Great Web 2.0 video

For those that need to explain what Web 2.0 is to those not technical, this video is a great way to show what Web 2.0 is all about.



This is exactly what Web 2.0 is all about and why everybody needs to get on the bandwagon of Web 2.0, it isn't hype any more, it's real.

On Technorati: Web 2.0

Social networking comes to Microsoft Excel

Marc Smith's Community Technologies research group at Microsoft Research has just released .NetMap which is a plug-in to do social network analysis in Microsoft Excel. This was presented at the Microsoft Faculty summit this week. Just import your data into Excel and let .NetMap visualize the social network, calculate centrality, and do all the other stuff that UCINET, Pajek and NetDraw do. Gone are the gzillion steps that you have to do in order to get the visualization of the social network (in my PhD thesis, this involved MySQL to get the actual data in a table format, creating a DL file to import into UCINET, then taking the file and converting it into Pajek to use Pajek features, or visualizing it in NetDraw).

More details of .NetMap are below:

New tools from Microsoft Research make performing many basic network
manipulations and visualization tasks as simple as using Excel. The (Excel)
.NetMap add-in provides directed graph charting features within Excel,
allowing users to create node-link diagrams with control over each node and
edge color, size, transparency and shape. Since .NetMap builds within Excel,
all of the controls and programmatic features of Office are available.
Additional features of (Excel) .NetMap generate social networks from data
sources like personal e-mail (drawing data from the Windows Desktop Search
engine). Arbitrary edge lists (anything that can be pasted into Excel) can
be visualized and analyzed in .NetMap. To download the Excel .NetMap Add-in
and slides, go to the following Web site in CodePlex (Microsoft's version of SourceForge).

I'm going to try it out and see how it works. Of course this could have saved me time in my PhD research analysis!

On Technorati: .NetMap, Microsoft Research, Excel

Arrived in Beijing

I've just arrived with my wife in Beijing and staying at a temporary apartment until we find a permanent housing to live. Can't believe that it's finally here, that I'm in Beijing and living and working here. Going to start my first day of work at Nokia Research tomorrow, looking forward to it!

Off to Beijing

I'm at the airport now with my wife and we're waiting for the flight to Beijing. This move is really exciting as I've been in Canada (specifically Toronto) throughout my entire life. I can't wait to start my new job at Nokia Research and I'm looking forward to this new journey in my life.

Please pray for us for a safe flight and a new and blessed beginning in Beijing. Maybe we'll get a chance to see the Olympics while we're there!

Keep reading my blog and keep in touch via e-mail. This is not good bye but a new beginning since so many things have happened in my life this year. And I'm grateful for God for everything in my life, my family, my amazing blessed wife, my exciting new job, and finally nearing towards the end of my PhD (my defense is in November).

God always has a plan for all of us.

Preparing my move to Beijing

Today, the moving company came to move the items that my wife and I are packing to Beijing. They were pretty fast, done within 2 hours, but they had 3 people to help to pack in boxes. Now, it's packing stuff in suitcases and then physically flying to Beijing.

I'm so excited to start a new job in Beijing and with Nokia Research and it will be a great opportunity to start a new life with my wife. I'm beginning to learn how to balance work and family life and having an amazing wife that supports me, I feel I'm the most blessed man and husband in the world.

PhD final defense scheduled!

Finally, the PhD is near its end after 5 years. I just scheduled my PhD final defense for November 3. It feels great that I'm going to graduate soon and start a full time job. I have accepted a full time job in Nokia Research in Beijing, China which should be exciting and challenging. I'll be moving with my wife to Beijing. Maybe I'll be able to see the Olympics while I'm there.

Just need to finish minor changes and flow in the dissertation.

As I reminisce on my PhD years, what I've learned is that a PhD prepares you for life, it's not about the degree, it's about the experience and skillset that you gain. You go to conferences, you practice your talks, you meet other people, you socialize with other researchers, you work on interesting projects, you improve your writing skills by writing papers, and you cooperate with other students and faculty. It is such an enriching experience. It isn't without its ups and downs, but its the ups and downs that make it all worthwhile.

