DGPis40 Bill Buxton talk

Here is a talk that I attended from the DGPis40 reunion conference for U of T's Dynamic Graphics Project, which turns 40 years old!

40 Years: Almost Enough Time to Make a Difference
Bill Buxton
Microsoft Research
www.billbuxton.com

Bill started his stints at DGP as a student but he was not a Computer Science student but a musician. Today, he probably would not be admitted as a Computer Science student. His talk today is based on whether Could DGP Happen Today? He is reviewing 40 years of DGP. A lot of the technologies of icons, Palm’s Graffiti, teletype, all came from beginnings of DGP. Also, Bill is mentioning that another icon is the Academy Award, which DGP has probably amassed more based on its alumni and the lab compared to other schools, which is strange he says because since DGP is in the Computer Science department.

What is the real accomplishment of the past 40 years? Bill worked on a computer that is now in the National Research Council (NRC) archives. NRC made a mouse in 1968, probably the second mouse based exactly from Doug Englebart who invented the mouse before PARC came up with the mouse in the 1970s. Bill worked as a musician and an artist, and started contacting Leslie Mezei at U of T (who is the founder of DGP). While working at DGP, he felt worthy of respect and became colleagues with others. If you wanted to do something, you could make it happen. Compared to other environments, you are dirt and you have to show respect to others until you have paid your dues. At DGP, people are challenged and are questioned and are proven to be wrong, because this means you will have learned something. DGP has published many papers at SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH more than any other academic and research lab during the first 20 years of its incarnation.

DGP was a self-organizing group because it was based on communal responsibility, he gives the analogy of filling concrete. Once students graduated, others came to fill the hole, so there was some kind of social contract. There are three generations of people in the CHI Academy, the only university to do so (Bill Buxton, Brad Myers, and Ron Baecker considered the grandfather in this lab). Bill is talking about The Long Tail a book by Chris Anderson, in the old economy you only had the beginning or head of the tail, whereas now in technology the most interesting opportunities happen in the long tail. A lot of work is done in the beginning of the tail in innovation and doing research. It takes 20 years from innovation to commercialization which is the exact number of years before a patent gets expired.

According to Bill, as academics, we are on a slippery slope and the slope is tilting. According to the New York Times in December 2007, corporate research labs are going away. There were few PhD students working in industry research than in 1980. There is no and will not be a Silicon Valley in Toronto or Canada. According to Bill, the DGP lab is absurd compared to other academic and corporate research labs. DGP represents integrity and values, productivity and influence around the world. Computers and technologies need to have as much engagement and review and criticism similarly to art and literary review. We need to think about culture and society within technology.

One question that was asked is how to bring the culture of DGP to corporate research labs like Microsoft Research that focuses on patents before publications. Bill answered that 80% of the work is on cultural change, the other 20% is the actual work. In his opinion, Microsoft Research has more academic freedom than any other university, which was an interesting comment in my opinion seeing that you would think Microsoft would absolutely tie all research back towards Microsoft products. Which is not to say that Microsoft doesn't do that of course, Microsoft Live Labs is exactly doing that, being a industrial lab to foster innovation within its MS products. What I got out of the talk is that there needs to be open Research, research with a capital R, not just some wishy washy research that is just for the benefit of the company and not the rest of the world. That is how you make a difference.

Photos from Mesh08 conference up

I've put my photos from Mesh08 up on Flickr. Check them out! Thanks to the organizers for a great Mesh conference. You guys did an amazing job.

Mesh08 - Day 2 - Second installment of 15 minutes of fame

Now is the second installment of 15 minutes of fame.



The first presenter is Ali Asaria of Well.ca which is an online drug and pharmacy store. Ali is saying that the key to their success is not the technology, but everything is focussed on the customer. Why are people buying online? People are saving time and it is the convenience of buying products.



The second presenter is Enomaly by Reuven Cohen which deal with enterprise cloud computing and scalable infrastructure. They are building scalable open source systems for companies. Mark Evans is asking Reuven where is cloud computing going? Reuven says that cloud computing is the next evolution of software. He is envisioning cloud computing as the base platform for building the next Google or like the Apache of cloud computing.



The last presenter is OverlayTV by Robert Lane. The business was focussed around user generated content. There are not a lot of tools for the average amateur user. Users can create overlays on video and post to Facebook, blog and any other social networking site. This is what video is heading towards, to annotate and to overlay on the video. The vision is to give 3 minutes to users to overlay on a video. Mark Evans is asking what is going to make Overlay.tv the YouTube of video. Robert is mentioning that there are 3 components, relevance, control (the users should be in control in creating the overlay).

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008

Mesh08 - Day 1 - Private vs. Public

I'm now in the last session of the first day of Mesh08 which is on Private vs. Public. There is the question of regulation in a public space. There is an issue now where people who are not who they are, post fake pages, there was this case with a Toronto local councillor who was bad mouthing others, according to Ken Anderson, assistant privacy commissioner for Ontario. You have to understand the ramifications of posting content online, according to philosophy professor and author Mark Kingwell. Rachel Sklar, the moderator, is addressing about how people use handles to be anonymous and not reveal their identity. An audience members is addressing how whether we can use a Creative Commons notion for acknowledging privacy and asking if it would be viable, because it is the case now that we have to be aware of what is being said in surroundings and how content about yourself can easily be posted online. Ken addressed how surveillance is something you can't control and he is talking about sousveillance where people monitor their surroundings like Professor Steven Mann's work on wearable computers.

