April 19th, 2008, by Tim Finin, posted in Social media
If you are are in the greater Baltimore area and interested in social computing technology and its applications you might consider going to the SocialDevCamp East BarCamp that will be held on Saturday May 10. Akshay Java has a good blog post on it. Wikipedia defines BarCamps as
“user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.”
And, of course, this sets them apart from the elite, invitation-only Foo Camp that has been run for a number a years by Tom O’Reilly.
April 16th, 2008, by Tim Finin, posted in Semantic Web
Many tasks require representing and reasoning with uncertain knowledge and data. Current Semantic Web languages are grounded firmly in classical logic and no extensions to manage uncertainty have gained popularity. In our lab, Professor Yun Peng and his students have been developing systems to integrate Bayesian reasoning with OWL and explore applications to ontology mapping.
identifies and describes situations on the scale of the World Wide Web for which uncertainty reasoning would significantly increase the potential for extracting useful information,
identifies methodologies that can be applied to these situations and the fundamentals of a standardized representation that could serve as the basis for information exchange necessary for these methodologies to be effectively used,
includes a set of use cases illustrating conditions under which uncertainty reasoning is important,
provides an overview and discusses the applicability to the World Wide Web of prominent uncertainty reasoning techniques and the information that needs to be represented for effective uncertainty reasoning to be possible,
includes a bibliography of work relevant to the challenge of developing standardized representations for uncertainty and exploiting them in Web-based services and applications.”
The sixth annual UMBC Computer Mania Day will be held at UMBC on Saturday, May 3, 2008. The event provides a half day of technology-related activities for up to 800 middle school girls and their parents and teachers. Girls are the focus, but boys are welcome. This program is designed to provide a broad-based introduction to the ways in which different careers make use of technology. Several sessions are planned including ones on robotics and on social computing. There is also a separate adult program designed for parents. Computer Mania Day is free, but space is limited and registration is required to hold a place. Free gift bags from Dell will be given to the first 800 students who register and attend!
The Economist has a short article on the Semantic Web, Start making sense that is positive and upbeat.
“Big and small companies are getting into the business of building an intelligent web of linked data
Some new ideas take wing spontaneously. Others struggle to be born. The “semantic web” is definitely in the latter category. But it may have found its midwife in Reuters, a business-information company.
The semantic web (or “web 3.0”, as some people are trying to re-brand it), is the name given to the idea that the pages of the world wide web ought to carry more than just the meaning they are intended to convey to the human reader. They should also, the thinking goes, be tagged and flagged in ways that machines can make semantic sense of, as people make semantic sense of language. That way, machines could make instant connections that would take serious amounts of time for people to see, or might even elude them altogether.”
…
The article touches on RDF and OWL and a number of companies building on the technology, including Reuters Calais, Twine and Qitera. The last one was new to me.
April 8th, 2008, by Tim Finin, posted in Social media
The prediction markets are bullish on Obama to win the Democratic nomination as their US presidential candidate. On Intrade, Obama is currently at at 86 compared to Clinton’s 12. Al Gore is the only other candidate in the running. The situation is similar over at the Iowa Electronic Markets.
EPA is on a web 2.0 kick. They sponsored a 2-day monster mashup exercise last Fall, the Puget Sound Information Challenge, and are making plans for further efforts. EPA’s CIO Molly O’neill talks a little about it here.
They’ve also been tracking and flirting with the semantic web, and are wondering how much effort to expend on a more full-on semantic engagement. I presented our semantic eco-blogging work at EPA headquarters in February, and was surprised at the turnout and enthusiasm. In response to a screen shot of a Fieldmarking post describing beach closings, a person from the Water Office related that he learned of the closing of his favorite Lake Erie swim-spot from a blog post. This made an impression on him, since, by rights, the closing should have been reported at the county level, up to the state level, and, ultimately, to his office in DC. It struck him that EPA should be systematically tapping the blogosphere for citizen sentiment and concern.
