great!
RapidResponse Overview from Matt Berg on Vimeo.
great!
RapidResponse Overview from Matt Berg on Vimeo.
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…)
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…)
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!
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).
“…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