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