Planet Semantico

According to a recent post in the Microsoft Careers JobsBlog the top three hottest new majors for a career in technology are

• Data Mining/Machine Learning/AI/Natural Language Processing
• Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence
• Analytics/Statistics, specifically Web Analytics, A/B Testing and
  statistical analysis

Happily these are all strengths of the IT programs at UMBC. In fact, we have placed a large number of graduates at leading edge technology companies in the past few years, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, and Yahoo.

AI, English, General, career, jobs

Analog computers were a hot idea — in the 1950s! But I find this intriguing because I’ve come around to the position that a lot of our human “intelligence” is the result of acquiring and using probabilistic models. So supporting this in hardware might be a big win, especially for low-cost, low-power devices. It will also support lots of other common tasks in social computing, image processing and language technology.

Technology review has a short article, A New Kind of Microchip, on computer chip being developed by Lyric Semiconductor that process signals representing probabilities rather than digital bits.

“A computer chip that performs calculations using probabilities, instead of binary logic, could accelerate everything from online banking systems to the flash memory in smart phones and other gadgets. … And because that kind of math is at the core of many products, there are many potential applications. “To take one example, Amazon’s recommendations to you are based on probability,” says Vigoda. “Any time you buy [from] them, the fraud check on your credit card is also probability [based], and when they e-mail your confirmation, it passes through a spam filter that also uses probability.”

All those examples involve comparing different data to find the most likely fit. Implementing the math needed to do this is simpler with a chip that works with probabilities, says Vigoda, allowing smaller chips to do the same job at a faster rate. A processor that dramatically speeds up such probability-based calculations could find all kinds of uses.”

Lyric’s chip is called LEC and was developed with support from DARPA. It is 30 times smaller in size than current digital error correction technology according to Wired. Although small it yields “a Pentium’s worth of computation,” according to Lyric CEO Vigoda. His 2003 dissertation at MIT was on a related topic, Analog Logic: Continuous-Time Analog Circuits for Statistical Signal Processing.

You can also read about the LEC chip in a story in yesterday’s NYT, A Chip That Digests Data and Calculates the Odds.

English, General, Semantic Web, social media

Using a combination of mathematical tricks, good programming and 35 CPU-years on Google’s servers, a group of researchers have proved that every position of Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less. The group consists of Kent State mathematician Morley Davidson, Google engineer John Dethridge, math teacher Herbert Kociemba, and programmer Tomas Rokicki.

This is an amazing result and a testament to more than 30 years of work on the problem. The Cube was invented in 1974 and almost immediately the subject for programs to solve it. In 1981, Morwen Thistlethwaite proved that any configuration could be solved in no more than 52 moves. Periodically, tighter upper bounds for the maximum solution length were found. This result ends the quest — there are some configurations (about 300M) that require 20 moves to solve and there are none that require more than 20 moves.

In their own words, here’s how the group solved all 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 Cube positions:

• We partitioned the positions into 2,217,093,120 sets of 19,508,428,800 positions each.
• We reduced the count of sets we needed to solve to 55,882,296 using symmetry and set covering.
• We did not find optimal solutions to each position, but instead only solutions of length 20 or less.
• We wrote a program that solved a single set in about 20 seconds.
• We used about 35 CPU years to find solutions to all of the positions in each of the 55,882,296 sets.

This reminds me of the first program I wrote for my own enjoyment, which used brute force to find all solutions to Piet Hein’s Soma Cube. In 1969 I had a summer job as the night operator for an IBM 360 and I would turn off the clock to run my program so that the management wouldn’t know how much computer time I was consuming.

See this BBC story more more information on this amazing result.

AI, English, Games, General, Google, social media

The secret message embedded in the USCYBERCOM logo

     9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

is what the md5sum function returns when applied to the string that is USCYBERCOM’s official mission statement. Here’s a demonstration of this fact done on a Mac. On linux, use the md5sum command instead of md5.

~> echo -n "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, \
synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the \
operations and defense of specified Department of \
Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when \
directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace \
operations in order to enable actions in all domains, \
ensure US/Allied \ freedom of action in cyberspace and \
deny the same to our adversaries." | md5
9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a
~>

md5sum is a standard Unix command that computes a 128 bit “fingerprint” of a string of any length. It is a well designed hashing function that has the property that its very unlikely that any two non-identical strings in the real world will have the same md5sum value. Such functions have many uses in cryptography.

Thanks to Ian Soboroff for spotting the answer on Slashdot and forwarding it.

Someone familiar with md5 would recognize that the secret string has the same length and character mix as an md5 value — 32 hexadecimal characters. Each of the possible hex characters (0123456789abcdef) represents four bits, so 32 of them is a way to represent 128 bits.

