Sunday, January 03, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Google Chrome OS: An new OS for the 21st century?
I'm sure that everyone has heard of the Google Chrome OS, Google's foray into creating an operating system running on Linux where everything is centered around the browser especially Google Chrome. Well, the Google Chrome OS has already been reviewed, with source code available. Engadget has the story. Apparently, the Google Chrome OS is much different than regular operating systems, it has been designed in the beginning for simplicity, security and ease of use.
Google Chrome OS is not meant to totally replace existing OSes like Windows, MacOS or Linux. In my opinion, it is meant for totally web-based computing. There are certain things where a native application is much faster and you can do more than with a web-based application. However, with AJAX and JavaScript, the performance of web-based applications is nearing that of native applications, which makes the game change. But it reminds me now of how the computer will become just like a dumb terminal in the 1960s and 1970s before the PC era. All you need to do is just boot up and everything is on the web, just like before on the mainframe server. Now that everything is going to the cloud, what does this leave for the native client?
Will the PC return back to a dumb terminal? Will rich native clients be replaced with web-based applications running in a browser. Will a browser-based OS make the computer more secure so therefore there isn't any loopholes to have viruses running on the native system exploiting ports from native applications like Outlook and the OS?
What do you think?
Google Chrome OS is not meant to totally replace existing OSes like Windows, MacOS or Linux. In my opinion, it is meant for totally web-based computing. There are certain things where a native application is much faster and you can do more than with a web-based application. However, with AJAX and JavaScript, the performance of web-based applications is nearing that of native applications, which makes the game change. But it reminds me now of how the computer will become just like a dumb terminal in the 1960s and 1970s before the PC era. All you need to do is just boot up and everything is on the web, just like before on the mainframe server. Now that everything is going to the cloud, what does this leave for the native client?
Will the PC return back to a dumb terminal? Will rich native clients be replaced with web-based applications running in a browser. Will a browser-based OS make the computer more secure so therefore there isn't any loopholes to have viruses running on the native system exploiting ports from native applications like Outlook and the OS?
What do you think?
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
All in one email, instant messaging and social networking in one client: Nokia Messaging http://ping.fm/fu6Y1 #nokia
Friday, November 06, 2009
Exertion Interfaces talk from Floyd Mueller
Today, I attended a talk from Floyd Mueller who is visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia and is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne. He is talking about exertion games.
Abstract
Exertion Interfaces are interfaces that require intense physical effort. Their recent success stems mostly from their use in games, as demonstrated by the Wii and Natal. It is believed that these games facilitate not only physical health, but also more social play than traditional computer games. Over several years, Floyd has investigated the influence of technology design on exertion games. His research has contributed to an understanding of how people play computationally-augmented exertion games and how we can support exertion and social play in future designs. Floyd's research has produced several prototypes, including 'Jogging over a Distance', a system that allows joggers who are located in different cities to motivate one another while running using mobile technology, which was used last month between expat joggers in London, UK and Melbourne, Australia. Floyd will focus on the 'Jogging over a Distance' work to describe challenges and opportunities in using mobile technology to enhance people's fitness activities through a distributed social approach that aims to enhance the engagement with the activity while it occurs, unlike most pedometer work that focuses on post-reflection after the exercise.
Floyd is talking about how Dance Dance Revolution and the Nintendo Wii really changed the face of gaming using physical activity. There is an exciting research for engaging people over the internet using physical activity. For example, a group of cyclists come together and can connect with and cycle with other cyclists over the internet using Skype video conference. How to do the design between exertion play and social play? According to Floyd, we need to focus on mediated environment which can extend opportunities for social interaction.
The first research project was on Table Tennis for Three which involved a table tennis table with one side showing a screen and video conference to show the remote players. A player uses the table tennis racquet to hit the ball onto the screen which the other player on the other side will see and will hit the ball.
The second research project was Jogging Over a Distance, using spatial audio for showing whether your partner in jogging is close to you. Using a heart rate monitor, joggers can then speed up depending on the other partner in order to catch up to that person based on the spatial audio.
