Peter Harsha reports that the Senate Appropriations Committee included language in the Senate version of the FY 06 Defense Appropriations bill that strips $55M from DARPA’s Cognitive Computing program, specifically “Learning, Reasoning, and Integrated Cognitive Systems”. That’s a 50% cut in the program. Peter points out that this runs counter to recent congressional sentiment that the role of computer science, especially university-led fundamental computer science, should be strengthened at DARPA.

There’s been a lot of talk about splogs lately (e.g., here, there and everywhere). There was even a note in the Washington Post’s Computer Security blog today. We recently finished a paper on using SVMs to recognize splogs

Pranam Kolari, Tim Finin, and Anupam Joshi, SVMs for the Blogosphere: Blog Identification and Splog Detection, TR-CS-05-13, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 8 October 2005.

The paper compares results using different feature sets for the task of splog recognition as well as some other simple tasks. We’ve submitted this to the AAAI Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs.

FeedShake looks like a very useful service for merging, sorting and filtering multiple RSS feeds. You give it a set of feeds and it produces a URL for a new RSS 2.0 feed. You can optionaly filter the feed items, selecting only those which have or don’t have certain words. Once interesting design decision is that they don’t really parse the input feeds, but rather just look for <item>…</item> blocks in them. I don’t know if this is a good idea or not. I guess the onus is on the users to start with reasonable input feeds.

Microsoft research has and interesting project called VirtualWiFi — a virtualization architecture for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards for Windows XP.

“It abstracts a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. Therefore, VirtualWiFi allows a user to simultaneously connect his machine to multiple wireless networks using just one WLAN card.”

A prototype implementation is available for XP. This allows you, for example, to make an ad hoc connection to another computer will simultaneously making an infrastructure connection to a AP for internet access.

Rob Clyde, Vice President of Technology, Office of the CTO @ Symantec Corporation presented his keynote today morning. Along with the usual security stuff he reported on some interesting statistics –

• Phishing is becoming an increasing threat as 3 to 4% of users respond to such mails — much higher than traditional e-mail spam.
• In the first half of 2005 phishing increased from 2.99 Million e-mails/day to 5.7 Million e-mails/day.
• 31% of online consumers are buying less due to increased web security threat.
• US leads in the number of hacked machine reports followed closely by Germany.
• Broadband penetration is actually increasing security threats. Many personal machines are now vulnerable to hackers using them as web bots for DOS attacks.
• DOS Attacks are now a business. Such attacks are now available for as low as US $300. Where?

Some other interesting comments ..

• The increasing speed at which worms propogate are now demanding better use of proactive measures.
• In the absence of such measures Akamai and it’s expandable bandwith pipes are the only solution against DOS Attacks. Looks like more revenues to Akamai in the days to come! Maybe Akamai’s stock is in for a ride.

Finally, and of importance to us — Symantec is now working on compating web (and blog) spam. They see this as being one of the next big security threat.

Paper presentations at CASCON 2005 started today. This annual event is sponsored by IBM Toronto Labs and IBM CAS in co-operation with National Research Council Canada. Initial impressions — a very good place to demonstrate/present work relevant to IBM.

CASCON 2005, the 15th annual international conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.

Check out CASCON blog for information as it happens.

Google has added a capability to tag bookmarked sites (link, link). The tags aren’t public so this doesn’t support social tagging. Yet.

“To bookmark a page, just visit it through Google Search, get to it in your Search History, and click the star icon. Then click “editâ€? and type in any tags under the “Labelsâ€? heading. You can even add some notes in the box underneath that.

Once you’ve saved a bunch of sites, you can view them by clicking the Bookmarks heading in the left sidebar. You can show multiple tags at once by clicking all of their check boxes.” (link)

The interface seems clumsy and the private-only tags are not very useful, but this will no doubt grow into something significant.

BBC reports:

The web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom, says a study … Growth also comes from the rise in blogging, in which users write regularly updated web journals on any and every topic. Some blog sites host the journals on their own domain but many bloggers have taken the step of setting up their own site and installing blogging software on that.
.. many spammers are setting up many domains that try to push their products to the top of search rankings.

Interesting is the additional note about how blogging is driving growth to an extent. Concern is the mention of spam pages (mainly in the context of blogs) and how they are skewing some of these numbers!