TV houses using social media for research

TV companies like ABC and NBC are always looking for ways to improve viewer ratings, viewers themselves to watch TV, and to create enhanced services based around TV shows. We've already seen this with Facebook applications like Addicted to Lost around the ABC's hit TV show Lost and Warner Brothers' move using Facebook on their TheWB.com network. Now, NBC is using the Beijing Olympics as a testbed for research into social media to determine which sports viewers like to watch and to provide a "comprehensive picture of how people are supplementing TV viewership with tools such as video streaming, video on demand and mobile phones" (Alan Wurtzel, NBC's research chief). They are also giving online surveys to viewers to guage their feedback and even giving special programmed cell phones to look at viewer behaviour when away from the TV watching the Olympics.

I think it's about time that TV began to use social media and integrate it with their own TV offerings. There needs to be more value add in TV, it needs to be a more social experience. This reminds me of a research project from PARC called SocialTV. You can also read a previous blog post I wrote about this.

On Technorati: Olympics2008, social media, TV

Hypertext 2007 trip report published in ACM SIGWEB newsletter

If you're an ACM SIGWEB member, then the latest SIGWEB newsletter is out. In there you'll find an article co-authored by me and James Goulding about the Hypertext 2007 conference trip report.

Have a read and let me know what you think!

On Technorati: SIGWEB, HT07

Bye bye Bill Gates

As everybody probably has known, Bill Gates' last full day at Microsoft was yesterday and there's been so much video, audio, posts, you name it, about Billy G leaving. Some of the CEOs and visionaries from other companies have made comments about Bill, his competitors and fiercest enemies. Gates gave his final speech to Microsoft employees.

Love him or late him, you must admire his drive, his passion, his motivation in forming Microsoft as the underdog and how he has been able to fight so many challenges by many companies like Netscape, WordPerfect, Lotus, IBM, Apple, Borland, Palm, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo just to name a few. Translating this same drive over to the Gates foundation will certainly make him probably one of the greatest philanthropic leaders of all time. It's good to see that he will be using his wealth and money for finding cures for diseases and for making the world a better place.

I've never met Bill Gates in person but I have heard his keynotes before at computer conferences (specifically Comdex in Toronto). I've read his books like Business@The Speed of Thought and many other books about Microsoft like Hard Drive, All I Really Need to Learn in Business I Learned at Microsoft, and The Microsoft Way.

Bill is an inspiring individual, he was definitely one of my role models and made me first get into the computer industry. Gates is now wanting to spend more time with his 3 daughters.

Best wishes for you Bill and for the Gates foundation.

On Technorati: Microsoft, Bill Gates

Plazes social networking service bought by Nokia

In an interesting move, Nokia has bought out Plazes, the social networking site for allowing users to mark places that they have been for others to look at. This creates location-based services and avoids the need to have GPS which provides absolute location. Plazes creates semantic location. As long as you have some kind of internet connection like Wi-Fi you can track where you are and write comments, put photos or mark what the location is. I've tried the service and I really liked how it worked, although I haven't been using it for a month. It is kind of like Intel's PlaceLab where location can be annotated and hotspots found contributed by people rather than having to provide GPS or radio-type location technologies (like triangulation).

This is a good acquisition for Nokia because Nokia does not seem to be very much in the social networking arena and the next step is social networking on mobile phones. Integrating Plazes with the Nokia phones would provide the next logical step to providing ubiquitous location-based services, and will be part of Nokia's vision of "Connecting people".

On Technorati: Plazes, Nokia

Journal paper submitted and Hypertext 2008

I finally submitted a journal paper today based on the latest results from my PhD thesis. Hypertext 2008 is on Friday of this week (June 20) and goes unto Saturday June 21 in Pittsburgh. I would love to be there but circumstances prevent me from doing so. Either way, I will track what's going on through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the blog. You can network virtually with Hypertext 2008 attendees. For those who are going, have a great time there and link with others!

On Technorati: hypertext08", ht08

iPhone 3G

It's finally here, which everyone has heard about, the iPhone 3G which was announced by Steve Jobs at his keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference. It will be rolled out in 22 countries on July 11 and finally, Canada will get one on the Rogers network. It has 3G, GPS, version 2.0 software with iPhone APIs for location-based services and for third party developer support, the apps will be downloadable over the air on App Store, and the really surprising part, the 8GB version is going for only $199! You can check out specifically the iPhone part of the keynote here:



If you see the keynote, the apps that some of the third party companies that demonstrated are just amazing. There are lots of games that make full use of the touch screen and the gyroscopes of the iPhone. This brings a new generation into mobile gaming and a new experience, just like the Nintendo Wii has done for console gaming.