We’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to compute the 128 bit sequence that our secret code corresponds to.

English, General, Mobile Computing, Security, Semantic Web

The newly restored complete version of Metropolis opens tonight the Senator Theater for a one-week run. If you like movies about robots, or dystopian futures or just like classic fims that made a difference, it is well worth seeing.

Baltimore is lucky to be one of about ten cities in the US screening it this summer and the only one on the east coast outside of Boston. From the Baltimore Sun

“This “complete” version of Lang’s silent sci-fi extravaganza restores all of its subplots and nearly all of its surging imagery. With Gottfried Huppertz’s soaring romantic score heard in full for the first time, “Metropolis” offers an engulfing audiovisual experience. It leaves you shaking your head in wonder and disbelief.

Those new to the film can sit back and be overwhelmed. Those who’ve seen it have the additional pleasure of watching a puzzle solved before your eyes. Roughly 25 minutes longer than the 2002 version, this print of “Metropolis” uses footage from a 16-millimeter dupe negative found in Buenos Aires to fill in some major bits and pieces — and some minor ones.

You can tell the 16-mm footage from the drop in picture quality. But the effect is thrilling, not jarring. This print combines the ecstasy of seeing a peak accomplishment in pristine form with the frisson movie-lovers get from viewing films as artifacts of their time, aging the way gardens or buildings do.”

AI, English, Film, General, robots

Here’s a quick trick that could significantly speed up your Web surfing. Download and run the open source namebench on your computer. It does a thorough test of your current DNS servers and some other popular global and regional alternatives, produces a good report and recommends which ones you should use.

Here is how namebench describes what it does:

“namebench looks for the fastest DNS (Domain Name System) servers accessible to your computer. You can think of a DNS server as a phone book: When you want to dial a company on the phone, you may have to flip through a phone book by name to find their phone number. On the Internet, when you want to visit “www.google.com”, a DNS server needs to looks up the correct IP Address for you.

Over the course of loading a single web page, your computer may need to look up a dozen of these addresses. While your Internet provider usually automatically assigns you one of their servers to handle looking up these addresses, there may be others that are significantly faster. namebench finds them.”

Namebench also points out which DNS servers do DNS hijacking — typically by intercepting the error message produced by entering a mistyped URL (e.g., http://umbc.edo/) and redirecting you to a page full of ads and “helpful” search results. Some name severs, like OpenDNS, will also automatically correct some mistyped URLS, e.g., guessing that then you typed http://umbc.edi/ you meant to type http://umbc.edu/. (Shades of DWIM!) It’s not dangerous and is a way private DNS services, like OpenDNS, get revenue to support the service and make a profit.

I have been using OpenDNS because it’s the fastest (for me) and don’t mind their NXDOMAIN hijacking. But I learned from namebench that OpenDNS reroutes www.google.com to google.navigation.opendns.com. That site redirects HTTP GET requests to and then from there onto http://www.google.de/. And Google itself redirects HTTP GET requests for http://google.com/ to http://www.google.com/. I’ll admit I am a bit confused by this. I imagine they do this to capture queries sent to Google, which provide very useful information even in the aggregate. OpenDNS says that they are doing this to correct a problem with Google-specific software installed on Dell computers. They do not seem to be doing this for Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which does lend some credence the claim. I plan on digging into this more to fully understand what is going on and why.

Namebench runs on Macs, Windows and UNIX, and has both a command line and graphical user interface. See the namebench FAQ for more information.

CS, DNS, English, General, networking, privacy

Digital Capital Week (DCWEEK) is a 10 day festival running from June 11 to 20 in Washington DC focused on technology, innovation and all things digital — social media, games, policy, multi-media, activism, new media, mobile computing, animation, etc.

DCWEEK is expected to involve more than 4,000 people — artists, technologists, entrepreneurs, communicators, govies, and citizens. They will come together to participate in over 100 distributed events produced and hosted by individuals, organizations and community groups. Most of the events are free or charge a nominal cost, but pre-registration may be required.

At DCWEEK you can:

• learn from others through sessions, keynotes, workshops and panels
• meet new friends, clients, partners, investors and collaborators
• focus on the issues in DC that can be addressed in new ways
• come together to support innovative businesses, people and ideas
• work on projects that benefit the city and the world
• experiment with what’s possible
• have fun at some great parties

See the DCWEEK site for registration, schedule and details.

English, General, Mobile Computing, Web, social media

Photo by Susan Polgar

Professor Alan Sherman reports that UMBC has won the “Final Four of College Chess” for 2010:

“Undefeated, UMBC finished the President’s Cup (Final Four of College Chess) 1/2 point above the field, winning its 6th national chess title since the championship began ten years ago. The large President’s Cup perpetual trophy will return to campus for another year.