Another question being addressed by an audience participant is how to guarantee that the information being captured using cameras is used for just for the purposes intended for, but what guarantees that it is not being used elsewhere. Another question is that whether we should get rid of privacy because everything is being made public and it is difficult to regulate and control privacy. According to Ken Anderson, not all websites are the same.

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008

Mesh08 - Day 1 - Panel: The New Front Page

I left the online video workshop to come to the panel on the new front page. Daniel Burka from Digg and Pownce is talking about how the web is not replacing traditional media, and how traditional media like CNN is not linking or using Web 2.0 tools like Digg. I'm beginning to see how CTV and CBC.ca is now using Facebook and other social media technologies and bookmarking services for sharing content with others. Daniel is mentioning that Digg is having some content partnerships with media companies.

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008

Mesh08 - Day 1 - Online video workshop

I've finally decided to go to the online video workshop. The workshop is talking about the creation of content, the presentation of content and monetization. The video content needs to be viewer centric and tailored to your audience. You also need to engage your audience with blog comments, etc. You need to distribute your video on a regular, predictable schedule and decide your distribution (iTunes, YouTube, blip.tv, Vimeo, Ustream.tv). For networking, you need to be part of the community through face-to-face meetups as well as social networking like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online tools. As a matter of fact, I'm getting more people following me on Twitter from the mesh conference than ever before!

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008, online video, Amber MacArthur

Mesh08 - Day 1 - 15 minutes of fame

Right now is the 15 minutes of Fame where start up companies talk about their product in 15 minutes. Today, there are three companies which is being moderated by Mark Evans.



The first company is aideRSS which is a service which provides an extra metalayer to target to users to read what matters to them, since there is a pool of information that is hard to digest. The web is now an RSS pool. This seems very relevant in Web 2.0, so I may check this out.

The second company is GigPark by Noah Godfrey and Pema Hegan, which is using friends to make recommendations to others for services. I'm a member of GigPark and seems really cool, something simple, but useful.



The third company is carbonetworks by Daniel Crawford. They create a software platform for helping companies create carbon emissions strategy.

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008

Mesh 08 - Day 1 - Michael Geist keynote

I'm right now in the keynote with Michael Geist who is University of Ottawa law professor. He is talking about technology law and copyright with digital media. There is lots of mashups of video that take different streams and making their own video. We talk about Facebook advocacy, YouTube advocacy, and Google advocacy (example using Ushahidi.com which uses Google Maps and identify places where violence has occurred).

There are examples where people have used Twitter where protesters in Germany updated other protesters, Facebook was used to bring to attention an issue by the public from which a law was made in the Senate in Canada. Offline protests have been organized from Facebook meetings. There is also a protest about net neutrality which has been publicized on a website online where people are gathering on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and Canada to not regulate the internet. According to Michael, there are people from the blogging community that are speaking against (cyberdissidents) issues and are jailed, and they use mainstream media to bring to the attention of those people that are jailed (like Reporters Without Borders). Michael gave an example of a video mashup which uses short clips from Disney movies to illustrate copyright law.



Michael has also launched a site called iOptOut to exempt yourself from a do-not-call registry. There is now the instance of Government 2.0. For example, in Britain, people can upload videos of what to ask the prime minister and invite the public into a kind of virtual townhall meeting.

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008, digital advocacy

Photos for MeshU on Flickr

Here is my photostream for all photos that I took today at MeshU on Flickr. I can't wait for tomorrow's Mesh conference for two inspiring days that only cost me $30 because I'm a student! Ah, the joys of being a student, but soon to be no more after I graduate!

On Technorati: MeshU08, MeshU 2008

MeshU tomorrow!

I can't wait for MeshU which happens tomorrow, it's a one day workshop on technical stuff for Web 2.0. I'm trying to recover back and get back into work mode after the Victoria Day long weekend here in Canada. Then the Mesh conference happens on Wednesday and Thursday. This should be great, there are lots of great talks and speakers, and I got both tickets for $30 each as a student!

On Technorati: MeshU08,Mesh Conference 08

Video Gaming Research Symposium at U of T

Today is the Video Gaming Research Symposium at the University of Toronto that deals with video gaming research and issues dealing with distributed systems support, middleware, HCI and animation, artificial intelligence, video gaming design and course education, social research, psychology and spatial cognition, cognitive gaming research, individual and group behaviour, and legal ramifications. Attendees from academia and industry came together to discuss and listen to leading video gaming research.

Some interesting research talks that struck me were the following. The first talk was on character motion content models for motion editing and interactive visualization, by Patrick Coleman. In video game design, character animation is being done to mimic human movements to make it more realistic. In this talk, the purpose was to use content to solve video gaming problems which involves using poses for motion editing. This led right into creating models for learning motions in order to generate new motions based on training data called Data-driven character animation, presented by Professor Aaron Hertzmann of DGP. The idea is to "learn" from movement of pose models and how specifying certain points on poses allows for more natural movement rather than having to specify all points on the body to move. Another aspect is non-photorealistic animation which involves whether we can make games with visual styles of traditional artistic media.

Another talk dealt with AI research application to video games. One talk was on Practical AI modules for development of non-player characters in video games by Stavros Vassos. Current video game developers create their own "thinking" function for what a non-player character should do which is generally a finite state automaton (FSA) and is generally coded in C++. The "thinking" function can also be implemented as an AI agent which abstracts this using cognitive robotics. In this way, the AI agent is plugged into the video gaming engine. There is few AI research that is being used in video games.

