Between 19 September and 31 October UMBC will host a unique campus soundscape experiment using microRadio broadcasting nodes. Visitors to the Baltimore campus will be able to explore its creative past by taking a walking tour with a small handheld FM receiver to hear a compilation of unique archived recordings of music, conversations and other sounds from former and present faculty at UMBC.

UMBC’s New Media Studio and the IRC Fellows program, in collaboration with Baltimore artist collective, URBANtells, will install “Tune to the Arts,” a live microRadio broadcast of recorded soundscapes. Placed throughout the UMBC campus, FM transmitters will broadcast sound excerpts that include aural expressions derived from various arts archives such as dance, music, theatre, literature, and visual arts, and from individuals in the UMBC community. Each transmission site has been carefully selected based on the meditative quality of its surroundings. At a central location, listeners will check out an FM receiver that has been tuned to 99.7; they will also be provided with a map to guide them as they orient themselves on the UMBC campus. As participants encounter a broadcast, they are then invited to write their reactions in chalk on the nearby sidewalk and/or on provided cards before returning to the checkout point where their comments will become part of the project’s archives.

You can use your own FM receiver tuned to 87.7 MHz or borrow one from the information desk at the UMBC Commons. A map shows the transmission locations. The sites are chalked with a radio tower icon and can be picked up within 100-200 feet. The event is part of UMBC’s 40th anniversary celebration

The current issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article on the DARPA Trauma Pod project.

“Robot surgeons promise to save lives in remote communities, war zones, and disaster-stricken areas

Our role in the project isn’t described, though the University of Maryland is mentioned, but then we are a subcontractor to a subcontractor of a subcontractor. Our research for this project has included work on RFID tagging and tracking and implementing a resource management system that captures a medical encounter record that records information about the surgery as well as the perioperative period. Some of this is described in “Context-Aware System to Create Electronic Medical Records”.

Here’s more from the Spectrum article.

DARPA is promoting its vision of the operating room of the future primarily through its Trauma Pod program. It’s an ambitious initiad RFID tagging and tracking and automatically capturing a medical encounter record that records the entiretive managed by Richard M. Satava, a professor of surgery at the University of Washington. Satava, a hospital commander in the first Gulf War, was prompted by his experiences there to think about how technology could improve battlefield medical care.

Satava’s main objective with Trauma Pod is to use robotics to project the skills of surgeons to precisely where they’re needed on the battlefield. How to do that? Using an unmanned, mobile operating room that expert surgeons can control at a distance. The concept is in line with the current trend of reducing personnel and logistics on the battlefield through the use of autonomous and teleoperated systems. The U.S. Department of Defense expects to reduce deployed personnel by up to 30 percent by 2025.

Behind this vision is a multiphased program led by SRI that includes contributions from the University of Washington, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Maryland, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as from companies like General Dynamics, Intuitive Surgical, General Electric, Robotic Surgical Tech, and Integrated Medical Systems.

There has been a lot of news about the rollout of WiMax. Sprint has already stated that it will roll out national access in 2008. Nortel claims that it has a WiMax router capable of consumer broadband speeds. While WiMax has been well recieved by businesses, they have mostly ignored MANET’s. To them WiMax is simply a better wireless data network than current 3G networks. Researchers have gone the other way almost ignoring WiMax and spending a lot of time studying ad-hoc networks. To us MANET’s provide lots of interesting and tough problems. All of this makes me question the hope of work (my own included) in the field of MANET’s and VANET’s.
WiMax has many desirable capabilities: 30 mile coverage per base station, high transfer rates, and the ability to hold a connection when the reciever is traveling at highway speeds. Compare that with ad-hoc networks that have significant limitations. Some researchers believe there is an ad-hoc horizon. Past some number of hops ad-hoc networks don’t seem to perform well. That group put the horizon at just 3 hops! There are some legal questions with borrowing bandwidth from open base stations. However some groups have gone as far as breaking the law to develop ad-hoc networks. Ad-hoc networks also have many of the trust issues associated with P2P networks.
Ad-Hoc networks do have the advantage of working in situations where no infrastructure exists, such as in military, emergency response, or space exploration settings. Outside of this limited set of circumstances I doubt that MANET’s with no guarantee of quality of service will be used. WiMax just seems so simple and effective that it will be the network of choice for most consumer products.
Can anybody tell me a good reason why I am wrong about this?

Splogs need not always be bad.

Splogs -> Spa Blogs

So here in the splogs(spa blogs) to come, will be some tips of joy and points of ponder to help you in the continuing quest for the perfect spa or to “perfect” your spa.

Splogs -> Spatial Blogs

Splogs - or spatial blogs ..blog entries on a specific location such as a local historic building, park or other piece of real estate, would be an invaluable tool ..

As the world get flatter, entity disambiguation will only get harder.

Zdnet reports on a new vision for a wearable UWB wearable hub.

HP has revealed its vision for the future of mobile devices by unveiling, as a concept, a wearable wireless communications hub. The hub — which resembles a wristwatch and would be worn on the arm — would handle a user’s connectivity requirements. All the individual’s other mobile devices would then communicate solely with the hub.

Sounds like a good idea, but it’s posiiton somewhere in the fututr, when old geezers will still be using Bluetooth devices.

McKinney said users would set up a personal area network using ultra wideband (UWB), but also Bluetooth if they were still using today’s devices. All the radios for external connectivity — whether 3G, WiFi, WiMax or any other bearer — would be contained in the hub.