Final standings:

• 8.0 UMBC [avg USCF rating 2588)
• 7.5 UTB (Brownsville) [2580]
• 4.5 TT (Texas Tech) [2450]
• 4.0 UTD (Dallas) [2541]

In the first two rounds, UMBC gained a 1/2 point lead over UTB by defeating UTD and TT 3-1 each, whereas UTB beat UTD 3-1 but UTB beat TT only by 2.5-1.5.

Entering Round 3 with a 1/2 point lead, UMBC needed only two points to secure clear victory. In Round 3, UMBC tied UTB 2-2. Kritz lost on Board 1, Erenburg won on Board 2, and Margvelashvili and Kaplan drew on Boards 3-4. As part of its preparation, UTB hired a top Grandmaster consultant who in the months before the event helped prepare an opening trick against Kritz that contributed to Kritz’s third round defeat. Seeing that Erenburg was winning, Kaplan in a better position safely steered his game to a draw, clinching the team victory.

This weekend’s event was the strongest Final Four ever: there were seven International Grandmasters, one International Woman Grandmaster, at least ten International Masters, and 15 players rated over 2500. The event was intensely fought and played at an extremely high level of chess.

UMBC’s success was due to playing better than the opponents. The UMBC delegation included five Grandmasters, anchored by Kritz and Erenburg – each rated over 2600. At 2667, Kritz is the highest rated college player in Pan-America.

Three of the four UMBC players have perfect 4.0 GPAs (taking at least 19 credit hours per semester), and Team Captain Erenburg is a candidate for Valedictorian.”

For more details, see UMBC Wins Record “Final Four of College Chess” Against Strongest Field Yet.

English, General, UMBC, chess

UMBC will be the Baltimore site for the Global Game Jam. This is a 48 hour event, where teams from around the globe will work to each develop a complete game over one weekend. Last year, the UMBC site fielded five teams as one of 54 sites in 23 countries. This year promises to be even bigger, with 124 sites in 34 countries.

The Baltimore site and open to participants at all skill levels. It is not necessary to be a UMBC student to register. Thanks to generous support by Next Century , there is no registration fee for the Baltimore site, but you must register for this site in advance at www.globalgamejam.org. The jam will start at 5PM on Friday, January 29th in the UMBC GAIM lab, room 005a in the ITE building. At that time, the theme for this year’s games will be announced, and we’ll brainstorm game ideas and form into teams. Teams will have until 3pm on Sunday, January 31st to develop their games. We’ll have demos of each game and selection of local awards, wrapping up by 5pm Sunday.

Last year’s theme was “As long as we’re together there will always be problems”, and we had games developed using a combination of XNA, Flash, Maya, Photoshop, and the Unity Engine.

For more information, visit http://gaim.umbc.edu/jam/.

English, GAIM, General, UMBC, social media

Shades of Y2K! Mike Cardwell reports on a rule in Spamassassin that judges any message sent in or after 2010 as “grossly in the future” and treats this as evidence of it being spam. I just checked and found that our mail server’s Spamassassin is using this buggy FH_DATE_PAST_20XX rule.

If you are using Spamassassin, or think your mail server might be, check the source of mail you have received today. Here’s an example from one of my messages this morning.

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.2.5 ... on mail.cs.umbc.edu
X-Spam-Level: *
X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.6 required=5.0 tests=AWL,FH_DATE_PAST_20XX
  autolearn=disabled version=3.2.5
Received: from mail-yw0-f142.google.com (mail-yw0-f142.google.com
  [209.85.211.142]) by mail.cs.umbc.edu (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP
  id o01DjJUn011187; Fri, 1 Jan 2010 08:45:19 -0500 (EST)

If the message exceeds the local spam score threshold for, you may find a block with more details in your message header, like this example.

Content analysis details:   (6.1 points, 5.0 required)

 pts rule name              description
---- ---------------------- ----------------------------------
 3.4 FH_DATE_PAST_20XX     The date is grossly in the future.
-4.0 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_MED   RBL: Sender listed at http://www.dnswl.org/,
    medium trust [130.85.25.80 listed in list.dnswl.org]
 1.8 SUBJ_ALL_CAPS  Subject is all capitals
 0.7 MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE  MSOE_MID_WRONG_CASE
 4.2 FORGED_MUA_OUTLOOK  Forged mail pretending to be from MS Outlook

As a workaround until your server updates Spamassassin, the points that the rule adds to a message’s spam score can be lowered to 0.0 in Spamassassin’s configuration file (local.cf) or your own user-prefs file.

score FH_DATE_PAST_20XX 0.0

English, General, spam

UMBC won the 2009 Pan-American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship yesterday with perfect score of 6.0 points. This year’s tournament was held in South Padre Island, Texas on December 27-30

This is from the UMBC press release:

“Capping a near-flawless performance over the past four days at the tournament in South Padre Island, Texas, the Retrievers topped a team from the University of Texas-Brownsville today to secure the title outright for the first time since 2005.

