In next week’s ebiquity meeting (10:15 EDT Tue 10/6), Lance Byrd and Set Cruz will talk about Blackbook, a graph analytic processing platform for semantic web data.

Blackbook3 is an RDF middleware framework for integrating data and executing algorithms that relies on open standards and “best-of-breed” open source technologies, including Jena, Lucene, JAAS, D2RQ, Hadoop, HBase and Solr. Blackbook3 has a plug-and-play, loosely–coupled architecture, supports SOAP and REST interfaces, offers SPARQL and linked data endpoints and can run in environments where high confidentiality is required.

The talk will discuss the current and future use cases for Blackbook3 as well as broader knowledge discovery and dissemination issues for RDF applications. You can participate remotely via dimdim starting at 10:15 EDT October 6.

David Easley and Jon Kleinberg have made available a free pre-publication draft of a new book, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. The book is based on an inter-disciplinary undergraduate course, Networks, that they teach at Cornell.

They say about their book

“Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex “connectedness” of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.
    Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.”

Download the 828-page (!) draft of Networks, Crowds, and Markets in pdf here.

Netflix announced today that BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos team was awarded the $1M Netflix Grand Prize.

“It is our great honor to announce the $1M Grand Prize winner of the Netflix Prize contest as team BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos for their verified submission on July 26, 2009 at 18:18:28 UTC, achieving the winning RMSE of 0.8567 on the test subset. This represents a 10.06% improvement over Cinematch’s score on the test subset at the start of the contest. We congratulate the team of Bob Bell, Martin Chabbert, Michael Jahrer, Yehuda Koren, Martin Piotte, Andreas Töscher and Chris Volinsky for their superb work advancing and integrating many significant techniques to achieve this result.”

Netflix announced that it will hold a new Netflix Prize 2 contest with details to be released.

What about the Ensemble’s last-minute entry, the one that seemed to top BellKor’s?

“Team BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos edged out team The Ensemble with the winning submission coming just 24 minutes before the conclusion of the nearly three-year-long contest. Historically the Leaderboard has only reported team scores on the quiz subset. The Prize is awarded based on teams’ test subset score. Now that the contest is closed we will be updating the Leaderboard to report team scores on both the test and quiz subsets.”

As part of the final submission, teams were required to submit papers describing the approach. Here are the three that the winning team delivered.

• Y. Koren, The BellKor Solution to the Netflix Grand Prize
• A. Töscher, M. Jahrer, R. Bell, The BigChaos Solution to the Netflix Grand Prize
• M. Piotte, M. Chabbert, The Pragmatic Theory solution to the Netflix Grand Prize

The New York Times Bits blog also has an article, Netflix Awards $1 Million Prize and Starts a New Contest.

HealthBase is a ’semantic search engine’ for healthcare information that is driven by content mined from “millions of authoritative health sources” including WebMD, Wikipedia, PubMed, and Mayo Clinic’s health site. Techcrunch first described it as the ultimate medical content search engine but then had a follow up article reporting that HealthBase thinks you can get rid of jews with alcohol and salt. Language Log had some more fun exploring HealthBase.

We thought we’d see what HealthBase thought of the Semantic Web and it turns out that if you are experiencing the Semantic Web as a condition there are several recommended treatments.

and as a treatment itself, HealthBase is pretty positive.

The Washington Post reports that Flu Trackers Encourage Patients to Blog About It. There was quite a bit of discussion about this back in April with the first wave of H1N1 (swine flu) concerns (e.g., Google flu trends: Web searches as sensors). The article mentions Google Flu Trends and HealthMap, but I was surprised with some of the new ideas people are exploring that the article mentions. Plus, I learned a catchy new term for this: infodemiology.

One idea is to further exploit mobile phone technology.

Boston-based HealthMap’s automated system sends out an hourly Web “crawler” that hunts for flu information in seven languages. Its creators on Tuesday launched a cellphone application called “Outbreaks Near Me” that can alert users to illnesses nearby. “If you move into a zone where there’s an outbreak, your phone would actually alert you,” said John Brownstein, assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Boston, where HealthMap is based. The application also allows users to send back to HealthMap their own flu alerts.

