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.

Next Monday (3:00pm, May 13), Fabrizio Petrini will visit and give a presentation on Streaming Applications on the Cell B.E. Processor. Here’s the abstract:

“We increasingly need to process large and complex data volumes to enable near-real-time informed human decisions or automated response actions. Current limitations in I/O and processing capabilities hinder the timely acquisition, processing, and presentation information to decision makers for rapid response. Multi-core processors, such as the Cell B.E. processor, provide an unprecedented computational capability to curb this data deluge. In this talk I will describe the challenge in designing new data streaming algorithms for multi-core processors and and present some recent results obtained with the Cell B.E. processor.”

In this week’s UMBC ebiquity meeting (10am Tue may 6 in ITE 325), PhD student Wenjia Li will talk about his research on security and MANETs. Guests are always welcome — just drop in. Here’s the title and abstract.

Gossip-Based Outlier Detection for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Wenjia Li, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

It is well understood that Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are extremely susceptible to a variety of attacks. Many security schemes have been proposed that depend on identifying nodes that are exhibiting malicious behavior such as packet dropping, packet modification, and packet misrouting. We argue that in general, this problem can be viewed as an instance of detecting nodes whose behavior is an outlier when compared to others. In this work, we propose a gossip-based outlier detection algorithm for MANETs. The algorithm leads to a common outlier view amongst distributed nodes with a limited communication overhead. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient and accurate.

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.

David Chapman will defend his MS thesis, A General Algorithm for Gridding Earth Sensing Scanning Instruments, at 10:00am Monday May 5 in room 325 ITE. The abstract is below.

Gridding in remote sensing must re-project observations from their original coordinate system based on satellite orbit and attitude to a grid defined by Earth coordinates. Primitive methods assume that observations are located at points on Earth and typically average observations in grid cells, or interpolate geolocated observations. These approaches are inaccurate, because they do not make use of the instrument’s footprint geometry, and spatial response. Observation Coverage (Obscov) gridding techniques make use of the satellite optics and geometry to more accurately describe coverage of a footprint on within each grid cell. Obscov gridding provides significant accuracy improvements exceeding 1 Kelvin Brightness Temperature over most regions on Earth for a 12 micron window channel on-board the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS). Existing Obscov algorithms are only applicable to specific instruments and depend heavily on implicitly defined spatial response functions. We make use of raycasting and adaptive grid numerical integration to compute Obscov for the spatial response function of any instrument while processing streaming satellite observation data faster than 400 Megabits/second on a 6 machine cluster. We discuss the quality benefits of our algorithm by analyzing the results of gridded AIRS infrared sensor data with 324 operational spectral channels. We also address parallel processing issues to integrate AIRS Obscov gridding with SOAR, an on demand climate processing system built on a 122 processor blade server.

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.