Today’s win completed a perfect 6-0 match record for the tournament, known as the “World Series of college chess.” UMBC’s dominant performance is all the more impressive given the high quality of the 28-team field this year, said Alan Sherman, director of the school’s chess program.
…
Today UMBC topped UT-Brownsville’s “B” team, 4-0, to complete the march to the title. But the Retrievers most of the hard work yesterday, winning decisive matches over two of the strongest teams in college chess. The Retrievers topped UT-Dallas, 3 to 1, in the early match, and then got past UT-Brownsville’s “into today’s action. The tournament also included teams from Yale, Princeton, NYU, Stanford and University of Chicago.
…
The Pan-Am is the most celebrated intercollegiate chess tournament in the Americas. Since its 1946 inception, dozens of universities throughout the Americas have participated. The tournament is open to any college or university team from North, South, or Central America.

Since 2003, the teams representing the top four schools in the Pan-Am have met again in the spring to compete for the President’s Cup in an event sponsored by the U.S. Chess Federation — the “Final Four of Chess”. In 2010 the University of Texas Brownsville will host the final four, UMBC, UTD, UTB and Texas Tech, in April.

You can get information on the tournament and the games at monroi.

English, General, UMBC

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 Texas were the (only) two states in the US that accepted a computer science course as fulfilling high school graduation requirements. In Texas, the Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) course fulfilled a mathematics requirement. In Georgia, it fulfilled a fourth science course requirement. As of October, however, Georgia has rescinded that decision. … ”

I wonder how other countries treat computing and informatics in primary and secondary education.

CS, Computer Science, Education, English, General

OK it’s all Google stuff, but still good to see. Go to Google Maps, My Maps, to find ‘Videos from YouTube’ listed. Here’s where I used to live (Bristol UK) and where I live now (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Here’s a promo film of some nearby art installations from ArtZuid, who even have a page in English. I wouldn’t have found the video or the nearby links except through the map overlay. I don’t know exactly how they’re geotagging the videos, I can’t see an option under ‘my videos’ in YouTube, so perhaps it’s automatic or viewer annotations. In YouTube, you can add a map link under ‘My Videos’ / ‘Edit Video’; I didn’t see that initially. I made some investigations into similar issues (videos on maps) while at Joost; see brief mention in my Fundamentos Web slides from a couple of years ago.
Oh, nearly forgot to mention: zooming out to get a Europe or World-wide view is quite striking too.

English, General, Geo, Technology, ggg

Gregory Chaitin is on tour promoting his new field – metabiology. As Chaitin conceives it, metabiology is the study of the evolution of computer programs, with the goal of proving theorems concerning the circumstances under which evolution occurs. It’s ultimate goal, as the name suggests, is proving that under Earth-like conditions, DNA-based computers must evolve.

Key to Chaitin’s notion of evolution is something he calls creativity, and he explored this idea a little bit in a talk at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Mathematical Medicine. To understand his first theorems in this area, you need to (roughly) understand the Busy Beaver problem of Tibor Rado. A good precis is here. Essentially, a busy beaver is a Turing machine that operates as long as possible, and then halts. The Busy Beaver function, BB(n), is the highest whole number produced by an n-bit busy beaver.

So, to Chaitin’s first theorem in metabiology …

He begins with a single organism – a Turing machine. He mutates this organism, and then either keeps the original and throws away the mutant, or vise-versa, depending on which is more fit. The fitness function is based on the Busy Beaver problem. If the mutant halts, and, upon halting, produces a higher whole number than the original, then the mutant wins. If not, it loses.

Now, BB(n) is uncomputable. In fact, it has no computable bound. Nevertheless, Chaitin shows that random mutations will, in exponential time (on the number of bits, n, in the organism), result in the computation of the Busy Beaver function for n!
(That was an exclamation point, not a factorial sign.)

In other words, evolution causes fitness to increase faster than any computable function. Chaitin calls this “evidence of biological creativity”. This is a nice result, but is one that Chaitin finds less than satisfactory. In real life evolution is cumulative, while Chaitin’s proof requires assuming that evolution sometimes starts over from scratch. He really wants to prove an evolutionary process that is, in some sense, cumulative, in addition to being creative. His second theorem uses his infamous halting probability, Ω, to construct a cumulative path through program space to arbitrary levels of complexity. But this also doesn’t satisfy Chaitin, since the process is unstable, in a sense that he didn’t really explain.