And another is to recruit a population sample willing to serve as active sensors by reporting their own status and experiences.

Locally, Maryland has launched a “flu watcher” program in which volunteers report their health conditions weekly via the Internet. Project officials say the state is the first in the country to have such a system: the Maryland Resident Influenza Tracking Survey.

“We get people to sign up online and give us their e-mail address,” said Rene Najera, an epidemiologist with the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “They give us their county of residence, their month and year of birth. We don’t get too personal with them. We just want some basic demographics. Every week . . . we send them a survey . . . ‘Did you have any fever? Did you have any cough? Did you have any sore throat in the week previous?’ ” he said. If the answer is yes, more detailed questions are asked. So far, 740 people across the state have signed up.

And the Maryland system is not the only one — see the Australian Flutracking system for another, which gets responses from about 6,000 people.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a system called FluLog that will use Bluetooth to locate people who had been in proximity to someone who has become infected.

It’s a high-tech version of a process called “contact tracing,” said Mehul Motani of the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Engineering. Typically, he said “when you have a suspected case, you interview the suspected case, and you ask them: ‘Where have you been? . . . Who have you been in sustained contact with?’ ” The idea is to locate others who might get sick.

Many of these systems have serious privacy issue, of course. But the examples discussed in this article (only some of which are mentioned here) are all voluntary.

It would be great if some of these systems could expose data as RDF making it available as part of the web of linked data.

RAEng report on Social, legal and ethical issues of autonomous systems

The Royal Academy of Engineering has released a report on the social, legal and ethical issues involving autonomous systems — systems that are adaptive, learn and can make decisions without the intervention or supervision of a human.

The report, Autonomous Systems: Social, Legal and Ethical Issues (pdf), was based on a roundtable discussion “from a wide range of experts, looking at the areas where autonomous systems are most likely to emerge first, and discussing the broad ethical issues surrounding their uptake.”

While autonomous systems have broad applicability, the report focuses on two areas: transportation (e.g. autonomous road vehicles) and personal care (e.g., smart homes).

“Autonomous systems, such as fully robotic vehicles that are “driverless” or artificial companions that can provide practical and emotional support to isolated people, have a level of self-determination and decision making ability with the capacity to learn from past performance. Autonomous systems do not experience emotional reactions and can therefore perform better than humans in tasks that are dull, risky or stressful. However they bring with them a new set of ethical problems. What if unpredicted behaviour causes harm? If an unmanned vehicle is involved in an accident, who is responsible – the driver or the systems engineer? Autonomous vehicles could provide benefits for road transport with reduced congestion and safety improvements but there is a lack of a suitable legal framework to address issues such as insurance and driver responsibility.
…
The technologies for smart homes and patient monitoring are already in existence and provide many benefits to older people, such as allowing them to remain in their own home when recovering from an illness, but they could also lead to isolation from family and friends. Some users may be unfamiliar with the technologies and be unable to give consent to their use.”

The RAEng report recommends “engaging early in public consultation” and working to establish “appropriate regulation and governance so that controls are put in place to guide the development of these systems”.

rdf:SeeAlso Autonomous tech ‘requires debate’; Scientists ponder rules and ethics of robo helpers; Robot cats could care for older Britons.

(via Mike Wooldridge)

Twitter is adding support for geotagging tweets to their API which will make Twitter a richer source of real-time news. The Twitter blog reports:

“Twitter platform developers have been doing innovative work with location for some time despite having access to only a rudimentary level of API support. Most of the location-based projects we see are built using the simple, account-level location field folks can fill out as part of their profile. Since anything can be written in this field, it’s interesting but not very dependable.

We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

This opens up lots of interesting opportunities but there is still room for geotagging from conent. There are more than one relationship between a Tweet (or any utterance) and a location. They include both were the tweeter was when it was issued but also the location of the event or object that’s the tweet’s subject.