The third research project was Remote Boxing, which is boxing over a distance where users would hit the screen and get points for doing so when they saw objects appear on the screen.
All in all, very interesting research work and something that really brings HCI and ubiquitous computing to real every day life.
Abstract
Exertion Interfaces are interfaces that require intense physical effort. Their recent success stems mostly from their use in games, as demonstrated by the Wii and Natal. It is believed that these games facilitate not only physical health, but also more social play than traditional computer games. Over several years, Floyd has investigated the influence of technology design on exertion games. His research has contributed to an understanding of how people play computationally-augmented exertion games and how we can support exertion and social play in future designs. Floyd's research has produced several prototypes, including 'Jogging over a Distance', a system that allows joggers who are located in different cities to motivate one another while running using mobile technology, which was used last month between expat joggers in London, UK and Melbourne, Australia. Floyd will focus on the 'Jogging over a Distance' work to describe challenges and opportunities in using mobile technology to enhance people's fitness activities through a distributed social approach that aims to enhance the engagement with the activity while it occurs, unlike most pedometer work that focuses on post-reflection after the exercise.
Floyd is talking about how Dance Dance Revolution and the Nintendo Wii really changed the face of gaming using physical activity. There is an exciting research for engaging people over the internet using physical activity. For example, a group of cyclists come together and can connect with and cycle with other cyclists over the internet using Skype video conference. How to do the design between exertion play and social play? According to Floyd, we need to focus on mediated environment which can extend opportunities for social interaction.
The first research project was on Table Tennis for Three which involved a table tennis table with one side showing a screen and video conference to show the remote players. A player uses the table tennis racquet to hit the ball onto the screen which the other player on the other side will see and will hit the ball.
The second research project was Jogging Over a Distance, using spatial audio for showing whether your partner in jogging is close to you. Using a heart rate monitor, joggers can then speed up depending on the other partner in order to catch up to that person based on the spatial audio.
The third research project was Remote Boxing, which is boxing over a distance where users would hit the screen and get points for doing so when they saw objects appear on the screen.
All in all, very interesting research work and something that really brings HCI and ubiquitous computing to real every day life.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
China HCI seminar series in Beijing - First session
China HCI Seminar Series
October 26, 2009
This is what I wrote from the first session in the China HCI Seminar Series which kicked off last night. This seminar series is meant to foster research and collaboration among HCI researchers in the Chinese community as well as abroad. It was held at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. There was lots of people for the first session, so the turn out was really great like a large lecture hall! There were two talks after introduction by the organizers and distinguished Chinese HCI researchers.
Prof. James Landay, University of Washington, Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia
Jonathan Grudin: A Moving Target: The Evolution of HCI
Keynote Speech
HCI started with Human Factors and Ergonomics with operation and data entry from 1905 to 1945, and then came the invention of general-purpose computers. HCI was one of five major IS research streams since 1967 (Banker and Kaufmann). Then there was HCI in Information Systems for managerial use. Finally Computer-Human Interaction happened in the 1980s with the beginning of the CHI conference and the establishment of SIGCHI. There was a focus shift from non-discretionary use to discretionary use. The Computer-Human Interaction stream started from the work of computer-engineer interaction and the work done at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The actual goal behind human-computer interaction actually started with the work of Grace Hopper.
According to Jonathan, there is a shifting focus of interface development from the large hardware mainframes, to the PCs, and now in groups and mobile devices where it is used collaboratively. The graphical user interface (GUI) changed the field of human-computer interaction in 1985 with the Apple Mac computer. Jonathan showed a curve of Moore’s Law showing how as you move the number of years, there is a longer tail on the curve. The next big impact was in 1995 where there was unanticipated changes in audio, video and graphics. Now, if we continue the curve, what is the next big bomb and it is predicted that it will happen in 2015. Design started coming into HCI since 1995, but we have been neglecting design for a decade or so. There is now new research trend into emotional design.
