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. Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:11:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on students using BitTorrent to share scanned copies of textbooks. The article, Textbook Piracy Grows Online, Prompting a Counterattack From Publishers, starts off "College students are increasingly downloading illegal copies of textbooks online, employing the same file-trading technologies used to download music ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/07/02/textbook-piracy-via-bittorrent-on-the-rise/ The Washington Posts Security Fix blog has a post, Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud!, reporting on allegations that spammers are starting to use Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers. It only makes sense -- you can sign up easily without committing to a contract of any length, ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/07/01/spammers-are-using-amazon-ec2/ A good fraction of the comment spam that makes it through our Akismet filter is from people who are trying to add a comment to one of our posts about spam blogs or comments. Here's an example from today's batch, a comment on a two-year old post Blog comment ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/07/01/blog-comment-spam-magnet/ Here's something I never expected: splogs as a political issue. Actually, it's allegations of political blogs being splogs, or rather allegations of accusing political blogs of being a splogs in order to get Google to block them. The NYT Bits blog has a post, Google and the Anti-Obama ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/07/01/splogs-and-politics/ The WSJ has an article, Get Out of Your Own Way, on research suggesting that people have often form intentions to act and make decisions well before they are conscious of the fact. Maybe this is like detecting the inferences made by the OWL reasoner or classification of a ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/28/act-before-you-think-you-think/ Today's New York Times has an article, With Wireless Network, City Agencies Have More Eyes in More Places, that describes a city wide wireless network that is operational and is expected to largely completed by the end of the summer. "Locating vehicles is one of ways the Department of Sanitation and ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/28/nyc-deploys-wireless-network-for-municipal-employees/ Venture Beat reports that Microsoft will acquire Powerset for a price "rumored to be slightly more than $100 million". Powerset has been developing a Web search system that uses natural language processing technology acquired from PARC to more fully understand user's queries and the text of documents indexed. "By ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/26/microsoft-rumored-to-buy-semantic-search-startup-powerset/ Wired has an interesting article, The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, that discusses the data driven revolution that computers and the Web have unleashed. Science used to rely on developing models to explain and organize the world and make predictions. Now much ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/26/models-we-dont-need-no-stinking-models/ During the past year, the Journal of Web Semantics was added to the list of journals indexed by Thomson Reuters. Their most recent Journal Citation Report (2007) gives the JWS an impact factor of 3.41, which is the third highest out of the 92 titles in its category -- ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/25/journal-of-web-semantics-has-high-impact-factor/ The July/August issue of Technology Review is focused on Web 2.0. The lead article, "The Business of Social Networks", asks "Web 2.0--the dream of the user-built, user-centered, user-run Internet--has delivered on just about every promise except profit. Will its most prominent example, social networking, ever make any money?" "Social networking ... http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2008/06/24/technology-review-special-issue-on-web-20/