Beyond these two theorems, the field is open. Things to work on seem to be:

i. Without changing the model, can Chaitin’s desired result (cumulative evolution) be proved?

ii. Part of the utility of Chaitin’s fitness function is that it explicitly rewards complexity. This fits with the observation that life, in general, evolves to become more complex. But complexity is, I think, typically seen as an epiphenomenon of fitness, and not as the very definition of fitness. Can a “Darwinian” fitness function be chosen such that complexity is not explicitly rewarded AND such that life can be proven to evolve to arbitrary complexity?

iii. Once we exhaust the limits of what we can prove without an environment, what happens when we introduce an environment, which interacts with the organism, exchanges information with the organism, and which can change, suddenly or gradually?

Of course, (iii) might not be necessary. If (ii) can be proven, then, in a sense, case closed: life must evolve. Some might even say that (ii) isn’t necessary.

But I suspect that Chaitin expects (i) to be very hard. Hence his enthusiasm. In fact, I suspect that he suspects that Ω in going to be all over metabiology, and that some of its fundamental questions will prove to be (mathematically) unknowable.

But algorithmic information theory (AIT) is only one extra-biological approach to evolution. Another is thermodynamics. Eric Chaisson, for example, argues that the Earth, bathed in solar radiation, has a natural tendency towards lower entropy and higher complexity. Is an AIT/Thermodynamics synthesis possible? Google says: Yes, (and it’s been around a while).

AIT, English, General, Metabiology, Theory of computation, evolution

The NYT reviewed Logicomix by writer Apostolos Doxiadis and Berkeley CS professor Christos Papadimitriou.

“First published last year in Greece (where it became a surprise best seller), the comic book — er, graphic novel? — is the brainchild of Apostolos Doxiadis, previously the author of a not-bad mathematical fiction called “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture.” For expert assistance on logic, Doxiadis called on his friend Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of computer science at Berkeley and the author of a novel about Alan Turing.”

It looks great. Amazon is out of stock for the harccover version, but there are other online sources that have copies and I’ve ordered one for the ebiquity lab. The paperback version will be released on Monday.

Here’s how the Logicomix site describes it.

“Covering a span of sixty years, the graphic novel Logicomix was inspired by the epic story of the quest for the Foundations of Mathematics.

This was a heroic intellectual adventure most of whose protagonists paid the price of knowledge with extreme personal suffering and even insanity. The book tells its tale in an engaging way, at the same time complex and accessible. It grounds the philosophical struggles on the undercurrent of personal emotional turmoil, as well as the momentous historical events and ideological battles which gave rise to them.

The role of narrator is given to the most eloquent and spirited of the story’s protagonists, the great logician, philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. It is through his eyes that the plights of such great thinkers as Frege, Hilbert, Poincaré, Wittgenstein and Gödel come to life, and through his own passionate involvement in the quest that the various narrative strands come together.”

CS, English, General

It looks like the release of Conrad Barski’s long awaited graphic text on Lisp is getting closer. You can now order it from Amazon, although the publication date is listed as April 28, 2010. Conrad’s site says that it’s “due out this Fall” and the publisher’s site says “Coming March 2010″. I hope we don’t have to wait until next Spring.

Conrad Barski, Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!, No Starch Press, 2010.

Here’s the description from the publisher’s site.

“Lisp is a uniquely powerful programming language that, despite its academic reputation, is actually very practical. Land of Lisp brings the language into the real world, teaching Lisp by showing you how to write several complete Lisp-based games, including a text adventure, an evolution simulation, and a robot battle. While building these games, you’ll learn the core concepts of Lisp programming, such as data types, recursion, input/output, object-oriented programming, and macros. And thanks to the power of Lisp, the code is short. Rather than bogging things down with reference information that is easily found online, Land of Lisp focuses on using Lisp for real programming. While not a cartoon guide like our Manga Guides, the book is filled with author Conrad Barski’s brilliant Lisp cartoons (featuring a Lisp alien and other characters) that are sure to appeal to many Lisp fans and, in the tradition of all No Starch Press titles, make the learning more fun.”

For more information, see the comments on Hacker News.

English, General

Sunday’s Boston Globe has an article on online privacy provocatively titled Project ‘Gaydar’ that leads with a story of an class experiment done by two MIT students on predicting sexual orientation from social network information.

“Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said.”

I suspect that many will read the article and think that such an analysis can be easily done on their own Facebook information. While I’m not a Facebook expert, I assume that the vast majority of its users employ the default privacy settings which do not allow non-friends to see personal information including gender and the ‘interested in’ attribute, which can be used as a proxy for sexual orientation.

Still, the problem of protecting privacy in online social networking systems is a very real one. The Boston Globe story also mentions work by AISL colleague Murat Kantarcioglu on predicting political affiliations (see Inferring Private Information Using Social Network Data).