History and evolution of HCI
Interface development
The amount of information will dramatically increase exponentially and increasingly significant focus in HCI. H.G. Wells made a quote which sounds very much related to what the vision of human-driven Web 2.0 systems is, and this was in 1905! There is now the emergence of information schools. James Martin from 1973 talked about the era of information scarcity and according to Jonathan, we are still in the age of information scarcity. Now, there is a merging of the physical and virtual world. We can learn something from the kids domain like WebKinz where kids can buy a stuffed toy, enter the code, and then can enter the virtual world where they have to feed their toy and can share with other kids’ toys. He says why this can’t be the same in the adult world like buying a car?
Desney Tan: Creating Novel Human-Computer Interaction with Physiological Sensing
Computational User Experiences Group, Microsoft Research
Desney's web site
Following Jonathan’s footsteps, the next big thing in the evolution of computing paradigms is natural user interfaces. Mind reading devices are now hitting the consumer market, and is now becoming a science. At Microsoft Research, Desney and his team is looking into classifying brain activity tasks and uncontrolled game tasks with greater than 80% accuracy. The goal is to have only a few sensors as possible with high accuracy. They can use the brain sensors to accurately classify images based on brain activity using EEG. Another goal is to take science fiction like Minority Report as reality, and use detection of hand gesture recognition. At Microsoft Research, there is Project Natal which is controller free interaction which will be shipped with Microsoft XBox. In order to make this reality, they use EMG armbands to use muscle stimulation in order to detect gestures. You can sense gestures on a hard surface like a table top using Microsoft Surface.
Games are a very good test of the research because they require accurate classification and fast classification. Their group created a test application called Air Guitar Hero that uses hand gestures to pretend playing the guitar. A third research theme is mouth gesture interactions for example using tongues that can be used with paralyzed people who cannot use their hands or arms. Desneyäs group created a device to be placed on the tongue with electrodes in order to sense the tongue with a micro+controller. The idea is that some children wear retainers when they are young but a reluctant to use them because they are not nice to have and make them look ugly. But if they were cool by using sensors to make them technologically advanced to use, would help adoption of them. An example is using your tongue to control a Tetris game. All the technology is now embedded in the tongue retainer. So what are some applications of tongue gesture interaction? According to Desney, we can use tongue gestures to control mobile devices like for example building a music player within your mouth. Another application is in medical sensing for salivary analysis and food analysis.
The last project is Bionic Contact Lenses where technology is embedded in the contact lens. An application could be to project information into the eye, for example, remembering who a particular person is by looking at that person. Another application is medical sensing such as glucose sensing with bionic contacts.
In closing, Desney is talking about the next evolution of HCI that will help bring computing into the real world.
At the end, there was some questions addressed to Desney and Jonathan.
All in all, a great start to what looks to be a great lecture series on HCI in Beijing, something that I miss from my alma mater at University of Toronto.
October 26, 2009
This is what I wrote from the first session in the China HCI Seminar Series which kicked off last night. This seminar series is meant to foster research and collaboration among HCI researchers in the Chinese community as well as abroad. It was held at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. There was lots of people for the first session, so the turn out was really great like a large lecture hall! There were two talks after introduction by the organizers and distinguished Chinese HCI researchers.
Prof. James Landay, University of Washington, Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia
Jonathan Grudin: A Moving Target: The Evolution of HCI
Keynote Speech
HCI started with Human Factors and Ergonomics with operation and data entry from 1905 to 1945, and then came the invention of general-purpose computers. HCI was one of five major IS research streams since 1967 (Banker and Kaufmann). Then there was HCI in Information Systems for managerial use. Finally Computer-Human Interaction happened in the 1980s with the beginning of the CHI conference and the establishment of SIGCHI. There was a focus shift from non-discretionary use to discretionary use. The Computer-Human Interaction stream started from the work of computer-engineer interaction and the work done at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The actual goal behind human-computer interaction actually started with the work of Grace Hopper. According to Jonathan, there is a shifting focus of interface development from the large hardware mainframes, to the PCs, and now in groups and mobile devices where it is used collaboratively. The graphical user interface (GUI) changed the field of human-computer interaction in 1985 with the Apple Mac computer. Jonathan showed a curve of Moore’s Law showing how as you move the number of years, there is a longer tail on the curve. The next big impact was in 1995 where there was unanticipated changes in audio, video and graphics. Now, if we continue the curve, what is the next big bomb and it is predicted that it will happen in 2015. Design started coming into HCI since 1995, but we have been neglecting design for a decade or so. There is now new research trend into emotional design.