What does it take to design a video game and how can video game companies hire the best students? This is where Steve Engels talked about designing a video gaming course at the undergrad level and how to address the drop in enrollment of CS students as well as few females in CS. Video gaming may be one example that can entice students to consider CS as a discipline to study and build a CS career. The challenge is that video game design is a collaborative discipline that deal with many CS and non-CS fields: AI, graphics, systems, psychology, sociology, and HCI. According to Steve: "video game design is the lure, but breeding CS is the goal".

Another aspect of video games is its social impact. Tracy Kennedy, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology from U of T talked about "What can social research tell us about the non-traditional gamer". In here, she discussed about her cultural studeis of virtual worlds. She has many virtual avatars in virtual worlds and she is studying role playing in massively multiplayer online games using ethnographic research, content analysis, surveys, interviews and network analysis. One of the things is that gaming helps to have the family spend time with each other, and there are moms who are active gamers. She studied women gamers in the XBox Live forum called GamerChiX and using content and network analysis, she discovered that there was a lot of activity and support, and there was one instance where one post received many comments. It was evident that community was important to female gamers. Another thing that I suggested as a question to her was looking into social interactions through chat logs in online games such as the work done by Nic Ducheneaut from PARC.

Ian Spence from the Department of Psychology provided the next talk on spatial cognition and video games. His lab did an experiment with non-gamers and gamers where they were given cognitive tasks to see if gamers perform better at spatial cognition than non-gamers. The non-gamers were given video game training and then they did a user field of view experiment and mental rotation test. They found that non-gamers did in fact improve their user field of view and mental rotation after playing video games, which would sound intuitive. They are also looking into measuring electrical activity in the brain in response to video games and looking at how seniors could improve their user field of view by playing video games in order for them to reduce accidents. As well, they have also begun work to designing mobile phone games using first person shooter.

Following along this cognitive research path, Kevin Tonon and Ron Baecker from KMDI at the University of Toronto talked about Internet-based cognitive enrichment communities for research on mental aging interventions. Ron talked about how we could slow down cognitive decline using video games in order to improve mental fitness (like Scrabulous which a lot of people play, myself included on Facebook) and find interventions to make cognitive fitness become more fun and enjoyable. They are building a web site to support cognitive and social stimulation games online to allow for research randomization and data collection. Kevin then talked about the technical details for creating this web site and hosted games involving game authoring where anyone can design or author a game using a hybrid approach of domain specific language and GUI. He gave an example of designing a chess board application.

Jonathan Freedman then looked at the obvious question do violent video games cause aggression and violent crime. There is a study from Anderson and Dill that is cited the most in the literature, but has no convincing evidence that violent video games do cause aggression. For most video gamers, they know that what they are doing is not real. However, for those that have psychological, family or social problems, then this is where violent video games may have an effect.

The final presentation dealt with virtual property and real law by Susan Abramovitch. With virtual worlds like Second Life, people are creating and collecting virtual property and creating a virtual market for the consumption, production and exchange of virtual goods just like in the real physical economic market. Virtual property is similar to physical property. Virtual currency in fact can be exchanged for physical currency. For example, Linden dollars which is the virtual currency in Second Life, can be exchanged for US dollars. There have been cases where real world laws were applicable to virtual intellectual property. For example, a company was able to sue a Second Life user for selling their virtual property that was not theirs, and vice versa, where a user successfully sued a company for not protecting his virtual rights when his virtual property was stolen by another user. She concluded that legal aspects of commerce in virtual property will become more important if it has not already.

All in all, it was a good showing of different aspects of video gaming research from various disciplines, and made me open up my eyes to other areas of research in video games. I am not an avid video gamer, but I know I am getting really addicted to the Nintendo Wii because I love the engagement of your body into the games, rather than just sitting at your computer and playing. That is why I am more into the Wii than any other gaming console.

On Technorati: video gaming research, UofT

Mesh conference 2008 schedule is up

I just got an e-mail saying that the Mesh conference 2008 schedule is up as well as the MeshU schedule. I'm pretty excited as I'm attending both events and I got both for only $30 each through student ticket pricing! For the past 2 years, I've wanted to go to Mesh but I was always late in getting the student tickets and they are limited and go by so fast! So, I wasn't going to be disappointed this time. Looks like there will be a great roundup of speakers, I'm impressed as to how the organizers were able to get these speakers, but kudos go out to them, as it's not easy to get the right set of speakers. I know since I've organized many workshops and getting speakers is not easy.

With that being said, Mesh is about less than a month from now! And speaking about Mesh, do you know that Microsoft has Live Mesh? It's their answer to Web 2.0, many people were saying how Microsoft is not onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Again, Microsoft may be late to the game, but they have a pretty neat platform called Live Mesh that is designed to synchronize not just people you know, but devices and content. It was the brainchild of Chief Software Architect and CTO, Ray Ozzie and has been 2 years in the making. It just got released last week. More info on Live Mesh on here. To me it sounds like service-oriented architecture like Jini or web services but has a Web 2.0ish flavour to it, plus a open extended programmable framework that allows programmers to write and get data from the mesh using any programming language. What do people think about Live Mesh?