Will I get an iPhone? Well, if it's only $199 I think I just might to finally replace my Palm Zire 71 that I've had for so long. I've also wanted GPS as well so I can find where I'm going. But wait there's also RIM's Blackberry Thunder which is also touch screen and is going to compete with the iPhone:



What about Nokia, the #1 cell phone vendor in the world? Well, don't count Nokia's socks off, they do have a touch screen concept phone called the Achieve:



Somehow, I don't like the Nokia Achieve, it seems really ugly compared to the beauty of the iPhone. So, hmm, which one to get? Well, in this tech world, you're never satisfied with what you get, since another one will come out the next second.

On Technorati: iPhone 3G, WWDC08

Goosh: A Unix-type interface to Google

Well someone either is a hard-core computer science person, has too much time on their hands, is doing this for a project, or all the above. This person has created a Unix-type interface command shell to Google called Goosh (Google shell named appropriately). It has all the same commands that you would issue to Google in a web browser or using the Google search API. This would make a good Computer Science web programming project, as all I can see is that this is just an interface that makes calls to the Google Search API and presents the results in a command-type interface.

On Technorati: Goosh,Google shell

DGPis40 Abigail Sellen talk

This is the second talk that I attended at the DGPis40 reunion conference which was by Abigail Sellen, Senior Researcher and Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Abigail talked about her stints at DGP as a post-doc where in the early '80s and '90s, she worked on Bill Buxton's Ontario Telepresence project. She is now at Microsoft Research Cambridge in the UK working on socio-digital systems and her talk is "Being Human in the Digital Age". Her research deals with how to bring humans into the loop of computer technologies and assist the human, a human-centered approach to computing which I think is much needed in our industry. She has 23 patents and she says that we have to think and change our methodologies towards HCI. We need to put a humanistic agenda in research.

In the past, the origins of HCI was about thinking the brain as an information processing system and using cognitive psychology (in the '70s and '80s) and human factors engineering. Then in the early '80s, Don Norman talked about HCI and Card, Moran and Newell (1984) wrote a book called the Psychology of HCI. The idea here was to use cognitive psychological models to improve the use of computers. These led to the following contributions to HCI: User-centered design, user-testing and modelling.

Now, we are in the age of ubiquitous computing as visioned by the late Mark Weiser from PARC. An example of this is the Augmented Reality kitchen from the MIT Media Lab. The problem with HCI is that we need a view of the user and understand users as cognitive machines, therefore we need to have multi-disciplinary terms and design goals for rich evolving ecosystems and practices. As a result of this, Abigail and her colleagues created a Whereabouts clock which allows each member of the family to see where others are (either work, school, or out) based on their location. They conducted a user study that showed that family members got reassurance of where everyone was.



In their research, they have opened up the view of the user and thought of new information appliances that they would have not thought before if there was not any user testing. Opening up to the user can lead to invention. Another example that they created is the digital postcard where people can send SMS of pictures and text and it will show on the postcard.



Another example is the kitchen postcard which they created which becomes an ambient display and blog space. Think of it like a digital version of putting stuff on the fridge.



They also created a visual answering machine called Bubbleboard where the size of the bubbles indicates the length of the message.



According to Abigail, long term studies in real homes can give new insight into value of technologies for people. Abigail says that we need to redefine the H,C and I in HCI. Can technologies help us to switch off, forget, be isolated, be engaged (the opposite of what technologies do for us but thinking about what it means to be human). We are so increasingly connected, but sometimes we just need to unwind and not be connected, we need a break. So this raises new questions for research and development. Therefore, we need an HCI based on human values.

Abigail and a bunch of other researchers explore this reincarnation of HCI (in my opinion) with their published document from their workshop called Being Human:Human Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 which can be downloaded. I'll for sure be reading this because my research is very much into this area with social networks and how we can bring social networks to mobile and ubiquitous computing.

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.