History and evolution of HCI
Interface development
The amount of information will dramatically increase exponentially and increasingly significant focus in HCI. H.G. Wells made a quote which sounds very much related to what the vision of human-driven Web 2.0 systems is, and this was in 1905! There is now the emergence of information schools. James Martin from 1973 talked about the era of information scarcity and according to Jonathan, we are still in the age of information scarcity. Now, there is a merging of the physical and virtual world. We can learn something from the kids domain like WebKinz where kids can buy a stuffed toy, enter the code, and then can enter the virtual world where they have to feed their toy and can share with other kids’ toys. He says why this can’t be the same in the adult world like buying a car?
Desney Tan: Creating Novel Human-Computer Interaction with Physiological Sensing
Computational User Experiences Group, Microsoft Research
Desney's web site
Following Jonathan’s footsteps, the next big thing in the evolution of computing paradigms is natural user interfaces. Mind reading devices are now hitting the consumer market, and is now becoming a science. At Microsoft Research, Desney and his team is looking into classifying brain activity tasks and uncontrolled game tasks with greater than 80% accuracy. The goal is to have only a few sensors as possible with high accuracy. They can use the brain sensors to accurately classify images based on brain activity using EEG. Another goal is to take science fiction like Minority Report as reality, and use detection of hand gesture recognition. At Microsoft Research, there is Project Natal which is controller free interaction which will be shipped with Microsoft XBox. In order to make this reality, they use EMG armbands to use muscle stimulation in order to detect gestures. You can sense gestures on a hard surface like a table top using Microsoft Surface.
Games are a very good test of the research because they require accurate classification and fast classification. Their group created a test application called Air Guitar Hero that uses hand gestures to pretend playing the guitar. A third research theme is mouth gesture interactions for example using tongues that can be used with paralyzed people who cannot use their hands or arms. Desneyäs group created a device to be placed on the tongue with electrodes in order to sense the tongue with a micro+controller. The idea is that some children wear retainers when they are young but a reluctant to use them because they are not nice to have and make them look ugly. But if they were cool by using sensors to make them technologically advanced to use, would help adoption of them. An example is using your tongue to control a Tetris game. All the technology is now embedded in the tongue retainer. So what are some applications of tongue gesture interaction? According to Desney, we can use tongue gestures to control mobile devices like for example building a music player within your mouth. Another application is in medical sensing for salivary analysis and food analysis.
The last project is Bionic Contact Lenses where technology is embedded in the contact lens. An application could be to project information into the eye, for example, remembering who a particular person is by looking at that person. Another application is medical sensing such as glucose sensing with bionic contacts.
In closing, Desney is talking about the next evolution of HCI that will help bring computing into the real world.
At the end, there was some questions addressed to Desney and Jonathan.
All in all, a great start to what looks to be a great lecture series on HCI in Beijing, something that I miss from my alma mater at University of Toronto.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
My talk and photos from the Social Networking Conference in London, UK on Sept. 24 and 25, 2009
I was an invited speaker at the Social Networking Conference in London, UK from September 24 to 25, 2009. I spoke about Advances in Mobile Social Networking, of which my slides are available here for download and also on SlideShare below.
Photos from the conference are up here on Nokia Ovi.
It was great meeting with all of you at the conference, please keep in touch with me as gadgetman4u on Twitter and FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Advances In Mobile And Social Networking Alvin Chin
It was a business conference with many attendees and speakers from industry, I was the only one from research. However, it was nice to see how other companies are using social networking especially how Facebook is being prevalently used, as quoted by Clara Shih who promoted her book, The Facebook Era, of which I bought and I am reading. Clara mentions how Facebook and social networking sites are the new CRM, that is where your customers are and so you should utilize them to its full potential.
