The ACM named Edmund Clarke, E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis winners of the prestigious 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their research on Model Checking.

From the ACM announcement:

“Their innovations transformed this approach from a theoretical technique to a highly effective verification technology that enables computer hardware and software engineers to find errors efficiently in complex system designs. This transformation has resulted in increased assurance that the systems perform as intended by the designers. … Clarke of Carnegie Mellon University, and Emerson of the University of Texas at Austin, working together, and Sifakis, working independently for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Grenoble in France, developed this fully automated approach that is now the most widely used verification method in the hardware and software industries.” (link)

NYU Professor Ted Sider has made a draft of his new book, Logic for Philosophy, available on the Web. He describes it this way:

“This will be a textbook for a “logic literacy” course. It was designed for beginning graduate students in philosophy, but it is also suitable for advanced undergraduate courses. The goal is to introduce students to the logic they need to know in order to read contemporary philosophy journal articles. It emphasizes breadth rather than depth. For example, it discusses modal logic and counterfactuals, but does not prove the central metalogical results for predicate logic (completeness, undecidability, etc.) It will be published by Oxford University Press.

This looks like a good resource for many AI students who need a good overview of logic and don’t want or need to delve into the proofs. Spotted on LTU.

Google base was announce at Nov 15, 2005. It lets users publishing their information in a Semantic Web way: (i) defining an instance of class; (ii)letting users creating and filling attribute-value pair (value in text though); (iii) letting users add keywords as tag; and (iv) allow bulk upload. I wonder if R. Guha is behind it. It is could be a killer app to web directory services, including classifieds like Craig’s List.

(source: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/11/google_to_go_ha.html)
UPDATE: Greg Yardley has evidence from a Microsoft blogger that the software giant is also targeting the online classified market with its new Freemont project.

I’m still hoping some improvement from its beta version:
(1) add the total of items at the front page like below (the number was collected as of today’s snapshot)

(2) can I browse every item without being bound by 1000 items limit?
(3) what if many people have create many item types?
(4) can it recommend well-used attributes?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brooks, T.A. (2004). “The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google”, Information Research, 9(3) has an interesting take on things.

“The characteristic tension of the culture of lay indexing is between genuine information and spam. Google’s success requires maintaining the secrecy of its parsing algorithm despite the efforts of Web authors to gain advantage over the Googlebot. Legacy methods of asserting meaning such as the META keywords tag and Dublin Core are inappropriate in the lawless meaning space of the open Web. A writing guide is urged as a necessary aid for Web authors who must balance enhancing expression versus the use of technologies that limit the aggregation of their work.”

Was it ever so? In the world of an earlier generation, of every earlier generation, was there also this tension between those with information to promote and the mediators, publishers and gatekeepers? Does it matter that the mediator is an automaton, as foreshadowed in Metropolis?

UMBC website now publishes RSS for news and Podcasts.
(More )

Good move - subscribed!
Atleast now I will follow what should have been regularly checked by all students at UMBC.

Peter Mikhalenko has a short article on xml.com on SKOS.

“SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), recently introduced by the W3C, is a model for expressing knowledge organization systems in a machine-understandable way, within the framework of the Semantic Web. The SKOS Core Vocabulary is an RDF (Resource Description Framework) application. Using RDF allows data to be linked and merged with other RDF data by Semantic Web applications. SKOS Core provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes, including thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, terminologies, glossaries, and other types of controlled vocabulary.”

The Semantic Web And Policy Workshop (SWPW) will be held on 7 November 2005 in conjunction with the 4th International Semantic Web Conference in Galway, Ireland. The workshop will cover policy-based frameworks for the semantic web as well as the use of semantic web technologies in policy frameworks for other application domains such as multiagent systems, grid computing, networking, and storage systems. Submitted papers should describe original research results or articulate a position, describe an application or demonstrate a working language or system. Papers must be submitted electronically by 25 July 2005; decisions will be announced on 5 September with final camera ready copy due on 30 September.