“He and a student – who later went to work for Facebook – took 167,000 profiles and 3 million links between people from the Dallas-Fort Worth network. They used three methods to predict a person’s political views. One prediction model used only the details in their profiles. Another used only friendship links. And the third combined the two sets of data. The researchers found that certain traits, such as knowing what groups people belonged to or their favorite music, were quite predictive of political affiliation. But they also found that they did better than a random guess when only using friendship connections. The best results came from combining the two approaches.”

The article also mentions Lise Getoor’s work on discovering private information by integrating work across Facebook, Flickr, Dogster and BibSonomy (see To Join or not to Join: The Illusion of Privacy in Social Networks with Mixed Public and Private User Profiles).

“Those researchers blinded themselves to the profiles of half the people in each network, and launched a variety of “attacks” on the networks, to see what private information they could glean by simply looking at things like groups people belonged to, and their friendship links. On each network, at least one attack worked. Researchers could predict where Flickr users lived; Facebook users’ gender, a dog’s breed, and whether someone was likely to be a spammer on BibSonomy. The authors found that membership in a group gave away a significant amount of information, but also found that predictions using friend links weren’t as strong as they expected. “Using friends in classifying people has to be treated with care,” computer scientists Lise Getoor and Elena Zheleva wrote.”

English, General

Botprize is yet another variation on the classic Turing Test. Does setting the evaluation in the context of a online multi-user video game really change the nature of the test? At least this does have real practical values. The computer game industry is very competitive and having more realistic and interesting computer-controlled entities make a game more successful. Technology Review has a short story, A Turing Test for Computer Game Bots on the contest.

“A new contest could help develop better AI for games and other applications.

Can a computer fool expert gamers into believing it’s one of them? That was the question posed at the second annual BotPrize, a three-month contest that concluded today at the IEEE Computational Symposium on Intelligence and Games in Milan.

The contest challenges programmers to create a software “bot” to control a game character that can pass for human, as judged by a panel of experts. The goal is not only to improve AI in entertainment, but also to fuel advances in non-gaming applications of AI.

The contest has been completed, but the results have not yet been announced. The BotPrize web site currently says:

The 2009 BotPrize Contest has been decided!

Complete results will be posted soon, but here is a summary of the results:

None of the bots was able to fool enough judges to take the major prize. But all the bots fooled at least one of the judges.

The most human-like bot was sqlitebot by Jeremy Cothran. The joint runners up were anubot from Chris Pelling and ICE-2009 from the team from Ritsumeikan University, Japan. Jeremy and Chris are both new entrants, and the ICE team were also runners up in 2008.

… more details to follow in the next 24 hours.

Contestants created bots for Unreal Tournament 2004 which communicate with the game server via the GameBots interface.

The TR story continues.

“This year’s BotPrize drew 15 entrants from Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Spain, Brazil, and Canada. Entrants created bots for Unreal Tournament 2004, a first-person shoot-’em-up in which gamers compete against each other for the most virtual kills. For the contest, in-game chatting was disabled so that bots could be evaluated for their so-called “humanness” by “physical” behavior alone. And, to elicit more spontaneity, contestants were given weapons that behaved differently from the ones ordinarily used in the game.

Each expert judge on the prize panel took turns shooting against two unidentified opponents-one human-controlled, the other a bot created by a contestant. After 10 to 15 minutes, the judge tried to identify the AI. To win the big prize, worth $6,000, a bot had to fool at least 80% of the judges. As in last year’s competition, however, none of the participants was able to pull off this feat. A minor award worth $1,700, for the most “human-like” bot, was awarded to Jeremy Cathran, from the University of Southern California, for his entry, called sqlitebo.”

English, General

Yesterday’s Chronicle of Education had an article on 5 College Majors On the Rise. It’s gratifying to see that three of them are relevant to IT and computing: service science, health informatics, and computational science. Of course, now is a difficult time for universities and Departments to mount new majors or even tracks. Most schools in the US have had two years of budget cuts due to the recession and/or decline in their endowments. But this is a positive sign for the computing disciplines, which had suffered declines in enrollments after the dot com bubble burst seven years ago.

