Tony Abou-Assaleh

Friday, October 23, witnessed the most anticipated programming competition in Atlantic Canada. Teams from Atlantic Canadian universities gathered at Dalhousie University in a show-off of programming and problem-solving skills. Each team consisted of 3 participants, mostly undergraduate computer science students. The teams were given 5 hours to tackle 6 problems. The problem complexity ranged from easy, suitable for second year undergraduate students in computer science, to more complex ones that even graduates would find challenging. The algorithmic solutions to the problems ranged from basic searching and sorting, to dynamic programming, to geometry.

17 minutes into the contest, the SMU Huskies, led by my colleague Chris Adams, solved their first problem. Withing the hour, a few more teams solved their first problem, but by that time SMU Huskies had already solved their second problem. They were on the roll.

At the end of the competition, the Huskies had solved 4 out of 6 problems, qualifying to compete at the ACM ICPC Northeast North America Programming Contest in Fredericton, NB, next Saturday.

The final results were announced at the APICS conference today:

1. #4 smu_huskies 4 problems 456 minutes
   Saint Mary’s University, CS Huskies
   Chris Adams, Jonathan Kenney, Lucas Mannell
2. #14 mounta_thought, 2 problems, 126 minutes
   Mount Allison University, Deep Thought
   Andrew Edmunds, Jason Rhinelander, Marc St. Onge
3. #19 dal_gold, 2 problems, 137 minutes
   Dalhousie University, Dalhousie Gold
   John Doucette, Ross Story, Brian Wolff
4. #10 unbf_blacks, 2 problems, 174 minutes
   University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, UNB Blacks
   Bradley Aune, Cody Harris, Ian Bishop
5. #20 upei_sl, 2 problems, 332 minutes
   University of Prince Edward Island, UPEI Skull Lightning
   Nick MacAulay, Peter Workman, Stanley DeBoer
6. #16 acadia_red, 2 problems, 339 minutes
   Acadia University, Acadia Red
   Alex Sanford, Matthew Penney, Ryan Wooden

Congratulations to Chris and SMU for a well-deserved victory, and better luck for the other teams next year.

The churches in Milano are just fascinating. I spent many hours during my trip in Milan going from one historic church to another. And although this started because there wasn’t much else to do, I kept going because I enjoyed it so much. I visited a total of 5 churches, each with a unique style, history, Christian artifacts, and wall paintings.

1. The first was Duomo, Milan’s most known treasure. Duomo is a huge church fully covered in engraved marble. All these statues and figures and patterns were all so detailed, so perfect, and so breathtaking. in the centre of the church, high above it, stands a golden statue of Virgin Mary.
2. Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio had the oldest of the Christian artifacts, dating back to early Christianity and was built by St. Ambrose in the 4th century. Here I discovered that Victor is actually the name of a saint.
3. The most memorable elements of Santa Maria presso San Satiro were the hundreds of paintings of saints and angles painted on the ceiling of the church. The church, as many others, is kept dark. Therefore, to the painting are hard to see by the naked eye (having them on the ceiling doesn’t help either) but can be viewed with the help of a camera that is able to capture more light that the human eye.
4. Santa Maria delle Grazie is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the church were Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper, although the building housing the painting is no longer considered part of the church.
5. Basilica of San Simpliciano captured my senses with all the art it houses, from paintings by famous and less famous artists, to stained-glass windows. The art comes from a wide range of periods, the earliest dating back to the 4th century.

Probabilistic Relaxed Unification Formalism and Applications in Automated Question-Answering Systems

Reasoning about natural language requires robustness in the face of uncertainty about the validity of the information contained in the text. Many natural language processing formalism rely on classical unification, which assumes that the knowledge base is complete and accurate. However, this seldom applies to the real world; text from the Web may contain incorrect, incomplete, or contradictory information. We introduce probabilistic relaxed unification as an alternative approach where the assumptions of classical unification are relaxed. Relaxed unification replaces the binary success or failure outcome of classical unification with a real number quantifying the correctness of the result. Our formalism is realized in the implementation of a modular question-answering system prototype. Our approach is empirically validated through a series of cases drawn from real world questions and data collection. The validation cases substantiate that our system provides satisfactory results on the chosen dataset within the system limitations. This book should be of interest to academics and practitioners interested in reasoning under uncertainty and automated question-answering systems.

I was recently invited by VDM Verlag to publish my PhD dissertation as monograph. The way it works is that the author does all the work for preparing the manuscript, there is no editorial proof-reading or any type of content or formatting assistance. On the other hand, the publisher handles all the distribution and printing at no cost to the author. It’s a good deal if you’re looking for a low-risk (no cost to you) low-return publishing opportunity. The author receives some royalties, but they’re generally insignificant.

One significant difference between the book and the dissertation is the addition of an index. Learning about writing an index was both pleasant and frustrating, and it is my hope that the effort it took will prove of use to the reader.

