ACM’s TechCareers site offers “career-related resources, news and job postings for IT and engineering professions”. They recommend that IT professionals and those seeking to become one, should try Branding Yourself With A Blog.

“… Certainly personal branding isn’t a new concept, but the future of personal branding could be in at your fingertips—with a blog. One of the first steps in creating a brand for yourself is to make your blog visible. Post meaningful entries, comment on your industry’s top blogs, or simply gain a regular readership. “Visibility creates opportunities,” says Schawbel, a social media specialist at EMC Corporation. He believes that when you brand yourself, the competition becomes irrelevant. “The goal of personal branding is to be recruited based on your brand, not applying for jobs,” Schawbel says. …”

This is especially good advice for students.

This year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) will host a workshop on Social Data on the Web. Submitted papers are due by July 25, 2008.

“The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.”

Social media systems is all about information sharing, so its inevitable that it will have strong ties to Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, the ties will go both ways. Social media needs ways to annotate information objects with sharable data and meta data that can be understood by machines. Semantic computing systems focused on sharing data and ontologies can benefit from social computing systems that offer users easy ways to collaboratively develop, publish, comment on and link to their output.

Deadlines for submitting papers, Doctoral Consortium applications and tutorial proposals for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference are fast approaching. ISWC ‘08 will be held 26-30 October 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Key upcoming dates include:

• Research papers: due May 9 (title and abstracts), 16 May (full)
• Semantic Web in Use papers: due May 16
• Tutorial proposals: May 16
• Doctoral Consortium applications: due May 16
• Posters & Demo proposals: due July 25
• Workshops papers (13 workshops): mid-summer
• Semantic Web & Billion Triples challenge: Oct 1
• ISWC 2008 CONFERENCE: October 26-30

See the ISWC 2008 site for CFPs and other details. Inquires about specific tracks should be sent to the appropriate chairs. Send general questions and suggestions for panel topics, invited speakers, birds of a feather meetings, etc. to iswc08@gmail.com.

The call for the ISWC 2008 Sixth Semantic Web Challenge and Billion Triples tracks is out.

“We invite submissions to the sixth annual Semantic Web Challenge, the premiere event for demonstrating practical progress towards achieving the vision of the Semantic Web. The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

As the core technological building blocks are now in place, the next challenge is to show off the benefits of semantic technologies by developing integrated, easy to use applications that can provide new levels of Web functionality for end users on the Web or within enterprise settings. Applications submitted should demonstrate clear practical value that goes above and beyond what is possible with conventional web technologies alone.

Unlike in previous years, the Semantic Web Challenge of 2008 will consist of two tracks: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. The key difference between the two tracks is that the Billion Triples Track requires the participants to make use of the data set –a billion triples– provided by the organizers. The Open Track has no such restrictions.

As before, the Challenge is open to everyone from academia and industry. The authors of the best applications will be awarded prizes and featured prominently at special sessions during the conference”

The following workshops will be held as part of 2008 international Semantic Web Conference. Watch the 2008 ISWC workshop page for more information, including dates and links to workshop pages.

• Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web
• Terra Cognita 2008
• 3rd International Workshop on Ontology Matching
• 3rd ExpertFinder Workshop: Personal Identification and Collaborations - Knowledge Mediation and Extraction (PICKME’08)
• 7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop
• 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2008)
• Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web
• International Workshop on Ontology Dynamics (IWOD2008)
• Nature inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web (NatuReS)
• Social Data on the Web
• 4th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS2008)
• Incentives for the Semantic Web
• Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI 2008)

Marcella Wilson will defend her dissertation, The Comparison of Online Social Networks in Terms of Structure and Evolution, at 11:15am May 1st in 325b ITE. Here’s the abstract.

Social network systems on the Internet, such MySpace and LinkedIn, are growing in popularity around the world. The level of such activity is now comparable to that associated with email and blogs. Our research addresses the question of whether people in different demographic groups use these systems in the same way. We also examined the relationship between membership in on-line social networks and face-to-face networks, especially with respect to different age cohorts. Older Americans tend to use email the same way as Americans in general. The usage of blogs, however, is different, with significant differences in the temporal and structural patterns of post and response in blogs being evident in different demographics. Our research has implications for the design of social network software for older Americans, as well as the algorithms used in search engines for such systems.

Remember when finding information on the Web was done by navigation using Gopher or Yahoo’s directory? I worked and we thought it was pretty good, at least until the search engines came along. Then we realized that search was much better than navigation for most tasks, especially as the size of the Web grew.