For example, the Baltimore police use twitter to inform the press and public about about significant crimes, major traffic problems and other events. There are 10-15 tweets a day in this stream, all sent by an officer in the BPD Public Affairs department. The majority of the tweets mention a location (e.g., “Shooting on Lafayette Ave, Suspect in Police custody, handgun recovered.”) but are, I assume, sent from Public Affairs office. Baltimore city covers a large area, more than 80 square miles. Many residents or reporters will be interested only in events in or effecting the neighborhoods where they live, work or pass through when commuting.

I also wonder if there are more opportunities for Twitter to add semantic metadata to Tweets via their API.

See also: Bits Blog, O’Reilly.

Maybe WebFinger will succeed where others have failed. At what? At providing a simple handle for a person that can be easily used to get basic information that the person wants to make available. The WebFinger proposal is to use an email address as the handle.

WebFinger, aka Personal Web Discovery. i.e. We’re bringing back the finger protocol, but using HTTP this time.

Techcrunch has a post on this, Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID with some background.

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

The current focus of the WebFinger group is on developing the spec for accessing a user’s metadata given their handle. Using RDF and the FOAF vocabulary should be a no-brainer for representing the metadata.

How I Explained REST to My Wife popped up on Hacker News today. While the way Ryan Tomayko frames his description of http protocols stikes many (invcluding me) as sexist, it’s well written and illuminating.

What hit me like a two-by-four up side the head was his characterization of URIs as being like “GPS coordinates for knowledge and information”. Great analogy!

He’s not really talking about the Semantic Web, but he ought to be. I think we should steal borrow his analogy and use it in explaining the central role URIs play for us.

The Ninth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2010) will be held 7-11 November 2010 in Shanghai China. The conference events will take place at the Shanghai International Convention Center (map).

The ISWC 2010 organizers include general chair Ian Horrocks, program committee chairs Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Yue Pan, local chair Yong Yu and local organization committee members Dingyi Han, Gui-Rong Xue, Haofen Wang and Lei Zhang.

John Markoff has an article for tomorrow’s New York Times, Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man on a recent AAAI study on the future of AI.

“A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously. Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.”

The study was commissioned by AAAI to “to explore and address potential long-term societal influences of AI research and development”. Look for a report published by AAAI later this year. The study involved twenty-five participants who were divided into three subgroups: on concerns, control and guidelines, the nature and timing of disruptive advances, and ethical and legal issues.

There was a panel session earlier this month at IJCAI where some of the study participants discussed highlights from the study. Hopefully this was filmed and the results will be added to the videolectures.net IJCAI09 collection.

While I am generally skeptical of an impending technological singularity, which seems to sum up many of the concerns some have, there are aspects of the future that I do wonder about. At the top of my list is what will happen when virtually all of human knowledge is published on the Web (as it nearly is now) in a for that machines can understand. I’m pretty sure that this will happen in the next decade or two, either through the current Semantic Web approach (as a web of data) or by gradually improving techniques for machine understanding of human languages and images.

Yong Yu and Rudi Studer are editing a special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on Semantic Search that will appear in the summer 2010. Papers are due 20 January 2010 and decisions will will be sent two months later. Relevant topics include:

• Information retrieval tasks on the Semantic Web
• Incentives and interaction paradigms for resource annotation
• Interaction paradigms for semantic search
• Semantic technologies for query interpretation, refinement and routing
• Modeling expressive resource descriptions
• natural language processing and information extractions for the acquisition of resource descriptions
• Scalable repositories and infrastructures for semantic search
• Crawling, storing and indexing of expressive resource descriptions
• fusion of semantic search results on the Semantic Web
• Algorithms for matching expressive queries and resource descriptions
• Algorithms and procedure to deal with vagueness, incompleteness and inconsistencies in semantic search
• Evaluation methodologies for semantic search
• Standard datasets and benchmarks for semantic search

See the full call for papers for more information.