The book is 156 page and available from Amazon at $84.00 USD. ISBN: 978-3639171402

If you’re interested in publishing your manuscript through VDM Verlag, let me know and I will make the introduction. Disclaimer: I get a free book for every referral that leads to a publication.

As of today, the following plugins are active on this site:

1. Akismet: A popular anti-spam plugin the screens and blocks spammy comments
2. All in One SEO Pack: it gives a great flexibility in editing meta tags for individual posts and pages, but I use it most of it’s out-of-the-box good templates for default meta-tag values.
3. bib2html: With some in-house mods, this plugin powers the the publications page from a BibTeX file. Very convenient.
4. Exec-PHP: I use this plugin to execute PHP code on the popular posts page.
5. FeedBurner FeedSmith: provides RSS feed serving through FeedBurner.
6. File Icons: the idea behind this plugin is neat, it automatically ads meaningful icons to links based on the extension of the destination file. I’m not too happy with it though. I feel it’s a bit clumsy at times. See it in action on the publications page.
7. Google Analyticator: simple Google Analytics integration
8. Google XML Sitemaps: very useful plugin that automatically generates a site map every time a new post is added. Highly configurable too.
9. Wordpress Popular Posts: a new addition to the site. It power the popular posts widget in the right column as well as the popular posts page. The popularity can be based on page views or comments.
10. WP-ContactForm: I use a modified version of this plugin to power the contact page.
11. WP-SpamFree: Another plugin to reduce comment spam. It shows the comment form through JavaScript, reducing automated comments.

Milan has an extensive public transportation system that consists of trains, metro, trams, and buses. The train connects the Malpensa airport to Milan. The ride takes about 40 minutes and costs 11 euro. The city of Milan and the suburbs are covered with a star-shaped metro system. The metro run regularly, and there is insignificant wait time between trains during the day. City travel is only 1 euro, but if you’re coming from suburbs then it’s 1.5 euro.

Covering the suburbs is a network of over 60 bus and metro lines, augmented with about 100 lines for urban area. Needless to say, such a large network can’t be printed meaningfully on a map. So while the metro map is posted all over the city and on all maps of Milan, the bus map is only accessible from the ATM website. Unfortunate for me, the ATM website was recently redesigned and the English version is “coming soon.” If you speak Italian, however, the site is quiet amazing with search functionality and public-transit routing directions. The map is interactive allowing you to view the bus/train arrival times for each stop. Keep in mind that Milan transport is imprecise, and it was common for the bus to arrive 5 minutes early.

One inconvenience for visitors is that bus ticket must be bought it advance and validated on site. So if you’re at a hotel in the middle of nowhere with no stores selling bus tickets nearby, you’re out of luck. Or are you? You can still ride, as long you don’t get an inspector on your ride.

As for private transportation, namely taxi, two things to keep in mind: except for high volume tourist areas, you pretty much have to call for a cab; and they take cash only. And it doesn’t matter that you call for a cab with credit card capabilities, they still take cash only and have a thousand excuses why they couldn’t process your credit card. I speak from a sample of 3!

Milan metro map is courtesy of http://mappery.com.

The Twitter Times is an interesting news site that is built on top of the Twitter real-time stream. The site describes itself as:

“The Twitter Times is a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account.”

It basically monitors the global real-time Twitter stream, identifies news stories that are tweeted and re-tweeted, cross-references them with you friends and their friends, and brings them all in one, well-organized place. The best part of it all, you get the all the news stories on one page – no visiting multiple sites, no following links to see what the tweet is about.

The Twitter Times is a time saver for me. I follow almost 200 streams on twitter. There is no way I can read them all. Some of these streams are of my friends, and I’d like to read them all; others I follow for the news they post, which I can now read on the twittertim.es.

I had the pleasure of meeting one the creators (@mariagrineva) and speaking with another (@maxgrinev). Congrats Maria and Maxim!

Third Wednesday (#thirdwednesday on twitter) is a monthly informal networking event. There is no RSVP or membership, just show up at Foggy Goggle on Argyle Street between 5-7 PM on the third Wednesday of the month.

Today’s topic was Twitter and how local Halifax businesses use twitter to interact with customers and clients. It was facilitated by Michelle Yogis (@myogis). Highlights of comments made:

• Many local businesses in Halifax are active on twitter
• No measurable ROI at the moment
• There must be a single person behind a corporate twitter account – the interaction needs to be personal
• Main value comes through building relationships and branding, no immediate increase in sales
• Twitter should be considered in an integrated marketing plan and not on its own

Over 35 people attended the August meeting. A few prizes were given away in a mini-contest, where answer to questions were submitted through twitter (although the questions themselves were not).

All in all I think it is a great, relaxing event to meet locals from all industries who are passionate about the Internet, the Web, and the new social communication tools online.

My paper entitled “Personalization of Content Ranking in the Context of Local Search” has been accepted for publication at the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI2009) as a regular paper. The acceptance rate was pretty low at 16%. The conference will be co-located with the Intelligent Agent Technology Conference (IAT2009) in Milan, Italy. My colleague and co-author Philip O’Brien and I will be presenting the paper. The other co-authors are Xiao Luo, Weizheng Gao, and Shujie Li. The conference will be held in September 15-18, 2009 at Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca.