On Technorati: Mesh2008, LiveMesh

Allan Borodin talk - Fields CRM-PIMS prize

Today, I'm in the Fields CRM-PIMS prize talk by Allan Borodin, a professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. The talk is on Understanding Simple Algorithms: Toward a More Systematic Study of Algorithms. He is looking into an attempt of a more systematic study of algorithms. Typical algorithms courses deal with big three (simple, greedy, dynamic programming), search algorithm, combinatorial algorithms, but they don't deal with the actual topic of algorithms. So the question is then who cares about algorithms because you can't really give a formal definition. A second thing is that it has been done before. Algorithms have been used in social networks as that done by Jon Kleinberg. Many greedy algorithms deal with maximizing a submodular function. Sometimes there is no maximum cost function in the study of greedy algorithms. In algorithm, you can't capture everything but you want to capture the majority of all cases.

The algorithm should be easy to explain to others and be able to be formalized. Allan explained about his framework for priority algorithms that help to explain greedy algorithms. An example that he gave is to schedule athletes to do biathlon where they do swimming first in one lane and then biking. One example that he is describing is interval scheduling.

Babbage's Difference Engine on show

This is quite exciting. See the news below, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine #2 is being displayed and shown working at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. I was at the Computer History Museum in 2006 when I did my internship at PARC, let me say, if you're a computer geek, you'll LOVE this place! You can see my blog post I did when I was there.

Here's the info on the Difference Engine which I got as a subscriber to news from The Computer History Museum:

Join the Computer History Museum in launching its exciting exhibit: Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2, exhibited for the first time in North America. Bring your family and friends to see and hear the Engine in action!

This five-ton Engine is one of only two Charles Babbage’s computing engines ever built, consisting of 8,000 parts of bronze, cast iron and steel and measuring 11 feet long and 7 feet high. It was designed to calculate and print mathematical tables. Come to see the docents “crank” the Engine and watch it mechanically calculate - an arresting spectacle of automatic computing.

The Exhibit Launch and Open House, a Victorian-themed event, promises a stunning display of Babbage’s elegant design and inspired engineering. His designs for vast mechanical calculating engines rank as one of the startling achievements of the 19th century.

The Babbage Exhibit is made possible through the generosity of the following donors: Nathan Myhrvold, Andreas Bechtolsheim, Bell Family Trust, Donna Dubinsky & Len Shustek, Judy Estrin, Fry’s Electronics - Kathryn Kolder, Dorrit & F. Grant Saviers, Marva & John Warnock, and with special thanks to Science Museum, London.

Come to see what no Victorian ever saw.


Where
Computer History Museum
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
Directions

When

Saturday, May 10, 2008
12 noon - 5:00 p.m.

Activities:
- Engine demonstrations throughout the afternoon
- 1:00 & 3:30 p.m. - Screening of Ada Lovelace Film, “To Dream Tomorrow” (53min)
- Popcorn and snowcones available all afternoon

Sign Up

To sign up for your coupon for free popcorn, please click here.

To attend the Member's Only Breakfast at 10:30 a.m., please click here.
Last day to sign up is May 8.

So if you're in the area, have a look and perhaps take some photos to share back to the rest of us!

On Technorati: Computer History Museum, Charles Babbage,difference engine

Passed the PhD departmental exam!

I just had my PhD departmental exam today and I passed! So, now it's just changes to the thesis and to schedule a PhD defense and then I'll be finished with my PhD. So, 5 years of blood and sweat actually were worth it! It won't be long till everyone is going to have call me Dr. Chin hehe (of course not a medical doctor)!

RIP Dad

Last night, my father (Mark Shu-Chyuan Chin) passed away after a long illness with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes and high blood pressure. I can't believe it happened so fast. Dad, we love you, and we know even though you have been taken away from us, you are always in our prayers and that you are now in the hands of God. The picture above is my dad during his birthday in 2005.

God, please watch over us. Dad, you are always in our prayers and in our hearts. We will always remember your smile and even though it was hard for you to say things to us, we know that you loved us and tried your best to show that.

We will miss you!

Love your immediate family.

Thanks for all your prayers during this difficult time.

U of T CS Distinguished Lecture from Sebastian Thrun from Stanford

Today I listened to a talk by Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University and Google on When will we get our robotic car? Abstract of the talk can be found here. Sebastian talked about the CS project that he has in AI at Stanford that deals with drive-by-wire, which means cars that automatically drive by themselves. His research work uses Volkswagen Toureg cars which are equipped with a laser system for automatic steering. The car can detect obstacles through the shining of light, and do laser terrain mapping, driving in a laser map, and online motion planning by predicting future motion. They applied these techniques and other AI algorithms to creating a robotic car and formed the Stanford Racing team to compete in the 2005 DARPA racing challenge which required maneuvering a car automatically through desert-style terrain.

They explored navigation problems using AI, false positives are not good, and they try to solve hard problems like if the car goes off the road around the obstacles. They use statistics and probabilistic error models with Markov chains. How to determine if an obstacle is nearby, they do a trigger if the difference between Zf and Zi is at least 15 cm. The car that they entered into the 2005 DARPA racing challenge was called Stanley. Stanley's adaptive vision was designed with finding the road with computer vision. This involved how to find roads in the desert and they tested their method in a desert in Arizona. Stanford was selected as a semi-finalist in the 2005 DARPA racing challenge. Sebastian Thrun also showed how some competitors didn't fare so well in videos, which was pretty hilarious by how the audience laughed. While the cars were running the course, the teams were in a tent looking on a web page to see where their robot cars were. In the end and all the hard work, Stanford won the racing challenge.