If they to do this, they will, implicitly, be saying to the citizenry “If you can’t be bothered to fill out the right form in the right office, at least blog about it, and maybe the machinery of the blogosphere will direct your thoughts our way.” I kind of like that. (This particular example - finding information on beach closings in a given area - can probably be done fairly efficiently with Yahoo pipes).
EPA will be hosting this week’s meeting of the multilateral ecoinformatics cooperation, and there will be participation from a wide swathe of EPA - I’m curious to learn of their plans.
The appointment of Rod Beckstrom as the new head of the DHS National Cyber Security Center is interesting, if somewhat controversial. See, for example, the article Cybersecurity’s New Guard in BusnessWeek.
“The Bush Administration named Rod Beckström — entrepreneur, author, and decentralization expert — head of the National Cyber Security Center on Mar. 20. … Beckström, 47, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a former derivatives trader, and a champion of conflict resolution in Africa. He’s better known as the founder of business collaboration software provider Twiki.net and as an author specializing in the agility of decentralized organizations than for connections inside the Beltway or expertise in cybersecurity.”
What’s somewhat controversial is his lack of a strong background in security or computer and communication technology — he’s an MBA. What’s interesting is his perspectives on and enthusiasm for decentralized and “leaderless” organizations, as articulated in his 2006 book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, which I’ve not read, btw.
“Brafman and Beckstrom, a pair of Stanford M.B.A.s who have applied their business know-how to promoting peace and economic development through decentralized networking, offer a breezy and entertaining look at how decentralization is changing many organizations. The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish can regenerate itself from a single amputated leg. In the same way, decentralized organizations, like the Internet, the Apache Indian tribe and Alcoholics Anonymous, are made up of many smaller units capable of operating, growing and multiplying independently of each other, making it very difficult for a rival force to control or defeat them.”
In this age of decentralized information and communication systems and asymmetric warfare, I think Beckstrom might have a positive impact in his new position.
March 29th, 2008, by Tim Finin, posted in Social media
FAS Research is an Austrian company that specializes in social network analysis. Their site has a nice collections of social network visualizations that are artistic as well as informative.
Language models are widely used in processing both written and spoken language. They are used for part of speech tagging, sense tagging, disambiguation, text similarity metrics, and many other tasks, including predicting the words a person intends when typing on a telephone keypad. The last application has some interesting wrinkles, as this video we spotted on Language Log explains.
The most popular predictive text system in use today is T9, developed by Nuance Communications. You can check out the video’s examples using this T9 demo.
“For the past two months, 24 hours a day, MIT researchers have been collecting the electronic communications of millions of New Yorkers — but not for salacious gossip or to protect national security. They’ve been building a census that shows, neighborhood by neighborhood, New York’s telephone and Internet links to other cities across the planet and how those connections change over time.” (link)
Globe Encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York and cities around the world. The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP traffic flowing between that place and New York City. A greater glow implies a greater IP flow.
Visualizations from the NYTE project are part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which focuses on the use of technology in design.
“New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?” (link)
The data was provided to the MIT researchers by AT&T from voice and Internet traffic after being anonymized to remove any personal information.
“Since about 2005 — and at an accelerating pace — Wikipedia has emerged as the leading online knowledge base for conducting semantic Web and related research. The system is being tapped for both data and structure. Wikipedia has arguably replaced WordNet as the leading lexicon for concepts and relations. Because of its scope and popularity, many argue that Wikipedia is emerging as the de facto structure for classifying and organizing knowledge in the 21st century.”
“Below is an incomplete list of academic conference presentations, peer-reviewed papers and other types of academic writing which focus on Wikipedia as their subject. Works that mention Wikipedia only in passing are unlikely to be listed. Unpublished works of presumably academic quality are listed in a dedicated section.”
The sixth annual 
The prediction markets are bullish on Obama to win the Democratic nomination as their US presidential candidate. On 
UMBC eBiquity Blog
