http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger EBB is the ebiquity research group\\\'s blog at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). We focus on technologies that facilitate the design, implementation and control of distributed, intelligent information systems -- mobile and pervasive computing, ad hoc networking, multiagent systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the semantic web. As the tides of technology ebb and flow, we hope the good ideas wash up on our beach and the bad ones drift back out to sea. Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:51:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en UMBC alumnus Joab Jackson has an article in Government Computer News, Tim Berners-Lee: Machine-readable Web still a ways off, reporting on the International Semantic Web Conference help outside of Washington DC at the end of October. The article uses data.gov to illustrate the challenges and opportunities for the Semantic Web. ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/06/rpi-exports-data-gov-information-as-linked-data/ This post on the CACM Blog caught my eye and shows that we still have a long way to go before computing is taken seriously in US secondary education, let alone K-12. AP CS no Longer Counts for High School Graduation in Georgia (for now) "Up until September, Georgia and ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/05/computer-science-cant-get-no-respect-in-high-school/ Google added a great new service, Dashboard, that summarizes data stored for a Google account -- see MY ACCOUNT>PERSONAL SETTINGS>DASHBOARD. "Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/05/dashboard-shows-data-google-has-about-you/ Yesterday was the first time a truly voter verifiable voting system was used in any binding government election, thanks in part to work being carried out at UMBC's Cyber Defense Lab under the direction of Alan Sherman. Takoma Park, MD used the Scantegrity system for its municipal election after testing it ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/11/04/takoma-park-uses-scantegrity-voter-verifiable-voting-system/ Like many newspapers, the New York Times links the first mention of well known entitles in its articles to a reference page. For example, a mention of Barack Obama links to a page which is a collection of basic information on President Obama and links to relevant stories and ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/10/30/new-york-times-publishes-linked-open-data/ DARPA will hold the DARPA Network Challenge to explore how "broad-scope problems can be solved using Internet-based technologies. "To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/10/29/win-40k-in-the-darpa-network-challenge/ OWL 2, the new version of the Web Ontology Language, officially became a W3C standard yesterday. From the W3C press release: "Today W3C announces a new version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web. OWL 2, part of W3C's Semantic Web toolkit, allows people to capture their knowledge ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/10/27/owl-2-becomes-a-w3c-recommendation/ Golden Balls is a UK game show with a final round, Split or Steal, that is similar to the prisoner's dilemma. The two contestants have to simultaneously choose to split the prize or try to steal it. If both choose split, they each get half. If one ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/10/25/prisoners-dilemma-and-the-golden-balls-game-show/ Wolfram|Alpha is an interesting query answering system developed by Wolfram Research that is a blend of a question answering system and a Semantic Web alternative. It tries to interpret and answer queries expressed as a sequence of words from a large collection of interlinked tables. Oh, and Mathematica ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/10/16/wolframalpha-releases-api/ In the Fall of 2007, two MIT students carried out a class project exploring how presumably private data could be inferred from an online social networking system. Their experiment was to predict the sexual orientation of Facebook users who make their basic information public by analyzing friendship associations. ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/10/06/gaydar-facebook-and-privacy/