Stanford then entered the next racing challenge which was The Urban Challenge in November 2007 (last year) and the objective was to navigate the car in an urban setting with car traffic and human traffic. For this, Stanford created Junior and used surround laser technology. Thrun showed a video of how Junior merged into traffic (using a laser view) when there were cars in both directions on the roads. In order to determine where the car will move based on cars in front, Junior uses a hybrid A* search tree for planning to navigate. They did lots of simulation. Finally, the race involved a dirt road, passing disabled robot cars, and parking. Stanford came in second place while Carnegie Mellon came in first, however Junior was the first robot car to return. Apparently, Junior lost some time compared to the Carnegie Mellon team.

Thrun also showed an example of the next part of the research which was high speed driving where he showed the car zooming right through traffic. What are the implications of robotic cars? Thrun mentioned the huge cost of human driving and commuting, saying how many lives are lost due to driving. So he feels that robotic cars can be used to help save lives and make us more productive than having to waste time commuting. During the question period, someone mentioned that the robotic car is a way of trying to solve the commuting and traffic problem, however it doesn't really kind of solve this problem because you still have cars on the road. He mentioned that we should rethink the commuting problem instead of replacing the human, and asked if there were alternative ways. This made me think about the Segway, which is the human transporter vehicle created by famed inventor Dean Kamen. Also, Thrun mentioned about the need for clean technologies and alternative fuels.

So will we see any robotic cars any time soon? Thrun mentioned that even though the technological problems are largely solved, the main thing is political and social. He feels it will be probably 20 years out before we see self-driving cars. Since these self-driving cars will obey the rules of the road, does this mean we will see very few accidents and there won't be any need for police to monitor the roadways? Overall, this was an interesting talk and shows the practical applications of computer science research.

On Technorati: U of T, robotic car, Stanford

A Conversation with Michael Dell at U of T

This morning, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers came to University of Toronto to have an informal talk with faculty and students. It was nice to see that CEO would do something like that, most often, CEOs give talks that are structured and usually there isn't much interaction from the audience, apart from a question and answer period. But this time, it was a panel discussion followed by questions and answers from members of the audience.

Professor David Naylor, President of the University of Toronto first gave welcoming remarks about Michael Dell and welcoming him to the University of Toronto. Did you know that Michael Dell started with only $1000 to start Dell Computers in 1984. In 1992, he became the youngest CEO ever to earn a ranking on the Fortune 500. He is the author of Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, about the rise of his company and his business strategies. In 1998, he formed MSD Capital and in 1999, he and his wife formed the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, a philanthropic organization. He serves on the US President's Council of Adivsors on Science and Technology, the Technology CEO Council and the governing board of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India.

After Prof. Naylor spoke, then the attention turned towards the panel discussion that addressed questions from Professor Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management and Linda Nguyen, Student, Bachelor of Business Administration, University of Toronto Scarborough. Dell spoke about how Dell Computers dealt with customers directly through phone and internet, now Dell is selling their computers into retail markets such as Walmart and Costco. Before, I never used to see physical Dell computers in stores, just only when people bought them online. Now, I just saw a Dell laptop for $500 at Walmart and also in shopping malls.

One of the questions asked by Prof. Roger Martin was how can Dell manage change into the future. Michael Dell answered that there is a need to reintroduce risk into the business. There needs to be an investment in fundamental R&D to get traction in new technologies and trends like mobile computing. There was nothing new here, all companies are reinventing and investing significant amount of money into R&D because it is R&D that helps a company manage risk and get a leg up on its competitors. Dell is well positioned into the future because according to Michael, Dell is well represented in government and educational institutions. There is more opportunity with customers that are fickle and are constantly changing computer technology.

The second panel question had to deal with what are the environmental strategies for Dell to become “green”, which was asked by Linda Nguyen. Michael Dell responded that Dell has been an environmentally conscious company. In the 1990s, Dell tried to create a recyclable chassis which many engineers felt was impossible. Another example is that Dell was the first to offer free recycling in the world. Michael mentioned about the website dell.com/earth which is a real-time ticker that shows how many dollars are saved by customers through buying products from Dell. According to Dell, $12.2 billion dollars have been saved due to energy efficiencies. Dell introduced the Blade server that uses 19% less energy than its nearest competitor.

A third panel question dealt with how Dell is delving into services computing than products, following IBM and HP, with IBM having its services computing business. According to Michael Dell, products are changing into services. He gave an example of a large company that makes airplanes that starts with “B” where several million users are buying services to use Dell products. Dell is very focused on infrastructure services and how to simplify infrastructure, not applications. Michael says that competitors make money by making the customer service process complicated. Competitors will charge an arm and a leg to stay with a particular customer until the customer’s requirements are met, and the customer starts lured into buying more products. Dell’s model is different, where Dell gave an example of how there is an online simplification segment and service where quotes and orders are customized according to the customer’s requirements.

I did not know that Michael Dell stepped down as CEO of Dell in 1994, but now has returned back to the helm last year. This was the end of the panel discussion, and the opening up the floor for questions from the audience. The first question was what inspired you to start up Dell as the company? Michael Dell replied that he was fascinated with business and companies and he saw an opportunity of how PCs were being developed and sold, and thought of a better way of doing this. This reminds me of how all companies get developed, entrepreneurs look at the market to see what is happening, and decide what particular segment needs to be improved and targets that segment. So nothing new here.