View more presentations from ubiquitousdude.
It was a business conference with many attendees and speakers from industry, I was the only one from research. However, it was nice to see how other companies are using social networking especially how Facebook is being prevalently used, as quoted by Clara Shih who promoted her book, The Facebook Era, of which I bought and I am reading. Clara mentions how Facebook and social networking sites are the new CRM, that is where your customers are and so you should utilize them to its full potential.
IBM gave a great talk on enterprise social networking and how it forms a core in their organization, where employees can use DogEar for bookmarking URLs which automatically propagate to a social media portal that is similar to Facebook for aggregating social media content from all your colleagues and friends within the company. IBM has been a huge proponent and model for other companies to follow, about how a social media strategy can vastly transform a company to become more responsive and have a better reputation with customers.
Photos from the conference are up here on Nokia Ovi.
It was great meeting with all of you at the conference, please keep in touch with me as gadgetman4u on Twitter and FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Monday, October 05, 2009
I would like just to wish all my Chinese friends and family a happy mid autumn festival. The Social Networking Conference in London was really great, and even went sightseeing. In London, I went to see Big Ben, Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Thames river cruise, Buckingham Palace, Victoria and Albert museum, British Museum, Trafalgar Square, Kensington Palace, and Wimbledon. I cannot believe that I was at Centre Court! It was great!
Now I am in Guangzhou and spending time with my inlaws and eating great Cantonese food. There is Cantonese food in Beijing but it is not that great, so I am so glad that I am here. The weather is hot in Guangzhou, much hotter than in Beijing.
The 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People's Republic of China. If you thought the fireworks anywhere else in the world is great, it probably cannot beat Beijing's fireworks, even more spectacular than the Beijing Olympics. Only China could do this massive scale of celebrations. It was about more than half a year in the making.
Now I am in Guangzhou and spending time with my inlaws and eating great Cantonese food. There is Cantonese food in Beijing but it is not that great, so I am so glad that I am here. The weather is hot in Guangzhou, much hotter than in Beijing.
The 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People's Republic of China. If you thought the fireworks anywhere else in the world is great, it probably cannot beat Beijing's fireworks, even more spectacular than the Beijing Olympics. Only China could do this massive scale of celebrations. It was about more than half a year in the making.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Second day of the Social Networking Conference
After a good night sleep, I'm now in the second day of the Social Networking Conference. Met lots of smart people yesterday and last night at Lloyd's Bar and Distillery, and lots of them were very interested with what I am doing in China and my job as researcher in Nokia Research Center. They were very intrigued by the concept of using the mobile phone as an integral part of your social network, true real mobile social networking, recording real social interactions and creating social networks based on that.
Anyways, I'm in the first talk of the second day of the conference on Enterprise Social Networking in France by Andre Dan of Challengy. He helps companies understand enterprise social networking and how to use it. Companies are really opening up and becoming more human to their customers by incorporating enterprise social networking functions. The leading tools in Enterprise Social Networking are Ning, IBM Lotus Connections (as presented by Ian McNairn from IBM yesterday and IBM is a huge advocate of social networking and they extensively use it internally), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Jive. Two French tools are blueKiwi and Inspheris. The open environments are LinkedIn and Facebook and are also used in enterprise social networking. A French open tool is Viadeo. Boostzone Institute is an enterprise social networking tank in France. BlueKiwi Software is the leading European provider of enterprise social software. A lot of companies are now using enterprise social networking software companies to integrate social networking within their business.
