday life. This is an aggressive claim over a large domain. Adam says that "information processing" is "dissolving in behavior". One example of this that Adam gives is about the Octopus card in Hong Kong used for transit which is a wireless reader card where you can wave it towards the reader without having to take out the card (women in Hong Kong leave that card into their handbags). So what happens is that the visible (eg. the card) becomes invisible. I can say that I really love the Octopus card, Toronto transit should adopt that (so I don't have to use tokens for the TTC and GO Train ticket for the GO Train, and I can use the same card to take the ferry, the Oakville bus, York region transit, or any other transit system in the GTA).

So is this science fiction? Adam believes that we are beginning to see some of these visions happening but in a different fashion. The opt out feature is probably something that ubicomp researchers don't really think about when designing ubicomp systems, so to me that is a new thing. I met Adam before in San Francisco when I was doing my internship at PARC and had the privilege of doing a small interview with him which you can see from this post on my blog.

I just uploaded my photos that I took from my Palm Zire 71 up on the Flickr site, tagged with pervasive07.

On Technorati: pervasive07

Yahoo Research hires Duncan Watts

Just read about this article that Yahoo Research just hired Duncan Watts, who is the professor behind the science of six degrees and the small-world model. Duncan Watts is going to lead Yahoo's research in human social dynamics, including social networks and collaborative problem solving. This shows that Yahoo is really serious into social networking, having bought out del.icio.us, Flickr and Upcoming, but specifically using sociology to drive new web interfaces and interaction. This is what the web is going to, and clearly Yahoo is in that direction. In my opinion, this begs the question what Google is doing, and why they are not into the social networking arena (besides having Orkut and Blogger).

On Technorati: Yahoo, Duncan Watts

At Pervasive today, workshops and doctoral colloquium

The Pervasive conference starts today with the workshops and doctoral colloquium. As a student volunteer, I helped with stuffing conference bags with proceedings and adjunct proceedings, and giving them to attendees. I'm right now in the student volunteer room now reviewing my slides for the doctoral colloquium and hanging out with other student volunteers. I also took pictures from the conference so far which will be uploaded later.

On Technorati: Pervasive07

Pervasive conference starts tomorrow!

I'm going to give a doctoral colloquium talk tomorrow at Pervasive called "Searching for Sense of Virtual Community in Social Hypertext". Looking forward to some great discussion. I'll also be working as a student volunteer as well. If you're at Pervasive, come and see me, I'll be working at the registration desk tomorrow from 8 to 10 am. Then, my talk is at 2:30 pm.

Got to finish those doctoral colloquium slides!

On Technorati: Pervasive2007, doctoral colloquium