The second question from the audience was what are personal traits for success to give to aspiring entrepreneurs. Michael responded curiosity, the ability to think out of the box, and experimenting, not being afraid to make mistakes. Again, nothing new here, this is typical for any successful entrepreneur. The third question was what is next to grow the business. Michael responded that Dell needs to broaden itself to cater towards different customer markets. Dell is a leader in capturing product awards. The audience member that asked this question talked about Dell’s successful XPS line of notebooks such as the M1330. Last year, Dell had 14 notebook platforms and this year will come up with 40 notebook platforms. So customers have a wide range of choice to decide what type of notebook suits towards their needs. Dell is a gaming leader, and Dell needs to take a lot more effort towards product design and innovation. The fourth question addressed a mentor from EEStore that is joining Dell, who is developing a new way of making lower energy capacitors and energy storing devices. Dell is evaluating these new technologies, but is taking a cautious approach because according to Michael, many of these technologies never see the light of day.

The fifth question addressed key points of advice to entrepreneurs for starting up businesses. Michael Dell that businesses fail because there is too much funding which gets all used up. According to Dell, there is no perfect plan so entrepreneurs cannot wait for the perfect plan because it will never happen, and you will lose opportunities. Entrepreneurs need to experiment , learn and make mistakes. Again, nothing really new here, this is pretty much common sense. The sixth question asked is design aesthetics in laptops and computers a good thing. This is a trend in the industry as is with mobile devices such as cell phones, it is part of personalization. For Dell, it leverages personalization of factory infrastructure and customization before Dell was mass product using the same reference design. The device should be a reflection of you.

The seventh question dealt with how Dell is working to be a market leader in social computing. Michael responded that Dell outsells the nearest competitor by two times. Cloud computing is a big area of focus. For big search providers, social networking sites and video content sites, Dell has created custom businesses for them by dealing with the customers, coming back with prototypes, then bringing in a rack of servers that fit the customer specifications. Finally, the eighth question was what are the gaps in the IT industry that would require interdisciplinary areas in energy conservation. According to Dell, when you do a product/service, you are part of the ecosystem and so you are responsible for managing it. He said that companies need more intercultural and interdisciplinary students. That wasn’t really anything new, everybody knows that. Compound inventions are the most unpredictable but provide the most impact. Entrepreneurs are good at taking existing pieces and rearranging them to form new businesses, but not good at predicting the future.

In summary, Dell’s conversation was not thought-provoking as many of his answers were standard answers that any successful CEO would provide. However, it was nice to finally get to see Michael Dell in person.

On Technorati: Dell, Michael Dell

Just submitted paper!

I've just finally submitted my paper to a conference! Time to relax this long weekend! Those that are in Ontario, Canada, we now have a new holiday this coming Monday, February 18, called Family Day that the Ontario government put into law last year. Family Day is celebrated every year on the third Monday of February. So, spend the time with your families. We seem to be busy with work and we don't spend enough time with family. Family is very important, so take the time this Monday to cherish the moments with your family. I know I will.

MySpace now has Developer Platform

Well, it was going to happen sooner or later. MySpace now has a Developer Platform for developers to write applications into MySpace, following Facebook. It's interesting that MySpace is following Google's OpenSocial API. In fact, there are a number of companies collaborating with Google on this. But Facebook is not on this list.

It'll be interesting to see how this develops. So far, every social networking site or so creates their own API for developers, there is no unifying API. Google's OpenSocial is meant to unify this. The OpenSocial API is a wrapper to hook into other social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, and makes writing a social application easier. Ning is kind of doing something like this where you can create social apps based on templates, but it's not doing any type of development platform like I see with MySpace and Facebook.

On Technorati: MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial

Rick Rashid from Microsoft Research talk @ U of T

I’m in the talk with Microsoft Research’s senior VP Rick Rashid and he’s talking about how he started his research career as a graduate student, then professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and then his stint at Microsoft Research. MSR’s mission statement is to expand the state of the art in each of the areas in which they do research, rapidly transfer innovative technologies into Microsoft products, and ensure that Microsoft products have a future. MSR is adapting the academic model, they are an open research environment and have strong ties to University Research. 25% of all PhD graduates will have worked at MSR at some time during their PhD. MSR has just announced a 6th lab in Cambridge, MA to be close to MIT which will open in July 2008. MSR has almost 1000 interns a year and many postdocs. The key mission is to move the state-of-the-art forward and measure themselves with publications, MSR has over 3700 peer-reviewed publications, 13% at 2001 CHI. MSR has prestigious senior researchers like Gordon Bell, creator of the VAX and Rick Rashid with work on the NUMA architecture.

The second part of the mission statement is to drive technologies into Microsoft products and Rick showed that with the Tablet PC which was invented in Cambridge, UK and the codecs for Microsoft Windows Media Player. What’s the value of MSR to Microsoft? MSR is a source of IP and new technologies and to act as an early warning system to Microsoft as to what technologies and areas to focus on. A basic research group allows a company to respond more rapidly to change and to solve hard technical problems which advances the company and makes it one step above the competitors. If you want to survive, you have to invest in the future. MSR is also delving into research areas that you wouldn’t think Microsoft would be in, like for example, computational biology.

