Archive for the ‘developing’ Category

community health monitoring done with texts only

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

great!

RapidResponse Overview from Matt Berg on Vimeo.

Posted in developing, mobile | 1 Comment »

Mapping Social Networks (with APIs)

Monday, April 6th, 2009

There seem to be many reasons why people connect online. For example, on Twitter, I have connected to friends, colleagues, family, people I have met at conferences (or simply know from some of the work),  and a couple celebrities (like Tom Waits). These few reasons encompass a largely incomplete list of why two people may connect on a social network; of course, understanding why people connect to each other would give insight into suggesting new connections for people to make… (more…)

Posted in developing, evaluation, research, social networks | 3 Comments »

Research is the New Music

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

I’ve started trying out a new service, called Mendeley. The quickest way to describe it is a “last.fm for research;” they have a desktop client that can monitor the pdf files that you are reading, and an online presence where each user has a profile. (Read about them on their blog; my profile is here). So far, it seems that they are at a very early stage. However, the basic functionality (seeing/tagging/searching papers you read) seems quite nice. On the other hand, an obvious difficulty is that of extracting accurate meta-data from research pdf files.

The similarity between research papers and songs is quite striking. Think of it this way: songs (research papers) are made by musicians (authored by researchers), have a name (title), and are collected in albums (journals/conference proceedings). Both have a time of release; both can be tagged/described/loved/hated; both are blogged and talked about. Sometimes artists make music videos, sometimes researchers make presentations or demos. (more…)

Posted in applications, developing, education, info-overload, recommendations, recommender systems, research | Comments Closed

Get Ready to Rummble!

Friday, June 20th, 2008

The very last session of the IFIPTM 2008 conference was a demo session; there were 3 demos run and the one that I liked the most was Rummble.com. Rummble is a web site that, much like other web2.0 ideas, has as foundations a social network: the interesting addition, though (and what makes it so appropriate for a conference on trust) is that when you add a friend you can say how much you trust their opinions. You then go on to “rummble” different locations (shops/restaurants/clubs), by rating, tagging, and describing them with a comment. The neat thing is that combining trust, rating similarity, and social distance, the site can then predict how much you will like other places that you have not rummbled, and colours them accordingly. The site is also fully mobile! (more…)

Posted in conference, cooperation, developing, industry, mobile, recommender systems, social networks, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Strange Bugs

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

I recently went to an introductory course about the new UCL-Dell supercomputer Legion. It was a 2-day course, with plenty of presentations about optimizing/parallelizing code, and some hands-on. Other than a few quirks (the system is still being tested), it worked great- and it’s very exciting to have that (huge) amount of computational power available. The people are also very nice- more info on them here. (more…)

Posted in developing, recommender systems, research | Comments Closed

Online Applications

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Although in these posts we tend to focus on the research aspect of trust, social networking, recommender systems, and mobile applications, it is always interesting to keep an eye on what is going on in the “real” world – what is drawing the investment and attention of entrepreneurs.

Recommender Systems: the list is near-infinite now (and is proportional to the problem of data portability?), and everyone knows about the Amazons and Last.fms. However there are a number of names appearing that merge recommendations with social interactions – away from neat algorithms and towards human-driven reviews and recommendations. Names like Reevoo, Boxedup, LouderVoice, Crowdstorm, and RecommendBox.

Location-based Services: Although there are a wide range of potential applications for mobile phones, many of the early names seem to be focusing on mobile social networking. Sites like Imity, Mobiluck, Loopt, Hyphen-8, and MeetMoi. Some of them use bluetooth, others only require their users to SMS their location. One day the “familiar stranger” will not be a stranger for long!

Posted in developing, industry, mobile, recommender systems, social networks | 4 Comments »

Turn Ideas into Money

Monday, March 17th, 2008

As the GroupLens research blog is reporting, MyStrands have announced a $100,000 investment for the winner of the recommender startup competition. The winners will be announced at RecSys 2008. On a side note, any UCL-ers interested in entrepreneurship might also be interested in this course run by the UCL graduate school.

Update: it seems that tapping into any wisdom hidden in the masses is the new source of ideas (crowdsourcing): don’t come up with ideas, just make a means for the ideas to come to you. A new competition is adding its name to the Netflix prize, this previous post on evaluating algorithms with the masses, and the above competition: semantihacker is offerring $1 million to anyone who can put their semantic-analysis engine to good use!

Posted in award, conference, developing, recommender systems | Comments Closed

Barcamp for mobile designers and developers

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

From here: “mobileCampLondon will be taking place the last weekend of September or Saturday the 29th and Sunday the 30th. We’ve got an eclectic mix of participants coming: from those working on the open source mobile platform OpenMoko and the team behind the Mobile Advocacy Toolkit to CuteCircuit – the designers behind the hug shirt and other wearable computing experiments”.
Sign up (for free) on the wiki. (Space limited to 100 people).

Posted in developing, mobile | Comments Closed

London gets free Wi-Fi

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

“…A free metropolitan Wi-Fi network has been launched in London, continuing the gradual trend toward free public wireless Internet access in Europe and the United States….The group behind Free-hotspot.com (…) to offer free Wi-Fi access to businesses and the public along a 13.6-mile stretch of the River Thames.”

More details here

Posted in developing, free | Comments Closed