Anyways, I'm in the first talk of the second day of the conference on Enterprise Social Networking in France by Andre Dan of Challengy. He helps companies understand enterprise social networking and how to use it. Companies are really opening up and becoming more human to their customers by incorporating enterprise social networking functions. The leading tools in Enterprise Social Networking are Ning, IBM Lotus Connections (as presented by Ian McNairn from IBM yesterday and IBM is a huge advocate of social networking and they extensively use it internally), Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Jive. Two French tools are blueKiwi and Inspheris. The open environments are LinkedIn and Facebook and are also used in enterprise social networking. A French open tool is Viadeo. Boostzone Institute is an enterprise social networking tank in France. BlueKiwi Software is the leading European provider of enterprise social software. A lot of companies are now using enterprise social networking software companies to integrate social networking within their business.
Second talk on 2009 Overview of the Social Networking Industry in Europe
Mark Brooks from Social Networking Watch is giving an overview of the social networking industry in Europe. Apparently, Facebook is the number 1 social network, Bebo and MySpace are losing the share of the market.
In first talk at Social Networking Conference
I'm now in the first talk at the Social Networking Conference called Enterprise social Networking at IBM presented by Ian McNairn. He mentioned about most of the people in IBM have been there for less than 5 years and IBM uses enterprise tagging and social networking extensively in the company. It is part of their company strategy. Heath McCarthy from IBM mentions we use social networking software is for connecting with people. In IBM, approximately 60% of employees are actively using social networking mostly outside IBM. IBMers used LinkedIn as the most popular social network. The benefits of Web 2.0 social networking is improving the productivity of knowledge workers and building communities. It helps you to find people, find information, sharing, socializing and promoting yourself.
But why run social software internally? It is to increase innovation, employee cohesiveness, work quality, knowledge sharing and reduces risk. In the company, we have many profiles in the organization and right now there are different systems and it is not connected together. We need software to link all these resources together.IBM has harvested the data and have taken the homegrown solutions and created an internal product. IBM has a social networking software called Lotus Connections.
Ian just asked the audience how many people have an online CV (all the attendees raised their hands). How many updated the CV within a month, all hands went down. But it is easy to update your status on social networking sites. With tagging, we create knowledge communities and knowledge sharing. Also IBM's social networking software can help to make connections with other people in the organization based on mutual systems and things that are in common and tells you how you know that person. At IBM, you can use social bookmarks of particular web sites that you bookmark and then it gets harvested and put into Lotus Connections. Ian just showed the tag cloud of Sacha Chua, an IBM social networking expert, and also a colleague of mine from my PhD days at University of Toronto in the Interactive Media Lab.
But why run social software internally? It is to increase innovation, employee cohesiveness, work quality, knowledge sharing and reduces risk. In the company, we have many profiles in the organization and right now there are different systems and it is not connected together. We need software to link all these resources together.IBM has harvested the data and have taken the homegrown solutions and created an internal product. IBM has a social networking software called Lotus Connections.
Ian just asked the audience how many people have an online CV (all the attendees raised their hands). How many updated the CV within a month, all hands went down. But it is easy to update your status on social networking sites. With tagging, we create knowledge communities and knowledge sharing. Also IBM's social networking software can help to make connections with other people in the organization based on mutual systems and things that are in common and tells you how you know that person. At IBM, you can use social bookmarks of particular web sites that you bookmark and then it gets harvested and put into Lotus Connections. Ian just showed the tag cloud of Sacha Chua, an IBM social networking expert, and also a colleague of mine from my PhD days at University of Toronto in the Interactive Media Lab.
Monday, September 21, 2009
One more day left before leaving to London for the Social Networking Conference, can't wait! http://ping.fm/CpjSa
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Remember Vannevar Bush and the Memex? It's now going to become a reality in the new book Total Recall by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, researchers from their project MyLifeBits from Microsoft Research http://ping.fm/odw41
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Slides and paper from my SIN09 talk at IEEE SocialCom'09
I'd like to thank all the organizers for organizing a great conference for IEEE SocialCom even though it was co-located with the CSE, PASSAT, and EUC conferences all together. It will be nice to have just SocialCom and PASSAT together in one venue, so it will be more focussed. I found out that it was hard to go to different talks because they were all in parallel. Nevertheless, some things for improvements next year (if the Program Committee is listening, please make a note of this).