An earlier version will be available, but just don’t sit down

McKinney estimated that it will take until 2016 for a hub resembling a wristwatch to be commercially available. Before that it would go through several iterations, he said, first appearing as a credit card- sized box that could be carried in the user’s pocket.

Second life! Here is google video at the techtalk.

I was amazed by this creativity!

Second life is a “3d virtual world” in our real world. You can walk around it, can see other users around you. You can chat with them in the virtual world.

Creative programmers can create items like basket, house etc in the virtual world and others can buy it with the virtual currency! Then one can cash virtual $ into real world $.

Here is a complete story.

Mob R&D isn’t exactly like Mob Software, but I think it’s a good description for the Netflix Prize competition. Netflix will award a $1M prize for anyone who can achieve 10% improvement over their current Cinematch movie recommendation system.

“The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love.”

What’s amazing is that their status board shows that after less than two days, more than 6,000 teams have registered and 20 of them have already submitted results! None, of course, has achieved the 10% improvement required for the $1M grand prize or even the 1% threshold for a consolation $50K progress prize. Yet.

This is a great example of getting a mob of people to do your R&D for you in the hopes of winning a prize. However, unlike the DARPA Grand Challenge or the X Prize competitions, this one only requires an inexpensive (as in $1-2K) personal computer to compete. Moreover, the underlying domain, movies, is one that we all know quite well, at least from a consumer’s point of view. Talk about a flat world!

If there end up being 100 serious teams in the competition and the grand prize is awarded, it will have cost Netflix only $10K per team. If only a $50K progress award is made (say for a 5% improvement) the cost would be only $500/team. Not bad. For any prize winner, grand or progress, Netflix gets “an irrevocable, royalty free, fully paid up, worldwide non-exclusive license” to the algorithm.

The NYT has a story in today’s paper (Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.) on a recent DHS basic research contract to extract opinions from news articles.

“A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas. Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.”

In this case the DHS consortium (University Affiliate Center) consists of researchers from Cornell, Pittsburgh and Utah.

The article points out the potential for inappropriate use of such systems to monitor the opinions and beliefs of reporters, news sources and even ordinary citizens.

“Ultimately, the government could in a semiautomated way track a statement by specific individuals abroad or track reports by particular foreign news outlets or journalists, rating comments about American policies or officials.”

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the effort recalled the aborted 2002 push by a Defense Department agency to develop a tracking system called Total Information Awareness that was intended to detect terrorists by analyzing troves of information. “That is really chilling,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “And it seems far afield from the mission of homeland security.”

<opinion>
How worried should we be? I can see some real dangers for misuse of information extraction, especially in an age where so many ordinary citizens publish content on the web and in their blogs. However, there are many good and useful applications as well and the techniques are already being developed and extended for many applications.

Sentiment detection and opinion extraction are hot topics right now. A simple Google Scholar search turns up thousands of papers on the topic published in the past two years. One of the 2006 TREC (Text Retreival Conference) tracks is on opinion extraction from blog posts. Several companies offer a service to clients which tracks opinions expressed on blogs about the company’s products and services. And then there is Opinmind, a free web service that retrieves blog posts expressing an opinion about a topic described by a query string.

Two of the researchers involved in this DHS project have this to say about the issue.

Professors Cardie and Wiebe said they understood that there were legitimate questions about the ultimate use of their software. “There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government,” Professor Wiebe said. “But it doesn’t mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world.”

I agree with this position. We are not going to be able to control the problem by halting research on natural language understanding and information extraction. The technology is neither good nor bad — just its applications. Linguists and Computer Scientists have been working on improving the ability for machines to understand language for more than 50 years. The positive applications vastly outweigh the potential negative ones, even within the realm of intelligence and national security. Our government has an obligation to understand how its actions and policies are viewed by the press and the public around the world.

What is needed, IMHO, is a system of oversight and appropriate transparency, to ensure, as much as possible, that governments and corporations do not misuse the technology to do inappropriate things, like build dossiers of the beliefs and opinions of individual citizens.
</opinion>

Lee Feignenbaum has a good SPARQL FAQ. This is a good place to send people who are familiar with databases and with RDF and the like but new to SPARQL. I liked the way the answers automatically show and hide themselves, which seems like this is a common javascript package for FAQs.

Netflix has announced a one million dollar prize for the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations based on personal preferences.

To win the prize, which is to be announced today, a contestant will have to devise a system that is more accurate than the company’s current recommendation system by at least 10 percent. And to improve the quality of research, Netflix is making available to the public 100 million of its customers’ movie ratings, a database the company says is the largest of its kind ever released.

If no one wins the prize after a year, Netflix will award $50K for the submission that does best performing system that improves performance by more than one percent.

This dataset will be a great asset to researchers working on user modelling, machine learning and recommendation systems. There may be some privacy problems that surface, however. Given that you know I am a Netflx customer and a few unsuual moves that I’ve received from Netflix, can you pick out my profile? If so, it might reveal a few movies that I don’t want the general public to know I rated highly, like Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Just ask Robert Bork about it.

… as seen at Blaugh, which to a large extent is true. Just couldn’t resist re-posting this.

Though blogger has a very large user base, a high percent of newly created blogs are spam (splogs). Here’s a new farm (http://digital-color-cameravrnlibbe.blogspot.com/) our splog filters noticed yesterday. Warning! potentially objectionable content