AAAI-06 will include a special technical track on Artificial Intelligence and the Web. This year’s conference will Celebrate “Fifty Years of Artificial Intellligence” and be held at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center in Boston 16-20 July 2006. The deadline for submitting papers is 16 February 2006.

The track is especially interested in receiving papers in two active research areas: (i) using text and language analysis to interpret and understand natural language text found on the web and (ii) developing and exploiting Semantic Web languages and systems that explicitly encode knowledge using languages such as RDF and OWL. Innovative papers in other areas describing research involving both AI and the Web are also encouraged. See the track web site for details.

If you want a quick and easy way to check out Ruby on Rails, try Instant Rails

“Instant Rails is a one-stop Rails runtime solution containing Ruby, Rails, Apache, and MySQL, all preconfigured and ready to run. No installer, you simply drop it into the directory of your choice and run it. It does not modify your system environment.”

The only downside is that it’s only available in a Windows version, but the site says that there are plans for ports to Linux, BSD, and OSX.

The package comes with a simple cookbook application/site to make it easy to understand how to use Rails. Note: As the installation instructions point out, the path where you install this must not contain any spaces, so don’t, for example, put it in C:\Program Files.

Thanks to Yannis Labrou for telling us about this.

We’ve been trying to identify the first example of a blog post and gradually winding our way further into the past. Of course, it’s a bit of a judgement call, since the blog stereotype is constantly evolving. That, said, here’s ourcurrent best candidate for the world’s first blog post and what metadata we could figure out.

A story in today’s NYT (Bush’s Speech on Iraq War Echoes Voice of an Analyst) points out that the author of the Bush administration’s “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” document is Peter Feaver of Duke University. We know this thanks to the metadata embedded in the pdf:

“The role of Dr. Feaver in preparing the strategy document came to light through a quirk of technology. In a portion of the document usually hidden from public view but accessible with a few keystrokes, the plan posted on the White House Web site showed the document’s originator, or “author” in the software’s designation, to be “feaver-p.”

Moreover, if you look at the rdf metadata you can see that the document was originally titled Our National Strategy for Supporting Iraq before the PR experts got through with it.

By the way, I doubt that the NYT discovered the metadata — Google’s earliest result for “feaver_p” is from 30 November in the form of a comment on a Daily Kos post Daily Kos. Another example of how the blogosphere complements, and sometimes does the leg work for, the MSM.

I heard a report on 411-Song on NPR this morning and it’s a clever idea and an impressive technical accomplishment (I think, anyway).

“How many times have you heard a song and wished you knew who it was or wished you could get it before you forget it? Now you can, just call (866) 411-SONG, here’s how: * Hear a song you love; * Call (866) 411-SONG; * Wait for the beep and hold your cell near the music for just 15 seconds; * We identify the song and send you a text with all the song info (artist and song name) and a link to GET it.”

They claim a database of 2.5M songs with a focus on pop rather than classical, jazz or fringe music. You can try it for free, but after that it’s $.99 a song or $3.99 a month for all you can eat.

NMK, the company behind 411-song, has licensed the proprietary audio recognition technology from Shazam, which offers a similar service in the UK and some other countries.

I wonder how long it will be before the Google offers such a service?

I promised my programming languages class that we’d look at Ruby before the semester is over and now it’s time to deliver. I made this promise partly to force myself to learn more about Ruby and Rails. As it’s often the case, the instructor ends up learning much more than the students. Ruby sure looks interesting, fun and useful. We have a highly functional, semantic-web enabled site built with php and mysql, but the innards are complex and hard to understand. I’m sure that a rails implementation would be much simpler and easier to maintain and extend. I found a long and thoughtful blog post by Eric Kidd comparing Ruby and Lisp.

“Years ago, I looked at Ruby and decided to ignore it. Ruby wasn’t as popular as Python, and it wasn’t as powerful as LISP. So why should I bother?

Of course, we could turn those criteria around. What if Ruby were more popular than LISP, and more powerful than Python? Would that be enough to make Ruby interesting?

Before answering this question, we should decide what makes LISP so powerful. Paul Graham has written eloquently about LISP’s virtues. But, for the sake of argument, I’d like to boil them down to two things:

1. LISP is a dense functional language.
2. LISP has programmatic macros.

As it turns out, Ruby compares well as a functional language, and it fakes macros better than I’d thought.”

Ruby even has continuations, which, as Mikael Brockman shows in his entertaining post continuations on the web, simplify web programming.

Finally, if you want to check out Ruby for the first time, try why the luck stiff’s Interactive Ruby tutorial.

The First International Workshop on AAMAS Workshops (WORKSAAMAS?) has been proposed* for the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.

* Not by us. We were out sick that day.