My paper and presentation slides are now available for my talk I gave on August 30, 2009 at the SIN09 workshop called Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network. The slides are up on SlideShare shown below:
I met lots of new people and had great old acquaintances, and also had a chance to do a little sightseeing around Vancouver as well! Please keep in touch with me and add me to your social network!
My paper and presentation slides are now available for my talk I gave on August 30, 2009 at the SIN09 workshop called Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network. The slides are up on SlideShare shown below:
Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network
View more documents from ubiquitousdude.
I met lots of new people and had great old acquaintances, and also had a chance to do a little sightseeing around Vancouver as well! Please keep in touch with me and add me to your social network!
Monday, August 31, 2009
Last day of the IEEE Social Computing conference
I missed the keynote address by Victor Bahl today, so if anyone has blogged about this, please send to me. Today is the last day of the IEEE Social Computing conference and right now, I'm in the first session of the day in the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop, listened to a talk on Expertise Modeling and Recommendation in Online Question and Answer Forums where they used clustering on Yahoo Answers. There is an interesting talk on A Language of Life: Characterizing People Using Cell Phone Tracks by Alexy Khrabrov that is exploring whether can determine actions based on sensor data that is captured by Nokia phones with connection to cell towers. They use the dataset from the Reality Mining group of Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle from MIT, and use N-grams from languagemodelsto model the sensor data as text.
The next session of the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop is starting. First talk is on Surfing a Web of Trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing. I never knew that people would actually offer couches to others to sleep on on Couchsurfing.com! Reciprocity is based on whether the two people offer couches to each other. The second talk is on Virtually There: Exploring Proximity and Homophily in a Virtual World presented by Noshir Contractor. People tend to form social relations with those who are geographically close to them (theory of proximity). The implications of understanding proximity and homophily could be used for finding experts in online social networks. The third talk is on The Altruistic Searcher which talks about collaborative web search, their search engine is HeyStaks. An interesting talk now is on Inferring Unobservable Inter-community Links in Large Social Networks where the motivation is that social networks are reconstructed from partially observable data of social interactions, and the social graph is an approximation of the real social graph.
The next session of the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop is starting. First talk is on Surfing a Web of Trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing. I never knew that people would actually offer couches to others to sleep on on Couchsurfing.com! Reciprocity is based on whether the two people offer couches to each other. The second talk is on Virtually There: Exploring Proximity and Homophily in a Virtual World presented by Noshir Contractor. People tend to form social relations with those who are geographically close to them (theory of proximity). The implications of understanding proximity and homophily could be used for finding experts in online social networks. The third talk is on The Altruistic Searcher which talks about collaborative web search, their search engine is HeyStaks. An interesting talk now is on Inferring Unobservable Inter-community Links in Large Social Networks where the motivation is that social networks are reconstructed from partially observable data of social interactions, and the social graph is an approximation of the real social graph.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Social Intelligence and Networking workshop
I'm in the Social Intelligence and Networking workshop where I will present my work called Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network. There is a talk now on a model for collaborative decision making. To model this decision making, they create a two-player game where the computer and user have different goals.
Ben Schneiderman is talking how social computing is becoming widely recognized in schools.Social computing is a transformative moment. Ben is now challenging the audience on the vision of social computing and how we can provide impact in the world. We need to drive social computing to combat natural disasters. The take home message is that is your work focussing on national priorities and impact
Second day of IEEE SocialCom conference
Yesterday, after the conference, there was a very great reception (thanks organizers!) at the Renaissance hotel where I was able to network with important people and eat great food! Today is the second day of the conference with lots of parallel sessions and workshops, so it's going to be a busy day. There is a workshop on Mobile Phones sensing which I'm attending. The first is an invited talk on Social Computing with Mobile Phones and Sensors and the talk is about creating social computing applications using sensory data from the mobile phone, for example, one application for determining where to put recycling bins based on pictures, tagging, geocoding and location traces. Another application is for health and wellness, one example is AndWellness.