CS, Education, English, General, IT

[caption id="attachment_1744" align="aligncenter" width="380" caption="Pictured at the launch of NUI Galway’s B.E. in Sports & Exercise Engineering were (left-right) the University President, Dr James J. Browne; Professor Ó Laighin, Head of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at NUI Galway and Course Director; one of the first students on the new course, Ruaidhrí Molloy; and John Treacy, CEO of the Irish Sports Council."]read more

Electrical engineering, Electronic Engineer, English, General, Ireland, John Treacy, Mechanical Engineering, NUI Galway, Western World

[caption id="attachment_1744" align="aligncenter" width="380" caption="Pictured at the launch of NUI Galway’s B.E. in Sports & Exercise Engineering were (left-right) the University President, Dr James J. Browne; Professor Ó Laighin, Head of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at NUI Galway and Course Director; one of the first students on the new course, Ruaidhrí Molloy; and John Treacy, CEO of the Irish Sports Council."]read more

Electrical engineering, Electronic Engineer, English, General, Ireland, John Treacy, Mechanical Engineering, NUI Galway, Western World

Pictured at the launch of NUI Galway’s B.E. in Sports & Exercise Engineering were (left-right) the University President, Dr James J. Browne; Professor Ó Laighin, Head of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at NUI Galway and Course Director; one of the first students on the new course, Ruaidhrí Molloy; and John Treacy, CEO of the Irish Sports Council.

From http://www.nuigalway.ie/news/main_press.php?p_id=1069:

Olympic silver medallist and former double World Cross Country Champion, John Treacy, today (Friday, 10 July) officially launched NUI Galway’s B.E. in Sports & Exercise Engineering.

The degree programme, which incorporates significant elements of Anatomy, Physiology, and Mechanical Engineering with a major in Electronic Engineering, puts particular emphasis on ambulatory monitoring of human performance, movement assessment, and systems and devices for the assessment of sport and exercise.

Speaking at the launch, John Treacy, who is now CEO of the Irish Sports Council, said: “This whole area is hugely important. I see tremendous potential in this combination of engineering and sports science. In elite sports we deal with tenths and hundredths of seconds. Winning often comes down to a technical edge so having professionals trained in Ireland in this area will be of great benefit”.

The first cohort of students taking this focused interdisciplinary programme have just finished first year and are destined to graduate with a unique skillset for a growing industry according to NUI Galway’s Professor Gearóid Ó Laighin.

Professor Ó Laighin is Head of Electrical & Electronic Engineering and Course Director: “Professional sport is a worldwide multi-billion euro industry and plays a central role in most western societies. Today technology is used on a regular basis to improve sports performance in elite athletes. The Sports & Exercise Engineering programme at NUI Galway will provide graduates with the skills and expertise to design systems and devices for the evaluation and execution of sport performance across a broad range of sports”.

Professor Ó Laighin sees the Exercise Engineering component of the programme becoming increasingly important. Exercise Engineering is expected to play an important role in the management of two major healthcare crises for the Western World, obesity and ageing populations. “There are numerous health benefits associated with physical activity, including a reduced risk of premature mortality and reduced risks of coronary heart disease. Regular participation in physical activity also appears to reduce depression and anxiety, improve mood, and enhance ability to perform daily tasks throughout the life span. Exercise Engineers will design systems and devices to promote increased adherence to exercise”.

The programme in Sports & Exercise Engineering is offered by the College of Engineering & Informatics in collaboration with the College of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences at NUI Galway.

As part of their studies, Sports & Exercise Engineering students use the facilities in the newly opened Sports Centre at NUI Galway. A new high-spec Engineering Building will add to facilities on campus by 2011.

NUI Galway is also offering two additional new Engineering degrees, which will have the first student intake in September. These are B.E. degrees in Energy Systems Engineering, and Engineering Innovation – Electronic.

Electrical engineering, Electronic Engineer, English, General, Ireland, John Treacy, Mechanical Engineering, NUI Galway, Western World

Short version: If the Web knows I like a TV show, why can’t my TV be more useful?

So I have just joined a Facebook group, “Spaced Appreciation Society“:

Basic Info
Type: Common Interest – Pets & Animals
Description: If you’ve ever watched (and therefore loved) the TV series Spaced, then come and pay homage to the great Simon Pegg and Jess Stevenson. “You f’ing plum”
Contact Details
Website: http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/
Location: Meteor Street

That URL is (as with many of these groups) from a site whose primary topic is the thing the group’s about. In this case, about a TV show. It’s even in the public page for that group:

<tr><td class=”label”>Website:</td>
<td class=”data”><div class=”datawrap”><a href=”http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/” onmousedown=”return wait_for_load(this, event, function() { UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this), &quot;&quot;, event) });” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/</a></div></td></tr>

If I search Google (Yahoo BOSS might be wiser, they have APIs) with:

link:http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/ site:wikipedia.org

It finds me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced

Although “link:http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/ site:dbpedia.org” doesn’t find anything, some URL rewriting gets me to:

http://dbpedia.org/page/Spaced

“Spaced is a British television situation comedy written by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, and directed by Edgar Wright. It is noted for its rapid-fire editing, frequent dropping of pop-culture references, and occasional displays of surrealism. Two series of seven episodes were broadcast in 1999 and 2001 on Channel 4.”

