Two Ph.D. students are joining the ebiquity lab this Spring.

Wiboonsak Watthayu is a PhD candidate working with Professor Peng on the application of Bayesian networks to decision support systems with multiple uncertain criteria. He is currently teaching Computer Science in his home country of Thailand and will be on leave for the Spring so he can finish his dissertation. Wiboonsak will be sitting in ITE 368.

Lushan Han is a Ph.D. student who is just joining UMBC this semester. Lushan comes to us from the University of Delaware. Before coming to the US for graduate school, he worked in the computer industry in China and attended Peking University. Lushan is sitting in ITE 377. Lushan will initially be working on Swoogle while he decides what topic to pursue for his dissertation research.

Please welcome our newest ebiquity lab member, Mr. Capresso, recently arrived from Portugal. His sleek, stainless steel thermal vacuum carafe with drip-free pouring spout is said keep coffee hot for up to 4 hours. Even on his first day in the lab he has found ways to contribute to several research projects. Capresso is currently being supported by a generous grant from Google’s Adsense department. Olá Capresso.

The Indeed job search engine has a nifty feature that lets you graph job trends for a set of key words or phrases. Here’s the graph for Semantic Web and RDF, OWL, and Semantic Web services (click to enlarge or modify):

Adding in some other new web technologies (RSS and Web 2.0) helps put this in context:

And mixing in Java provides a lesson in humility:

But maybe there are a lot of ads for baristas that are throwing the numbers off.

Baltimore Sun’s Troy McCullough talks about Pranam Kolari’s work on detecting splogs in his column on Sunday, 15 January 2006. The column also has an associated podcast.

Fighting spam sites - latest battle in the blog wars
On Blogs: Troy McCullough, Jan 15, 2006

It seems that everyone has a blog these days - a spot that others can visit to find out what they have to say about something or nothing in particular. Some blogs are widely valued fonts of specialized wisdom, but many are viewed as uninteresting expressions of personal ego. The difficulty of sorting the good blogs from the bad can be a frustrating challenge - one that is seen as a serious threat to what has been viewed as a vital feature of the Internet.

Now, three University of Maryland, Baltimore County researchers have made a far more disturbing conclusion about blogs. After analyzing millions of blog posts, they have determined that the blogosphere is drowning in spam, the pejorative nickname given to unsolicited Internet advertising. Using data collected by weblogs.com, a prominent blog tracking service, doctoral student Pranam Kolari and professors Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi analyzed 40 million blog updates submitted from 14 million blogs.
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Ping-O-Matic, a great tool and arguably the most popular update ping service is currently down. Matt blogs about a complete revamp. Apparently their current system was accepting pings on just one box!. Technorati is helping them out.

Most of us don’t even bother to check which update ping services our blog software notifies automatically. Now, is this a good enough motivation to notify additional update ping services ? If yes, who is set to gain? Given the recent valuation of weblogs.com, a short downtime of Ping-O-Matic might well create another multi-million dollar asset.

Related:
Attention Wordpress users!!! from Nick Starr, Ping-o-Matic is offline from Jeff Smith, Pingomatic is gone from Alan Fraser.

SemNews is a prototype application being developed by UMBC Ph.D. student Akshay Java that uses a sophisticated text understanding system to interpret summaries of news stories, publishes the results on the semantic web and provides browsing and query services over them. The project is the result of a collaboration between the UMBC’s Institute for Language and Information Technologies and Ebiquity Laboratory with partial support from the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

SemNews monitors a number of news source RSS feeds and processes new stories as they are published. After extracting a story’s metadata, its news summary is interpreted by the OntoSem text analyzer which does a syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis of the text, resulting in its text meaning representation or TMR. A TMR is a language-neutral description (an interlingua) of the meaning conveyed in a natural language text. In addition to providing information about the lexical-semantic dependencies in the text, the TMR represents stylistic factors, discourse relations, speaker attitudes, and other pragmatic factors present in the discourse structure. In doing so, the TMR captures not only the meaning of individual elements in the text, but also the relations between those elements, and captures both propositional and non-propositional components of textual meaning. OntoSem’s TMRs are represented in a custom frame-based representation language and grounded in the Mikrokosmos ontology, an extensive ontology with over 30K concepts and nearly 400K entities.

Each story’s metadata and TMR are translated into the Semantic Web language OWL via the OntoSem2OWL translator developed for this project. The results are then added to a special collection indexed by the Swoogle search engine and also put into a RDF triple store. These are used to support several services enabling people and agents to semantically browse, query and visualize the stories in the collection, enabling access to information that would otherwise not be easy to find using simple keyword based search.

For example, one can browse through the story collection via the ontology to find stories that involve certain concepts, such as a terrorist organization; find all stories that involve an entities in OntoSem’s onomasticon, such as al qaeda or Karbala; visualize the stories on a map based on the locations they reference; or construct an arbitrary query, such as finding “stories in which the nation named Afghanistan was the location of a bombing event.” Users can also define semantic “alerts” as queries over the RDF triple store and/or the Swoogle collection. For each alert, SemNews will generate an RSS feed of the results.

The SemNews system is currently a research prototype that is being used to refine the underlying technologies and to explore how the sophisticated automatic linguistic processing of text can be integrated into the Semantic Web and conventional web applications. Ongoing work on SemNews includes an evaluation of its semantic recall and precision as well as a service that can group and cluster stories based on their semantic representations.

For more information

• Akshay Java, Tim Finin and Sergei Nirenburg, Text understanding agents and the Semantic Web, Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kauai HI, 4-6 January, 2006.
• Sergei Nirenburg and Victor Raskin, Ontological Semantics, September 2004, The MIT Press, Cambridge.
• Li Ding, Tim Finin, Anupam Joshi, Yun Peng, Rong Pan and Pavan Reddivari, Search on the Semantic Web, IEEE Computer, October 2005.

We’ve moved the ebiquity site (and many of our other sites) from blackbox to EB1 — a rack-mounted Sun Fire X2100 running Linux. Poor old Blackbox was underpowered and its fan kept failing. An emergency fan transplant from an even older organ donor helped keep it going, but we all agreed that it should be allowed to retire with dignity. Transition to the new Sun box went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to the hard work of a number of lab members and alumni. EB1 lives in the main machine room in the ECS building. We’ve also added EB2, a Sun Fire V20z, that is being used to host Swoogle’s databases and crawlers. If we are happy with these machines, we plan to get several more to add to our rack in the machine room.

The infrastructure to set up online communities is not all that complicated — the member base is the real asset. I’m not sure that MSM companies will know how to manage them, as the following article suggests.

Get out of MySpace, bloggers rage at Murdoch
Nicholas Wapshott, The Independent, 08 Jan 2006

Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (£355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.
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The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites such as Friendster, Linkedin, revver.com and Facebook.com, News Corp relented and restored the links. However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of “a simple misunderstanding”.

XPOD is a prototype portable music player that can sense a user’s context — what she is doing, her level of activity, mood, etc. — and that to refine its playlist. The device monitors several external variables from a streaming version of the BodyMedia SenseWear to model the user’s context and predict the most appropriate music genre via a neural network.