The first paper in this workshop is on Touch Me Wear, which is about physical contact with social networks presented by Aaron Beach. They created a touch me shirt where if you hug people, it will show on Facebook who are the people you have hugged. It uses Bluetooth to upload the hug to Facebook through a contact access point. This group is the author of the paper WhozThat. There are lots of mobile social networking companies like BrightKite that can find out who are around you and what are you doing through activity inference. This is a very good example of merging actual physical interaction with social interaction and bringing it to virtual communities like Facebook.
The first paper in this workshop is on Touch Me Wear, which is about physical contact with social networks presented by Aaron Beach. They created a touch me shirt where if you hug people, it will show on Facebook who are the people you have hugged. It uses Bluetooth to upload the hug to Facebook through a contact access point. This group is the author of the paper WhozThat. There are lots of mobile social networking companies like BrightKite that can find out who are around you and what are you doing through activity inference. This is a very good example of merging actual physical interaction with social interaction and bringing it to virtual communities like Facebook.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Session on Social Computing - IEEE SocialCom'09
I'm now in the session on Social Computing, one of the sessions in IEEE SocialCom conference. The first talk that I attended was about Guangxi on the Chinese Web where the presenter showed work that they did in doing an empirical study of Guangxi web sites using PageRank, compared to the general web and structures that come about from the Guangxi web sites by modelling Guangxi and identifying Guangxi links. The question that comes to mind, is how do the Guangxi web social networks compare with regular social networks, and can this help explain why Facebook and Twitter are not popular with Chinese users?
Another interesting paper was on Structure of Neighborhoods in a Large Social Network using a dataset obtained from Orange mobile phone users. They used "characteristic patterns" to identify neighbourhoods. The first talk in the second session on Social Computing is on Deriving Expertise Profiles from Tags. Their assumptions are that the set of tags defines a resource, and that these tags are correlated with skills. They performed a study with Dogear and IBMr, internal IBM social computing systems. They also create a scoring model to correlate tags with skills, and did find out that the tags do represent the skills. It would be interesting to see how finding similar users and experts could be used for tag recommendations. The third paper is on Probabilistic Generative Models of the Social Annotation Process addressing the challenge of uncovering hidden structure in social annotations, can we discover communities of users and categories of related tags. Their inspiration is on text-based topic models and their solution is Community-Based Probabilistic Social Annotation (PSA), instead of modelling tags, they also model users. Users belong to hidden communities so how can we find these communities, also related to my paper that I will present tomorrow. They recover communities and categories based on the Gibbs Sampler and used Delicious for their experiments. The PSA is better at predicting unsessn data, and they also did a user study to determine if the tags were correctly specified in the categories.
The next paper is on Detecting Communities from Bipartite Networks Based on Bipartite Modularities.
Another interesting paper was on Structure of Neighborhoods in a Large Social Network using a dataset obtained from Orange mobile phone users. They used "characteristic patterns" to identify neighbourhoods. The first talk in the second session on Social Computing is on Deriving Expertise Profiles from Tags. Their assumptions are that the set of tags defines a resource, and that these tags are correlated with skills. They performed a study with Dogear and IBMr, internal IBM social computing systems. They also create a scoring model to correlate tags with skills, and did find out that the tags do represent the skills. It would be interesting to see how finding similar users and experts could be used for tag recommendations. The third paper is on Probabilistic Generative Models of the Social Annotation Process addressing the challenge of uncovering hidden structure in social annotations, can we discover communities of users and categories of related tags. Their inspiration is on text-based topic models and their solution is Community-Based Probabilistic Social Annotation (PSA), instead of modelling tags, they also model users. Users belong to hidden communities so how can we find these communities, also related to my paper that I will present tomorrow. They recover communities and categories based on the Gibbs Sampler and used Delicious for their experiments. The PSA is better at predicting unsessn data, and they also did a user study to determine if the tags were correctly specified in the categories.
The next paper is on Detecting Communities from Bipartite Networks Based on Bipartite Modularities.
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