Yahoo and Google have been arguing about whose index is bigger. The disagreement was touched off when Yahoo claimed that its index provided access to “over 20 billion items”. Google demurred. Researchers at the University of Illinois NCSA just announced the results of an experiment designed to settle the question. Their scheme used a Perl program that generated over 10K random two word queries drawn from the ispell dictionary. Comparing the number of results found by each search engine for these queries identified a clear winner. See their report for the results.

A last week’s monthly meeting of BayCHI, a local chapter of ACM CHI, featured a panel Are You Ready for Web 2.0? with David Sifry (Technorati), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr/Yahoo), Paul Rademacher (HousingMaps), Thomas Vander Wal (PersonalInfoCloud.com), and Rashmi Sinha (Moderator). Audio and pictures are available. Moderator Rashmi blogged about Web 2.0: Data, Metadata and Interface and Bill Scott has a synopsis.

This new automatic door from Japan creates a minimal opening for an object to pass through. The door is composed of a series of strips which open when activated by the infrared sensors on their edges. It’s said that the door also can identify people (RFID?) for security. Such doors can help manage energy loss in a a room, garage or freezer and protect a space from unwanted dust, pollen, bugs, and germs. Plus, they are cooler than the doors on Star Trek. See this video.

Here’s a marketing tip: get the door to occasionally say “Gee, you’ve lost weight, haven’t you?” and it will sell like hotcakes.

The CRA Bulletin has an item on an NSF brief describing the state of Science and Engineering graduate enrollment.

“While overall graduate enrollment in science and engineering programs reached an all-time high in fall 2003, it actually declined 3 percent in computer science. CS was the only field to see a drop and this was its first decrease since 1995. In addition, CS experienced the biggest drop (23 percent) among S&E fields in the number of full-time students with temporary visas who were enrolled for the first time.”

BlackDog is a a USB powerd linux server that’s about the size of an iPod mini. Plug it in to a host computer’s USB port and it takes over the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and network connections. Remove it and everything on the host is returned to its original state. It’s powered by a 400Mhz PPC running Debian with 64M RAM and 256 or 512 MB of flash memory. Cost? $240 for the 512M version.

IBM researchers have prototyped SoulPad, which uses an auto-configuring operating system along with a hibernated virtual machine on a USB disk to enable a user to suspend one’s personal computing state on one PC and resume it on another. The USB disk essentially carries the soul of the user’s PC while the host PCs provide environments where the soul can come alive. For more information, see this paper, which receive the best paper award at the 3rd International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services:

Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads, Ramon Caceres, Casey Carter, Chandra Narayanaswami, M. T. Raghunath, Proc of ACM/USENIX MobiSys 2005, pp. 65-78.

The ability to walk up to any computer, personalize it, and use it as one’s own has long been a goal of mobile computing research. We present SoulPad, a new approach based on carrying an auto-configuring operating system along with a suspended virtual machine on a small portable device. With this approach, the computer boots from the device and resumes the virtual machine, thus giving the user access to his personal environment, including previously running computations. SoulPad has minimal infrastructure requirements and is therefore applicable to a wide range of conditions, particularly in developing countries. We report our experience implementing SoulPad and using it on a variety of hardware configurations. We address challenges common to systems similar to SoulPad, and show that the SoulPad model has significant potential as a mobility solution.

ACM SIGART, in collaboration with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, has instituted an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. Award winners will receive an honorarium and will be invited to give a talk at the annual Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) Conference.

This award is specifically intended to recognize researchers whose current research is influencing the field. Candidates will therefore be evaluated based on the quality and significance of their research contributions over the last five years. It is expected that at least some of these contributions should have been reported at one or more Autonomous Agents or AAMAS conferences. Previous winners of the SIGART Autonomous Research Award were Milind Tambe (2005), Makoto Yokoo (2004), Nick Jennings (2003), Katia Sycara (2002), and Tuomas Sandholm (2001).

The award committee is now seeking nominations for next year’s award. Nominations can be
submitted by email to the Awards Committee Chair, Katia Sycara ( katia@cs.cmu.edu). The nomination should specify

• Name of person being nominated;
• Name and contact information for the person making the nomination;
• A statement describing the reasons why the nominee should be considered for the
  award.

