As the news media have all reported, Lori Drew has been indicted for her role in the death of a teenager. You may recall that this person, with her daughter and her friend, created a fake MySpace account, pretend to befriend another teen, and then “dump” her. The other teen committed suicide.  Opinions are split on whether being mean to a person, even to a kid, is a criminal offense that should lead to prosecution, as opposed to societal opprobrium.

What interested me however that of the four counts of the indictment, three had to do with violating the Terms of Service –in particular creating a fake profile, and using this fake profile to obtain information from the server. This was done under federal laws that criminalize unauthorized access — things like hacking into a server. So does this mean that the legal theory being advanced by the US Attorney for the Central District of California is that creating a fake account on an internet service is criminalizable if the ToS of the provider say that you should give accurate information ?  Certainly many experts that USA Today talked to seem to think so. No more creating accounts with fictitious names at newspaper sites that many people can use ? How about using the right name, but messing up some of the information ( income level, demographics) at each site so that they can’t datamine you ? Or not providing the right contact information (a@b.com), so that they can’t sell it to telemarketers ? Or any of the various other things that people routinely do in terms of providing incomplete or incorrect information. The penalty now can be criminal, not just a shutting down of access to the site concerned. Hmmm…….

Gadi Evron has written an account of the “Estonian Internet War” in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. Evron is a security architect for Afilias Global Registry Services and one of the founders of the Zeroday Emergency Response Team, a group of volunteers who create emergency patches against zero day attacks.

His article, Battling Botnets and Online Mobs — Estonia’s Defense Efforts during the Internet War , is non-technical and gives a good good explanation of what happened and the underlying cultural and political issues.

“What would happen if tomorrow the Internet ceased to function? To most critics, and particularly state officials and policy makers, the possibility that the Internet could one day suddenly disappear is no more than a mere speculation, a highly improbable concept. On May 2007, the events that took place in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, proved everyone wrong. On that day, Estonia fell victim to the first-ever, real Internet war. This article delves into the political context that shaped the incident and analyzes some of the key lessons and policy implications that emerged as a consequence.”

Many expect that understanding, predicting and preventing such events will be critical issues in the coming decade. The distributed and social nature of the Internet and Web create an environment that can be exploited to attack an organizations, whether it is a government, a political movement, a company, the Church of Scientology, a NGO or an advocacy group.

Spotted on IP list.

AP reports that an RPI group is developing a robot for Second Life, Researchers teach ‘Second Life’ avatar to think. Actually, it’s a robot with the brain of a four-year old pre-schooler.

“Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world. But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

“It’s a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now,” said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.”

There’s more information in an article on Virtual World News. Apparently the goal is not to build interesting Second Life Bots using a variety of hacks, but to demonstrate human-like behaviour using more principled techniques.

“RPI is looking, initially, at a “theory of mind” for children, specifically with a false-belief test. In the real world, a child (age 4) would be shown a person placing a teddy bear in a cabinet. When the first person leaves, a second person would move the bear to another spot, like a refrigerator. When asked where the first person will look for the bear, they usually answer with the refrigerator due to a lack of understanding of other people. In Second Life, an automated theorem prover and procedures for converting conversational English into formal logic make up the brain of “Eddie,” the four-year-old avatar. When posed the above problem, Eddie responded as the human child would.”

Here’s a video of Eddie in action.

Akshay Java pointed out an interesting radio program, Psychology of Social Networking, that’s available online for streaming or download.

“Psychologists have long studied social networks, and the growing popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook provide fertile territory for research. Stanford University even has a class called “Psychology of Facebook.” What do our online profiles say about us?”

The hour long segment was originally broadcast on May 12 on the KQED Forum program. Host Michael Krasny interviewed two guests:

• B.J. Fogg, director of the at Stanford University and the author of an upcoming book on the psychology of Facebook
• Sam Gosling, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin

It’s a good show that explores why social networking sites gave become ubiquitous and popular, ow they work, and why they work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!