A colleague has been testing the scalablilty of a triple store using synthetic triples. He asked if we could package up a large collection of real triples caught in the wild by Swoogle. After talking a bit, it was decided that having them as a simple SQL database dump would be the most convenient form.

10M Triples is an SQL database dump containing a table that of about 10.4M RDF triples extracted from the Swoogle cache on June 15, 2005. The size of the compressed file is 162M and when uncompressed its size is 1.7G.

Spurpurl confesses on perlmonks.org (via Lemonodor):

Hello fellow monks, my name is spurperl and I’m a Lisp addict,

My story may sound familiar to many of you – it’s been years that I’m having a love-neglect relationship with Lisp and its brethen. Since I learned Lisp, I’m in awe for its elegancy, how right it feels, and how naturally it lends itself to the solution of tough problems.

But… I’m just failing to find practical applications for it in my work / hacking. Any time I think of writing something, I usually end up with Perl – a language I know much better, am quite productive with, that has tons of libraries and a terrific place to consult gurus (the monastery, of course).
…
Lately a decision blooms in my heart – to detach, once and for all. To overcome my addiction to this language. I learned it, coded in it, I understand it. I was enlightened with its spirit, but I want to move on. I want to write code in my precious Perl without feeling guilty for leaving Lisp behind.
…
One idea that sprang to my mind is to break the illusion. Namely, find Lisp code I found elegant, Lispy and beautiful, and rewrite it in Perl, with code having the same elegant traits.I feel I’m not the only one with these doubts, that many Perl hackers feel that “I like Lisp and always wanted to deepen my knowledge in it, but I just want to get my job done”.
…

source

As shown in left picture, professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University has build a humanoid robot. It looks more like a human being than the one in the right picture.

‘When a robot looks too much like the real thing, it’s creepy,’ Repliee Q1expo developer Ishiguro said. ‘But if they resemble human beings, it also makes communication easier.’

I came across this interesting collaborative opinions application called StumbleUpon. If you like web surfing, this is the tool for you.

StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click Stumble!, you’ll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other SU members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers � you will automatically ‘stumble upon’ each others favorites sites.

James Odell (email@jamesodell.com) sent the following announcement to the agents mailing list today laying out the current situation on FIPA and IEEE.

FIPA, the standards organization for agents and multiagent systems, was officially accepted by the IEEE as its eleventh standards committee on 8 June 2005.

FIPA was originally formed as a Swiss-based organization in 1996 to produce software standards specifications for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. Since its foundation, FIPA has played a crucial role in the development of agent standards and has promoted a number of initiatives and events that contributed to the development and uptake of agent technology. Furthermore, many of the ideas originated and developed in FIPA are now coming into sharp focus in new generations of Web/Internet technology and related specifications.

Now, it is time to move standards for agents and agent-based systems into the wider context of software development in general. In short, agent technology now needs to work and integrate with non-agent technologies. To this end, the IEEE Computer Society has formally accepted FIPA to become part of its family of standards committees.

The new “FIPA Standards Committee (SC)² will start by bringing all the existing FIPA standards to the new IEEE-based organization. After that, the members and working groups of the FIPA SC, still under creation, will work to both improve existing standards and adopt new standards that the agent community vitally needs. Furthermore, the FIPA SC will expand its scope to include human and machine interaction, social and business type interactions, agent technology interoperability and other areas where the membership see fit. It will also work closely with other communities and bodies such as Semantic Web, W3C, GRID, Global Grid Forum, Web Services, BPM, etc. Within this new context, then, the FIPA SC will be able to better evolve and position itself as a unique player in the IT world — and thus help promote the deployment of software agents by end users and industry.

A presentation and discussion of the ³new FIPA² will occur at the upcoming AAMAS conference on 29 July 2005 at 10:30-12:30h. The purpose of the meeting is to both present what the FIPA SC is all about and elicit suggestions as to where it should go. In particular, this meeting will:

• Discuss the changes in the FIPA organization as it transitions to the IEEE Computer Society
• State the mission and general direction of the FIPA SC, as it currently stands.
• Indicate how to become member of the FIPA IEEE SC.
• Discuss how to contribute to the FIPA SC in this important phase and to elicit suggestions as to where it should go.
• Present a strawman set of objectives under which the FIPA SC can start operating effectively and efficiently.
• Solicit suggestions and feedback from meeting participants
• Discuss next steps, the upcoming FIPA SC meeting, and conclusion

If you have any questions about this announcement, please contact the FIPA board members at board@fipa.org.

“Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San Francisco, and eventually other major US cities. The move would trump Amazon’s A9 service, which offers two-dimensional photos of buildings on US city streets. The trucks would drive along every San Francisco street using the lasers to measure the dimensions of buildings, to create a 3D framework onto which digital photos can be mapped. This would complement the mostly top-down view of San Francisco available through Google’s Keyhole satellite photo application.” (LINK).

The Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory has a related project funded by Google that is building technology for digitizing commercial city blocks from sideways-looking video taken from a vehicle driving down the street.

It would be great if we developed a simple framework to allow arbitrary RDF encoded metadata to be associated with the (logical) locations and objects identified and modeled in such projects.

Trading virtual objects may sound zany, but it seems people can get motivated enough to kill for them, like this tragic incident.

Who owns virtual resources? Can there be rights over objects/artifacts in virtual gaming worlds and for that matter the Internet? Do we own email messages sent or received on Hotmail or Gmail? Is this really different from privacy? Is this DRM?

$9m trade revenues on eBay for such artifacts, gives an idea of the scope of the problem.

DARPA announced Monday the 40 Grand Challenge teams selected to advance to the National Qualification Event at the California Speedway in Fontana, September 27 to October 5, 2005. Half of the the 40 teams will be selected to compete for the $2 million prize in the Grand Challenge event on October 8, 2005. DARPA selected the semifinalists from a field of 118 entrants, using results from on-site visits where vehicles had to autonomously navigate a narrow 200-meter course that contained turns and randomly placed obstacles. The 40 semi-finalist teams come from a variety of backgrounds including universities, individuals, corporations, and a high school. See slashdot for more info.

Dr. Cynthia Sims Parr is joining the ebiquity lab to work on the Spire project. Dr. Parr is a Research Associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS ) an the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr. Parr received BS in biology from Cornell University and an MS and PhD from University of Michigan, where she studied social behavior and vocal communication in American crows. She studied molecular systematics and behavioral ecology of magpies during a postdoctoral fellowship at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. She served as the Content Development Director for the Animal Diversity Web project at the University of Michigan she uses web technology to help instructors at many institutions teach about animal ecology and evolution. At the University of Maryland she has worked on a number of projects using advanced computer technologies to support research and education in the Biological sciences.

IBM seems to have captured the gaming console market, becoming the sole chip provider for PS3, XBox 360 and Nintendo.

Apple moves on in search of greener pastures, switching to Intel x86 chips. Mac users will probably see dropped prices and increasing support for x86 applications by end of 2007. Seems to be win-win situation for Intel, Apple and Mac enthusiasts! We might finally see non-linux robust software on x86 after all .

Pirelli announced that their X-Pressure AcousticBlue tire pressure monitoring system will be able to send low-pressure warnings to your Bluetooth mobile phone. The the X-Pressuxre AcousticBlue is said to be available in September 2005. (spotted on Gizmodo) I’d guess that this will require explicit pairing with your phone. Maybe this is a good application for the use of RDF and a simple automated publish-subscribe protocol. I’d subscribe to messages tagged as warnings from devices owned by me, a member of my family or University lab. Helpful service stations would subscribe to public warnings from devices that are part of a vehicle. Also required would be a simple security and privacy mechanisms, perhaps driven by RDF-grounded policies used by both the sender and receiver. I might use such a policy to delegate access to securityWarnings from my office computer to our department sysadmin. and he would configure his policy to accept such delegations from current department members. Rounding out the picture would be a reasonable approach to the GUI, lest we reinvent Clippy. I might want to configure my phone to show only urgentWarnings immediately and log the rest for viewing on demand.

Yahoo has announced that it is expanding its research labs and intends to and “build Yahoo! Research Labs into a world-class center for scientific innovation and invention and foster an environment that attracts the most talented scientists from around the world.” Usama Fayyad has been appointed to lead the research lab, who’s goals are defined as follows:

“Yahoo! Research Labs will develop the underlying scientific foundation to address complex challenges in areas including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility. Of particular focus is the design of algorithms that will support technologies and interactions to scale to Yahoo!’s hundreds of millions of users.”