If you’re planning to attend WI/AIT 2009 and would like to connect, contact me.

The abstract of the paper follows:

Ranking search results using a single ranking function for all search engine visitors is inherently bounded in the performance the ranking algorithm can achieve when considering the variety of requirements of Web searchers and the proliferation of topics and types of data modern search engines rank. Adding a geographical dimension to the mix by way of local search engines further reduces the average satisfaction a ranking algorithm can garner from local search users. Personalization has been proposed in Web search with some success but has not, to our knowledge, been investigated thoroughly in local search. As initial steps in local search personalization, we propose a model for personalizing search results in a local search engine using a hybrid of profile- and click-based user modeling methods. User profiles are used to compare local search results to the topical interests of users and the specific businesses in which they have shown interest by way of search result “clicks”. Our model is tested through a user study and is shown to result in significantly improved mean average precision over the baseline ranking system.

Although experiments were conducted in the context of Local Search, the framework for modelling user interests is transferable to any domain where semantic similarity between users or user and objects is of interest. If you have any questions or comments about our approach, I’d be happy to discuss it in person or electronically – just give me a shout!

I would like to thank the staff at GenieKnows.com for their assistance and feedback both during the experiments and during writing the paper. Special shouts go to Stephanie Armsworthy, Jason Hines, and Jacek Wolkowicz, and Tapajyoti Das. Additional acknowledgements will appear in the paper.

CNN Money has an excellent articles where they interview 22 people from political leaders, company executives, investors, entrepreneurs, and even a chef, asking them to share the best advice they ever got. Below is a summary of their answers:

• “Keep it Simple” – Tiger Woods
• “Show, don’t tell” – Jim Sinegal
• “Do what you love” – Mort Zuckerman
• “Empower a subordinate” – Lloyd Blankfein
• “Push beyond your comfort zone” – Mohamed El-Erian
• “Ignore conventional wisdom” – David Axelrod
• “Trust your instincts” – Tory Burch
• “Read everything” – Jim Rogers
• “Be effective, not popular” – Scott Boras
• “Use failure to motivate yourself” – Mika Brzezinski
• “Focus on performance, not power” – Colin Powell
• “Take advice from smart people” – Shai Agassi
• “Make an impression” – Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
• “Hire a coach” – Eric Schmidt
• “Set realistic goals” – Meredith Whitney
• “Listen” – Lauren Zalaznick
• “Don’t talk shop” – Julian Robertson
• “Treat it like it’s yours” – Thomas Keller
• “Underpromise and overdeliver” – Robin Li
• “Don’t pursue titles and dollars” – Miles White
• “Self-doubt is normal” – Aaron Patzer
• “Be nice to people” – Niklas Savander

My favourite three from the list are “take advice from smart people”, “Keep it Simple”, and “Show, don’t tell.” Each of these three advices I have come to experience as being true wisdom and highly effective in a diversity of situations.

To read more about these advice, the context, and where they came from, see the original article: Best advice I ever got.

The Royal Nova Scotia Tattoo Festival is a yearly tradition in Halifax, NS featuring performers and miltary bands from around the world. The first time attended the festival was back in 2005 and I absolutely loved it. It was such a well organized show, so many performer, amazing bands, dancer, acrobats, and clowns. And the best part of it all was the finale were all the bands would play in unison creating a grand orchestra.

I loved the NS Tattoo so much that I went back the following year in 2006. It was not as big or as good as the 2006 show, but it was still enjoyable. In all honesty, there was a little bit of disappointment that it was getting smaller, yet the performance of 2006 made up for big part of that. The 2006 year was special for NS tattoo, it was the year it was given the Royal status by Her Majesty the Queen for her 80th birthday.

In 2007, the cast was shrinking even more. I thought I’d give it the benefit of doubt and attended anyway. Maybe if it was my first time attending I would’ve liked it, but seeing how it didn’t live up to the 2006 show, leave alone the 2005 performance, I must say I was greatly disappointed. I felt cheated in many ways because the prices didn’t go down, but the quality did. I had hopes that achieving the Royal designation would help the festival grow, but it was not to be.

I had to skip 2008 for personal reasons – by son was under a year old, I was 2 month away from defending by PhD dissertation – not a good time for big fun events.

This year, in 2009, “performer from around the world” really refers to only nine countries: Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States. There are a total of 30 groups confirmed, but 20 of them are from Canada. This is very different from previous years were we had more international participation. I am especially disappointed that the Russian and Ukrainian dancers are not in this year’s show.

My plan for this year is to go see the parade and then decide whether to attend the big show or not.

One piece of advice: if you’re planning to attend, go for the cheap tickets. I’ve tried different seating and they were all equally great. There is typically plenty of empty seats, so moving around is possible if your seat turns out to be not so great.