Rick is now talking about what the future will look like in 10 years. Rick gave a slide about the "Wallet PC" vision in 1993 where now this has developed in Windows Mobile. So, what will the future to 2018 will look like? Microsoft Surface is a tabletop system where you can manipulate digital objects as physical objects, kind of similar to tabletop work from DGP at University of Toronto. A new large research project at MSR is the singularity research project for proving very large systems and doing a better job of specification for software. Now, the specifications are actionable and can be verified through proofs that will change the software development process. Another project which became an actual product is TerraServer which was one of the earliest terabyte servers on the web, and was the basis for Microsoft Virtual Earth, and was started by Jim Gray (who is missing since last year from on a sailing trip). This delves into data mining and web services area.

One cool thing that Rick is showing is the WorldWide Telescope, which is like a space-version of Microsoft Virtual Earth but applied to space and the sky where you can navigate and also search. This is an example of galactic space storage. We are now entering into the age of human scale storage, where you could theoretically store all data, images, and video of your entire life. This is the premise of a MSR project with Gordon Bell called MyLifeBits. Another MSR project is the SenseCam which takes video of wherever you are while walking. A practical application of SenseCam to aid in memory loss where it would record images and video, and then the patient could review it to help remember. In an experiment comparing with a diary and no aid, the SenseCam device performed significantly better than the other methods where the ability to remember after 1 month was higher than with the other methods. Another research project is to manipulate images and improve on them (very relevant especially with wedding photos!), MSR have created technologies that allow you to remove certain objects and manipulate images using curves. One product that stitches a whole bunch of photos together to reconstruct a 3D virtual environment, called Microsoft PhotoSynth.

Another research area is streaming intelligence where we now are beginning to have sensors being deployed in the environment. Eric Horvitz is doing statistical analysis and modeling to do traffic prediction and modeling the user in order to predict better ways of driving through traffic.

On Technorati: Microsoft Research, Rick Rashi

Put Toronto on the world Monopoly map!

I just read this article thanks to TorCamp and BlogTO about the list of 22 cities that will be included in the next world edition of Monopoly. You can vote for the cities to be included in the world Monopoly edition.

Toronto apparently is ranked 17th, behind #1 Paris, France and #2 Montreal, Canada. Come on, Toronto, we're already Facebook's number 1 network, let's make Toronto #1 on Monopoly as well!

On Technorati: Monopoly, Monopoly World Vote

Turning real life behaviours into social features

Here's a presentation about how to turn real life behaviours into social features:

| View | Upload your own

This is a great presentation, a lot of things being obvious, but things that as designers we take for granted. If social media is to be successful and not just a way of saying "I have more friends than you do", it has got to reach the root of human behaviour.

There's an interesting article in the Guardian about how some social networking web sites (in particular the article is about Facebook) take away from the actual "social networking". Some people enjoy chatting with people online and using Facebook rather than meeting with friends face to face. Of course, I think the article does show that social networking sites need to supplement physical social networking. There are times when you can't do physical social networking due to distance and it's much easier to do it online and reach a wider audience. But, the article does show that there are opportunities in this space to improve on social networking web sites and closely examining human behaviour is something that needs to be actively researched upon in the context of creating an online presence that supplements the physical world.

Definitely opportunities for researchers and businesses, hey that's why I'm doing research in this area!

Vote for best of independent Toronto tech at BlogTO

I just got this message from David Crow of TorCamp about voting at BlogTO, this blog is also listed in BlogTO:

BlogTO is collecting votes for the best of independent Toronto.


We're really well represented, as in I think everyone on the list is an
active community member. Go vote at
http://www.polldaddy.com/survey.aspx?id=8b82d73b9414f3dc

Best Web or Tech Evangelist

- Amber MacArthur
- David Crow
- Eli Singer
- Joey deVilla
- Mark Kuznicki
- Will Pate

Best Unconference

- CaseCamp
- DemoCamp
- FacebookCamp
- PhotoCamp
- StartupCamp
- TransitCamp

Go vote!

On Technorati: BlogTO

Call for Papers: Hypertext 2008

The annual Hypertext 2008 conference is coming up this year, it is earlier than last year. This year it is in June, specifically June 19 to 21 in Pittsburgh, USA, whereas last year it was in early September. Full papers and short papers are due February 11. This year there are four tracks: Information Linking and Organization, Social Linking, Applications of Hypertext, and Hypertext, Culture and Communication.

I'm also the unofficial student representative for SIGWEB, so I'm writing this blog entry to encourage all students that have their research related to hypertext and the web to submit to Hypertext. You can check out last year's Hypertext page for more details on what happened at Hypertext last year.

On Technorati: HT08, hypertext08, hypertext2008

Carla Ellis talk – Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Today, I attended the first Distinguished Lecture talk of 2008 in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. The talk was by Carla Ellis of the Computer Science department at Duke University. Her talk was on energy aware computing. Can computing contribute to energy conservation in non-computer environments? This was the major motivation towards her research. She reviewed how there is computational support for the science of global change for reducing energy demand. We have progressed far with energy management for computing from various levels. First, we have dealt with energy management at the hardware level with low-power circuit design. Second, the operating system has support for energy management such as detecting voltage changes and scaling. Third, there are policies that govern energy management in computing, with popular techniques being caching and prefetching. The operating system can spin the disk down when not in use, and we have energy management schemes for our laptops, like to conserve battery by decreasing the brightness of the display. Fourth, we have software for energy management, with much systems research dealing with this. Carla and her research group have built an energy-centric OS which is nicely called ECOSystem.

