Thanks for a great Hypertext conference!

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

See you all in Pittsburgh in Hypertext 2008!

On Technorati: Hypertext07, Hypertext2007

Day 2 of Hypertext conference

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

More photos from yesterday and today are on Flickr.

On Technorati: Hypertext07

End of Day 1 session at Hypertext conference

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

Day 1 of Hypertext 2007 conference

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

Hypertext conference starts next week

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

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

On Technorati: hypertext07

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

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

What do you all think about this?

Gmail redirects to garbled site

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

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

Social network web sites don't really social network

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

On Technorati: social network

Prayers with the family and colleagues of Bill Richards

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

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

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

Did you know you can be banned from Facebook?

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

On Technorati: Facebook, banned

Howard Rheingold teaching virtual communities and social networks

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

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

On Technorati: Howard Rheingold, virtual community

Mapping the sky

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

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

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

The next RAZR 2

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



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

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

On Technorati: Motorola, RAZR2

Looking for faculty positions or industry research jobs

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

Cimple Project for Community Information Management talk

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

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

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

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

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

On Technorati: community, cimple

Community information management talk tomorrow

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

They have a project web page here.

On Technorati: Cimple, community, information, Yahoo Research

iPhone is in Canada now!

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

On Technorati: iPhone, G4Tech

StatCounter wins BusinessWeek's Europe's best young entrepreneur

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

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

Way to go Aodhan and StatCounter!

On Technorati: StatCounter, Aodhan Cullen, Business Week

Mashups and Twitterlicious

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

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

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

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

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

My classmate featured in MIT Technology Review!

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

On Technorati: audio interface, iPod