Recall how we get information from a big organization by phone today — we call customer service and navigate a confusing phone menu over the phone and after 10 minutes, end up being told to dial a different department. Dealing with such IVR (Interactive voice response) systems is part of the cost of living in our modern society. But maybe w can do better…

Fonolo offers a service that uses a search engine on their site to find the right spot on a company’s phone menu and connect you to it by a callback to your phone. You can even bookmark the point on the phone menu.

How do they do this? Here’s an explanation from IVR search: a ‘Google’ for phone menus?, a post on Telco2.0:

“And Fonolo wrote a web spider that visits large companies’ public phone numbers, and iterates through all the options on all the IVR menus from all the numbers, logging everything it finds. Then it’s just a matter of plotting it all on a directed graph, and making the whole thing searchable and available on the Web. And then the bit we like. You click on the bit you want to get through to, and their system uses the map to dial and navigate the IVRs for you, thus “deep dialing” the user directly to the point in the IVR they need. Every time someone dials through Fonolo, they use the interaction to re-validate that path through the IVR. The search terms that users submit tell them which companies they need to go spider.”

Fonolo is in a private beta mode, but you can sign up to be added to it on thei web site. You can see a video presentation of the idea and some ppt slides

Morgan Stanley’s latest Internet Trends report emphasizes social computing. It contains the interesting observation that seven of the top ten Web sites (ranked by Alexa) are social computing sites — YouTube, Live.com, Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, Wikipedia, and Orkut. Yahoo, Google and MSN round out the top ten. Of the social seven, only Myspace made the top ten list just three years ago. There’s lots more of interest in the report, which is available as a 72 page pdf presentation and can be viewed online via slideShare. Spotted on Techcrunch by Yang Yu.

In this week’s ebiquity group meeting, Palani Kodeswaran will talk about his research in developing protocols to govern how network routers implement the Border Gateway Protocol. here’s the aabstract.

“Policies in BGP are implemented as routing configurations that determine how route information is shared among neighbors to control traffic flows across networks. This process is generally template driven, device centric, limited in its expressibility, time consuming and error prone which can lead to configurations where policies are violated or there are unintended consequences that are difficult to detect and resolve. In this work, we propose an alternate mechanism for policy based networking that relies on using additional semantic information associated with routes expressed in an OWL ontology. Policies are expressed using SWRL to provide fine-grained control where by the routers can reason over their routes and determine how they need to be exchanged. In this paper, we focus on security related BGP policies and show how our framework can be used in implementing them. Additional contextual information such as affiliations and route restrictions are incorporated into our policy specifications which can then be reasoned over to infer the correct configurations that need to be applied, resulting in a process which is easy to deploy, manage and verify for consistency.”

Our meetings are open to anyone who wants to come, so drop in if you are interested. (10am Tuesday 29 April 2008, room 325 ITE building)

The 2008 International Semantic Web Conference anticipate having funds from the US National Science Foundation to partially support students currently enrolled in US universities in attending ISWC 2008. Students will be required to submit application and include proof of student status and a letter of recommendation. Since the funds are limited, only partial travel support can be provided. Preference will be given to students who are participating in the doctoral consortium, are an author or co-author on a paper, or are presenting a poster or demonstration. Awards will be based on a combination of merit and need and will probably range from US$ 500-1500.

Is that a catchy title or what? No, and the story doesn’t involve Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. See The $25,000,000,000 Eigenvector: The Linear Algebra Behind Google by Kurt Bryan and Tanya Leise. Here’s the abstract.

“Google’s success derives in large part from its PageRank algorithm, which ranks the importance of webpages according to an eigenvector of a weighted link matrix. Analysis of the PageRank formula provides a wonderful applied topic for a linear algebra course. Instructors may assign this article as a project to more advanced students, or spend one or two lectures presenting the material with assigned homework from the exercises. This material also complements the discussion of Markov chains in matrix algebra. Maple and Mathematica files supporting this material can be found at http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~bryan/google.html
“.

These techniques, and the mathematics behind them, are important in modeling many kinds of social phenomena.

Talis announced Nodalities — a magazine available in print and online devoted to the Semantic Web. They describe its mission as bridging “the divide between those building the Semantic Web and those interested in applying it to their business requirements.” The initial April 2008 Nodalities issue is available as pdf. While it can be expected to promote Talis and its activities, it should be a useful source of information and comment. You can request a free subscription to the print edition online.