UMBC is designing a new home page, about to be unvealed by the end of September. What was interested to note was the use of blogging as a mechanism to solicit user input. UMBC’s Webteam blog notes –

UMBC is providing a “sneak peek” of its new homepage, which begins the process of redesigning UMBC’s entire web presence by summer 2006. If you’d like to comment on the new homepage or the process for developing the site to follow, use the comment form below.

However I must add, I agree with many of the comments on the blog. It would be nice to see atleast some of these comments incorporated into the new design.

On a similar note, I wonder when UMBC will host blogs of students on the same lines as many other universities.

UCSD Physicist Jorge Hirsch has proposed the h-index as a new bibliometric measure of a scholar’s impact based on the number of publications and how often each is cited. See this story in Physics World for an overview. H-index can be defined as follows:

A person who has published N papers has h-index H iff they have H papers each of which has at least H citations and N-H papers with fewer than H citations.

You can easily estimate an author’s h-index using Google Scholar since the results are ranked (more or less) by the number of citations which are shown in the summaries. Try looking for papers authored by Turing. His 15 most cited papers all had at least 17 citations. His 16th most cited paper had only 13 citations. So Alan Turing’s h-index is 15.

This example, of course, shows one problem with basing this on Google Scholar — it only takes into account papers it finds on the Web, a disadvantage for Turing. Another is that Google doesn’t eliminate “self citations” — citations where there is an author common to both the cited and citing papers. Accepting self citations invites gaming the system by always citing all of your earlier publications. Citeseer is a web based system that does eliminate self citations as does ISI’s the venerable citation database. But CiteSeer doesn’t rank author queries by citation number and also weights them by year. ISI’s coverage for Computer Science is not comprehensive and access costs money. So Google Scholar seems to be the easiest way to play with the h-index idea for CS at present.

Google Scholar and Citeseer automatically discover and index papers of all types — journal, conference, book chapter and even technical reports — unlike traditional citation databases like ISI’s. Should all of these be contribute to a scholarly output metric? I think it’s not unreasonable. A technical report cited by 50 other papers has obviously had impact. Moreover, a paper’s visibility on the Web may become the dominant factor in its significance.

Hirsch argues that h is better than other commonly used single number criteria to measure a scholar’s output. He’s even suggested it could be used for tenure and promotion

Moreover, he goes on to propose that a researcher should be promoted to associate professor when they achieve a h-index of around 12, and to full professor when they reach a h about of 18. (Link)

What counts as a high number will vary across disciplines and even sub-fields within disciplines. Moshe Vardi tells me that Computer Scientists with h>50 are rare and Jeff Ullman’s number in the mid-60s is the highest he’s seen.

Finally, single number measures like this are always just shadows cast on the wall of a cave.

The CRA Bulletin has an item on an NSF brief describing the state of Science and Engineering graduate enrollment.

“While overall graduate enrollment in science and engineering programs reached an all-time high in fall 2003, it actually declined 3 percent in computer science. CS was the only field to see a drop and this was its first decrease since 1995. In addition, CS experienced the biggest drop (23 percent) among S&E fields in the number of full-time students with temporary visas who were enrolled for the first time.”

The Semantic Web And Policy Workshop (SWPW) will be held on 7 November 2005 at 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. Ora Lassila will give an invited talk entitled “Applying Semantic Web in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing: Will Policy-Awareness Help?”. Papers should be submitted electronically by 25 July 2005.

The Computing Research Association has been publishing and distributing by email a quarterly newsletter, the CRA Bulletin, containing links to items of interest to the computing research community. The CRA Bulletin has now been refactored as a blog complete with an RSS feed.

PITAC, the US President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, has released a report on Cyber Security: a Crisis of Prioritization. Free hard copies can be requested.

Vital to the Nation’s security and everyday life, the information technology (IT) infrastructure of the United States is highly vulnerable to disruptive domestic and international attacks, the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) argues in a new report. While existing technologies can address some IT security vulnerabilities, fundamentally new approaches are needed to address the more serious structural weaknesses of the IT infrastructure.

In Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization, PITAC presents four key findings and recommendations on how the Federal government can foster new architectures and technologies to secure the Nation’s IT infrastructure. PITAC urges the Government to significantly increase support for fundamental research in civilian cyber security in 10 priority areas; intensify Federal efforts to promote the recruitment and retention of cyber security researchers and students at research universities; increase support for the rapid transfer of Federally developed cyber security technologies to the private sector; and strengthen the coordination of Federal cyber security R&D activities.