Nominations are requested no later than October 30, 2005.

Google finally adds RSS/Atom support for Google News.

The new feature will allow Google News users to set up RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom content syndication feeds for specific Google News sections, such as entertainment, business or world news, and for specific terms users search for on Google News, such as “George Bush,” “diabetes” or “space shuttle.

More..

I am more interested in “specific terms” and how good(fast) a job Google does on it. Very soon its going to cross paths with Technorati’s Watchlist.

(Via Andrew Lark)

The Web and search technology makes it hard to keep any information secret today. I received an offhand revelation from an official, who is no partisan gunslinger, that a Google operative has found and posted Albert Einstein’s 1905 Annual Performance Review.

IBM is getting notice for it’s UIMA project. See recent articles from Reuters, CCN and ZDNET.

UIMA stands for Unstructured Information Analysis Architecture which is described as “An Open, Industrial-Strength Platform for Unstructured Information Analysis and Search”. I’d characterize it as a framework for integrating various natural language processing components in a way that supports search and other applications.

One of UIMA’s features, in fact the glue that holds it all together, is the Common Analysis System (CAS) is the subsystem that handles data exchanges between the different components and unstructured information management (UIM) applications. Alas, CAS’s common representation scheme is not based on RDF. It might be compatible, though, both as a KR framework and at a technology level since CAS has an XML serialization. We’ll have to look into this — if anyone has an opinion on this, please comment. UIMA certainly could be a useful framework for systems that add RDF annotations to text.

UIMA is a project that has been going on for some years at IBM — Alfred Spector spoke about it at WWW2002 and see this CNN article from Jnaury 2003 — so maybe it’s not surprising that it has developed its own knowledge representation language. But I think it could only strengthen the ambitious project to use a real standard like RDF. The reasons are many — it has a sound semantics, a significant community of researchers and developers are helping it to evolve, a large and growing amount of information is already published in RDF, and some key companies have committed to using it for metadata.

The UIMA Software Development Kit is currently available on from IBM’s alphaWorks Site and IBM has announced that it will make the UIMA core framework open-source. The UMIA SDK is a Java implementation of the framework and comes with an Eclipse-based development environment that includes a set of tools and utilities for using UIMA.

A good introduction to UIMA is

T. Götz and O. Suhre , Design and implementation of the UIMA Common Analysis System, IBM Systems Journal, Volume 43, Number 3, 2004.

That same issue has several other articles on UIMA.

Google Maps EZ is a free resource for embedding a Google map on a web page without writing any Javascript or learning Google’s map API. It uses standard HTML syntax with a few special keywords in a way that allows search engines to index the map contents. I tried it out to make this custom map for visitors to UMBC. Please suggest some other places to put on the map. I can attest to it being easy. And fun.

I’ve been thinking of how we could use Flickr to publish our photos in a useful and interesting way. The ebiquity web site has, of course, it’s own facility, for uploading, storing and annotating photos (thanks Filip). But there are some advantages to using Flickr. Flickr is very popular so using it might increase our visibility and allow us to connect to more people. For example, searching Technorati for blog posts tagged with ‘pervasive computing’ shows the most recent public Flickr photos with that tag (if there were any!). Flickr also has some useful features like tags, notes, comments, groups, easy interface, etc. and is likely to continue to add innovations as the Web evolves.

Our Ebiquity photo site has some interesting, research oriented features like being able to add arbitrary annotations that are rendered and published as RDF. And, of course, we have complete control over it, allowing us to implement and experiment with new ideas for tagging, semantic web annotations, etc. It’s a valuable testbed, one that most people and groups don’t have.

So, can we have the best of both?

One idea is to use EBWEB as the primary source for our photos, but to add code to automatically upload new photos to the ebqiuity Flickr site. The code would also add appropriate titles, tags and comments and include in the comments a link to the OWL metadata. Flickr limits the HTML one can put in comments, so we can’t do anything fancy like embed rdf or use microformats.

But, maybe there are other ways we can use Flickr. If any ebsters (ebites?, ebiquiters?) want to play around with the ebiquity Flickr site, let me know and I’ll email you the site username and password.