A nice video from Google EngEdu series. Peter Morville gives a talk on Ambient Findability and The Future of Search.
The slideset of the presentation is available as PDF.
With so much information around us, it becomes important to find what we look for…
An interesting evolution for the Nokia tablet pc, the N800. It will support WiMax and it will be launched in USA next year. For more information see the news on linuxdevices.com.
I just would like to recommend the latest Michael Moore movie Sicko, to really understand how important is a good and universal health care system. A system where everybody can get access. Putting profits before our health is a really dangerous choice as the movie shows.
The World Health Organization ranking of the World Health Systems is contained in the WHO 2000 report, at page 200.
You can check that table also from this website.
An editorial from the New York Times World’s Best Medical Care?.
In the same domain, I want to recommend a couple of books. The first is Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman.
The second book is The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It of Marcia Angell.
From the FT, Facebook buys start-up Parakey.
what is Parakey?
Parakey is a startup launched by Blake Ross. Blake Ross helped launch Firefox at the age of 15. A nice interview to Ross was in IEEE spectrum, The Firefox Kid.
The aim of Parakey is to make browsing the web and your file system seamless, a kind of Web OS. It will be interesting to see how Parakey will evolve with Facebook.
Performance is an important quality of a software. In my recent paper, just accepted for publication in the Journal of Systems and Software Elsevier, I discuss the use of software performance assessments in the context of software product family architectures and real-time embedded systems.
The paper is: Software performance tuning of software product family architectures: two case studies in the real-time embedded systems domain
Abstract: Software performance is an important non-functional quality attribute and software performance evaluation is an essential activity in the software development process.
Especially in embedded real-time systems, software design and evaluation are driven by the needs to optimize the limited resources, to respect time deadlines and, at the same time, to produce the best experience for end-users.
Software product family architectures add additional requirements to the evaluation process.
In this case, the evaluation includes the analysis of the optimizations and tradeoffs for the whole products in the family.
Performance evaluation of software product family architectures requires knowledge and a clear understanding of different domains: software architecture assessments, software performance and software product family architecture.
We have used a scenario-driven approach to evaluate performance and dynamic memory management efficiency in one Nokia software product family architecture. In this paper we present two case studies. Furthermore, we discuss the implications and tradeoffs of software performance against evolvability and maintenability in software product family architectures.
People write keywords or sentences in a search engine and retrieve a set of documents related to that query. The search engine finds the best match between the keywords and the document.
Using the inverse look-up, we can discover that a certain document has been found using the specific search terms. I use this technique to automatically tag my research papers. The tags are the keywords people have used to download that specific paper. You can check the example in the research section of my home page.
And I have recently found a paper on the subject:
Learn from Web Search Logs to Organize Search Results that will be presented by Xuanhui Wang and ChengXiang Zhai at the upcoming SIGIR 2007 conference.
Thanks to Greg Linden Blog
Interesting conference paper on the algorithms behind Google News:
Google News Personalization: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering: Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering Industrial track, at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007), May 8-12, Banff, Alberta, Canada
a nice article from Duncan Watts on predictions and why predictions of success are difficult to make:
Duncan Watts, Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage? in the NYT article
This is an invited paper I have written with 3 other colleagues of mine to appear in the proceedings of PIMRC 2007, the 18th Annual IEEE Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications. The abstract is below:
Next generation applications and services have to be user-centric, and therefore must satisfy users’ needs and improve users’
lives. These systems also have to be able to adapt to different contexts, foresee users’ intentions, provide recommendations
accordingly and protect users’ privacy at the same time. In this paper we present our research on context-awareness applications,
context-recognition techniques and privacy and trust. To demonstrate the feasibility and the progress in this area, we have
developed a set of representative applications, two of which are presented in this paper. This perspective is the first glimpse
of the forthcoming applications and services in the mobile domain. In the discussion, we summarize the many possibilities and
describe the challenges for the research brought in by these new topics.
you can download the pdf file here: Creating next generation applications and services for mobile devices: challenges and opportunities
A very interesting post by Marc Andreessen (Netscape cofounder) about the Facebook platform.
Facebook is a quite popular social networking site. Take a look at this interesting video which highlights how social networking + personalization really payoff!