A few months back I had a discussion on an interesting concept initiated by our group, but was not yet public. Response from the person I was talking to was short — “We will uncloak soon”. He eventually did, and at the right time. This brings me to a interesting question — “What does it mean to uncloak on Web 2.0?”

A recent post we and others (here, here, here and here) made about Sphere - a new blog search engine based on initiation by Om Malik is an interesting example. Om, an A-List blogger now posts on yahoo blog search engine and how Sphere is better. Some readers would have noticed del.icio.us count at the bottom in our previous post. What was 3 then is now 47! Moreover it is (was) widely discussed on the blogosphere.

It’s all a result of Web 2.0. In this context the Blogosphere and Folksonomies. Both have been able to generate higher visibility and provide fresher content. You no longer have to wait for centuries before a traditional web search engine indexes them and find out what people were (! not are) talking about you. You know what is being said NOW — or rather as Technorati rightly puts it — We are in the The World Live Web.

Web 2.0 has then an important implication — there is a new way of uncloaking

• Initiate discussion on your product.
• Monitor Buzz (the key).
• Uncloak!

In the context of Sphere it’s when buzz is at the peak. One of the creators of Sphere, Tony Conrad says, they are still waiting and will uncloak next week. Is NOW the peak buzz — well, arguable. Are they waiting for the second peak following a trough — well may be, or are they waiting for the buzz to continue - well only time will tell.

Bottomline — Web 2.0 has made sure that the Web aspect is even more important and you know what is being said about you NOW. It’s not just about “discussions on the Web”, but also about “when?”. Hope Sphere Beta is uncloaked on time. That said, Technorati has been doing fairly well in the middle of all competition. Good job!

The Semantic Web and Policy Workshop will be held at the 4th International Semantic Web Conference on 7 November 2005 in Galway, Ireland. The workshop is focused on two research areas:

• policy-based frameworks for the semantic web for security, privacy, trust, information filtering, accountability, etc.
• applying semantic web technologies in policy frameworks for application domains such as grid computing, networking, storage systems, pervasive computing and specifying agent communities norms.

In addition to presentations of nine submitted papers, Ora Lassila will give an invited talk on “Applying Semantic Web in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing: Will Policy-Awareness Help?” and a panel of policy researchers will initiate a discussion of “The 2005 Web Policy Zeitgeist”. The proceedings is available and participants can register at the online.

DMOZ in 2005 is a short note from Phil Craven pronouncing dead the once innovative and exciting idea of a community created web directory.

“It was a fine concept, and it looked promising for a while, but the idea of DMOZ becoming the definitive catalog of the Web is gone. Improvements in the search engines eclipsed its value, and the growth rate of the Web meant that it could never achieve its goal. It began with an excellent concept, and they gave it a good shot, but it didn’t work. The continuing growth rate of the Web ensures that it can never work. It continues as a good directory of a large number of web sites, but that is all. And not many people use directories when the search engines produce such good results, and so quickly.”

One supporting fact is that there are only about 3000 active editors and a backlog of over one million submitted links for them to review.

The note caused me to wonder about what’s in store for today’s popular community created, structured knowledge source — Wikipedia. Are it’s days numbered?

Will we will see the development of a machine generated and maintained collection of articles on different topics? Topics that themselves are identified and selected by the machines, as they are in Google News

The development of such a Googlepedia would certainly qualify as a grad challenge — one that might knowledge representation, semantic web technologies, natural language understanding, natural language generation as well as the ability to form a neutral and objective view in the face of conflicting information.

So maybe Wikipedia is safe for a generation.

We all know how blog search engines have made themselves a name, by tuning traditional IR techniques to the Blogosphere. Enter Sphere. It is in “stealth mode” now — not even a Beta. Over at GigaOm, Om Malik has some interesting thoughts on Sphere. Some excerpts —

Think Blog Rank, Instead of Google’s Page Rank. The company has also taken a few steps to out-smart the spammers, and tend to push what seems like spam-blog way down the page. Not censuring but bringing up relevant content first. They have pronoun checker. Too many I’s could mean a personal blog, with less focused information. That has an impact on how the results show up on the page …

The coolest feature they have is matching Blog content with relevant web articles from mainstream media.

The bottomline is of course tuning (there is still a lot of opporutunity here) relevancy to the Blogosphere. They are expected to launch their Beta soon. Current del.icio.us count — 3(only). Watch this space!