When coming up with an energy goal, it is important to know to be aware of the tradeoffs that can occur, like for example, the battery lifetime can be increased however the CPU may be downclocked to run at a lower speed, or there might be a sacrifice in performance. We need to know whether the tradeoffs are justified. In their project called ECOSystem, there is explicit managing of energy use to reach the target battery lifetime. The premise is to fully utilize the battery life within a set timeframe. The scenario that she used was that of a person being able to use the laptop all the way on a coast-to-coast flight across the country, like for example from Halifax to Vancouver. They use a unifying energy concept in ECOSystem which is called currentcy which is equal to current + currency to provide a cost model for energy. Their model is a pay as you go model, ie, you can use currentcy during an epoch. If there is no more currentcy, then there is no more service. Therefore, currentcy needs to be allocated amongst the resources, but care needs to be taken such that no resource hoards all the energy. Therefore, the energy needs to be distributed evenly for the task at hand. As part of the ECOSystem, there is currentcy-aware scheduling to determine which resources get allocated what amount of currentcy and up to how much (cap), as well as buffer management strategies and prefetching (common of all energy-aware computing research).

The second research area Carla described was that of context-aware energy computing in environments, in which at Duke University, there is a smart home with the newest technologies and “green” initiatives. Their problem was to count the number of people that walk through the doorway so that for example, lights could be switched off, if the last person leaves the room, or the thermostat can be adjusted so that it is not too hot in the room (which she mentioned could have been used in the lecture room she was talking in). In fact, she is taking her own research personally by building her own smart house, transferring research and technology into her own house.

The third research project that Carla next talked about was the soil-moisture forestry project in which she is working with biologists to measure soil moisture to determine when to sample and how to sample. Her research group is looking into soil moisture data and developing models to suppress transmission.

She concluded her talk by issuing a challenge to all computer scientists. Any subdiscipline of computer science can find research topics related to energy efficiency (like for example, using energy as a new metric for research), but not necessary having to go heavily into the area. There is need for interdisciplinary research and it is a challenge to do interdisciplinary research. There is a trend to support energy conservation in buildings and transportation systems, which shows the practical applications. She mentioned how collaborative applications can be written for more effective teleconferencing/telecommuting that exploit the energy conservation. She also mentioned that energy-aware applications can take technologies and research from software engineering, machine learning, and systems.

On Technorati: Carla Ellis, computer science

World's thinnest laptop: MacBook Air

It was bound to happen, the world's thinnest laptop. And who better to unveil it than Apple, the undisputed leader in innovation. Apple has done it again, and constantly raises the bar on technology, ease of use, and innovation. It just boggles my mind at how quick Apple releases their products at least once or twice a year. Anyways, here's the MacBook Air.



Just joking, that really is not the MacBook Air, but it is funny though! Here is the real MacBook Air from MacWorld 2008.

Part 1 of Steve Jobs' keynote on MacBook Air:



Part 2 of Steve Jobs' keynote on MacBook Air:



And here is the ad that Apple has on the MacBook Air:



I can't believe it, 13.3 inch screen! This could replace my laptop, maybe this might be my new laptop! But it's so thin I wonder if the laptop will become really hot on my lap, because if it's so thin, how can they fit the cooling fan? I just checked on the Apple Canada's web site, and it's going for $1899. Sure, it's more expensive than other laptops, but wait later, and the price will drop down. Maybe my next laptop will be the MacBook Air, then I can run both MacOSX and Windows.

On Technorati: MacBook Air, Apple Computer

Bill Gates' last keynote speech at CES 2008

Bill Gates gave his last keynote speech at CES 2008, the Consumer Electronics Show, the venue for the newest consumer technology and gadgets (which I've never had the chance to go!). Anyways, here's a video which he showed to the CES audience about what his last day at Microsoft would be like. Of course, this is an exaggeration, nevertheless it's funny!



On Technorati: Bill Gates, Bill Gates last day, CES

Happy New Year

I hope everyone's Christmas holidays went well, I had a great holiday with finally a real honeymoon in Hainan Island in China, and visiting family and relatives. It's now back to work with writing papers, teaching, finishing up my PhD dissertation, and applying for jobs. It's going to be another busy semester. I hope 2008 bids a successful, happy, safe and prosperous year to all.

Did You Know

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

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

Robert Kahn talk at U of T

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Technorati: Robert Kahn, Digital Object Architecture

Really funny Web 2.0 video

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



On Technorati: Web 2.0

KMDI Alumni Talk: Dave Gillis from Teehan+Lax

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

Top 10 wedding videos on YouTube

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



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



as well as Dirty Dancing.



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

Facebook and business

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

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

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

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

On Technorati: Facebook, Google, OpenSocial

Google going green

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

On Technorati: Google, renewable energy

Social graph - is it overhyped?

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

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

On Technorati: social graph, Facebook

Updated my web site, check it out!

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

World Usability Day 2007

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

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

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

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

Happy World Usability Day!

On Technorati: World Usability Day

Google's OpenSocial API

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

On Technorati: OpenSocial, Google, social network

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

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

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

On Technorati: Social Networking Symposium

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

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

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

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

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

On Technorati: Social Networking Symposium, Egotistics

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

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

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

On Technorati: Social Networking Symposium"

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Technorati: social networking symposium, blogscope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Networking conference at U of T

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

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

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

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