dbpedia-owl:author
* dbpedia:Jessica_Hynes
* dbpedia:Simon_Pegg

dbpedia-owl:completionDate
* 2001-04-13 (xsd:date)

dbpedia-owl:director
* dbpedia:Edgar_Wright

dbpedia-owl:episodenumber
* 14

dbpedia-owl:executiveproducer
* dbpedia:Humphrey_Barclay

dbpedia-owl:genre
* dbpedia:Situation_comedy

dbpedia-owl:language
* dbpedia:English_language

dbpedia-owl:network
* dbpedia:Channel_4

dbpedia-owl:producer
* dbpedia:Gareth_Edwards
* dbpedia:Nira_Park

dbpedia-owl:releaseDate
* 1999-09-24 (xsd:date)

dbpedia-owl:runtime
* 24

dbpedia-owl:starring
* dbpedia:Jessica_Hynes
* dbpedia:Simon_Pegg

There are also links from here to Cyc (but an incorrect match) and to Freebase (to http://www.freebase.com/view/en/spaced).

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia “external links” section, with the URL for http://www.spaced-out.org.uk/ (marked “offical, fan-operated site” is not part of the DBpedia RDF export. I guess as it is not in an infobox. Extracting these external-link URLs at least for the TV, Actor and Movie related sections of Wikipedia might be worthwhile. And DBpedia would be useful for identifying the relevant subset to re-extract.

This idea of using such URLs as keys into Wikipedia/dbpedia data would also work with Identi.ca groups and others. In fact the matching might be easier in Identi.ca – I’m not sure how the Facebook APIs expose this stuff.

Anyway, if a show is about to be broadcast that includes eg. an interview with dbpedia:Jessica_Hynes or dbpedia:Simon_Pegg I’d like to hear about it.

So… is there any way I can use BBC’s /programmes to get upcoming information about who will be on the radio or telly, in a way that could be matched against dbpedia URIs?

Edit: I should’ve mentioned that Facebook in particular also has a more explicit “is a fan of” construct, with Products, Celebs, TV shows and Stores as types of thing you can be a fan of. Furthermore these show up on your public page, eg. here’s mine. I’m certainly interested in using that data, but also in a model that uses  general groups, since it is applicable to other sites that allow a group to indicate itself with a topical URL.

English, General

Is this thing on?

English, General, iphone

My mother, Mary Breslin, died two weeks ago today. It was a terrible shock to all of our family, but I wanted to say a few words about her so that you would have an idea about what an influence she was on my life and the lives of many others.

Firstly, Mary was a loving and caring wife and mother, who amongst other things made sure I always had the best of everything, protected me from any perceived harm or injustice, and nurtured and encouraged my love for learning. She was a formidable woman, and always strived for perfection for both herself and her family. She was the kind of customer that you would either love or hate to have in your establishment, as any flaw or deficiency would be exposed!

She had a huge network of friends that she helped through both actions and words. She was one of those people that you could always call on if you were in trouble and needed help, advice or information.

Mary was an extremely intelligent and organised woman, and showed throughout her life how she was able to adapt herself to new situations and take on a variety of challenges. Having being forced to give up her civil service job in the tax office when she married (a regulation at that time), her jobs included homemaker, senior administrator in a car rentals agency, and part-time book keeper for local businesses.

She was also very modern and took to technology very easily. I remember when I was in Virginia in 1996, we used to communicate via a precursor to internet chat (VMS Phone) as international phone call prices were exhorbitant at that time. She used the Web for buying books, paying bills and internet banking, but also mastered services like boards, blogs, Skype, PayPal and eBay with ease (she racked up more positive feedback in a few months on her eBay account than I managed for many years!).

Mary loved many things, including: her family, her two grandchildren, her home and village, being beside the sea, Elvis, the comedian Dave Allen, holidays in San Francisco, Cyprus and Rome, Pope John Paul II, Hummel figurines, “The Past is Myself” by Christabel Bielenberg, Bjorn Borg, repeating baby stories about John, the Royals, TV soaps, the Thorn Birds, QVC, style and fashion, making greeting cards, the odd sherry, Italian food, the burned bit at the end of a roast, dolphins, gardening, the colour turquoise, and much more. We loved her too, and we always will.

Ar dheis D? go raibh a h-anam.

Though we need to weep your loss,
You dwell in that safe place in our hearts,
Where no storm or might or pain can reach you.
May this dark grief flower with hope
In every heart that loves you.
May you continue to inspire us:
To enter each day with a generous heart.
To serve the call of courage and love
Until we see your beautiful face again
In that land where there is no more separation,
Where all tears will be wiped from our mind,
And where we will never lose you again.

- John O’Donohue

English, General