Tony Abou-Assaleh » Events

Atlantic Canada’s War-of-Minds at Dalhousie University, Halifax

taa — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:21:41 +0000

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:

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

Memories of Milan, Italy: Historic Churches

taa — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:21:00 +0000

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Memories of Milan, Italy: Transportation

taa — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 03:12:35 +0000

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.

Third Wednesday Social Media Tweetup – Impressions

taa — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:37:06 +0000

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.

Halifax Tattoo Festival Shrinking Every Year

taa — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:01:00 +0000

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.

WWW2009 Reading List

taa — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:45:02 +0000

There were several interesting papers published at the 18th World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009) in Madrid last month. Below is a list of papers that I’m planning to read:

This list will be updated as I remember/discover more interesting papers.

Extracting Key Terms From Noisy and Multi-theme Documents – Grineva, Maria and Grinev, Maxim and Lizorkin, Dmitry
Discovering Users’ Specific Geo Intention in Web Search – Yi, Xing and Raghavan, Hema and Leggetter, Chris
Characterizing Insecure JavaScript Practices on the Web. – Yue, Chuan and Wang, Haining
Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty – Schonfeld, Uri and Shivakumar, Narayanan
From SOA to REST – Pautasso, Cesare and Wilde, Erik
Graffiti: Node Labeling in Heterogeneous Networks – Angelova, Ralitsa and Kasneci, Gjergji and Suchanek, Fabian M. and Weikum, Gerhard
Graph Based Crawler Seed Selection – Zheng, Shuyi and Dmitriev, Pavel and Lee Giles, C.
Instance-based Probabilistic Reasoning in the Semantic Web – Oliveira, Pedro and Gomes, Paulo

If you’d like to recommend other papers to be added this list, contact me!

All the tweets of @www2009 at the World Wide Web Conference in Madrid 2009

taa — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:15:13 +0000

From April 19 until April 26, I was in Madrid, Spain, attending the 18th World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009). I kept a live account of the conference and Madrid from my perspective at the twitter user @www2009. All my tweets are listed below. For a more comprehensive view, search for #www2009 on Twitter.

#www2009 please don’t DM/Reply to @www2009 anymore, use @tony_aa if you’d like to reach me. over and out.
4:31 AM Apr 27th from TweetDeck
Finally made it home after some delays. But #www2009 ain’t over for me, got lotsa papers to read. Singing off from @www2009 back to @tony_aa
4:30 AM Apr 27th from TweetDeck
singing off. time to go to wife and son in sun^H^H^Hfreezing #halifax. adios amigos! #www2009
5:30 AM Apr 26th from web
#www200 #twwweet #w3ctrack #w3csocial group photo number 2 http://twitpic.com/40b83
11:32 PM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
#www200 #twwweet #w3ctrack #w3csocial group photo number 1 http://twitpic.com/409uj
10:45 PM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
Congrats to all the organizers and attendees on the success of #www2009. I appreciated the diversity of sessions in content and format
9:33 PM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
I estimate that over 1000 delegates attended #www2009 since 900+ had pre-registered.
9:31 PM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
my streetmaps and geoparser slides are online at http://www2009.eprints.org/… and http://www2009.eprints.org/… #www2009 #devtrack …
9:14 PM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
wow, the power just went out at the hotel for a minute. Didn’t expect to see THAT in #Madrid.
9:11 PM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
last night in #Madrid. there is a wedding at the hotel – great spanish oldies and hits. flying back to #halifax in 12 hours. #www2009
9:01 PM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
group photo of #twwweet’ers at #www2009 will be posted next week. Network is too slow at the hotel for image
9:51 AM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
still in Madrid leaving Sunday. This evening/night is open. Email me if you’d like to meet for food/drinks/walk/etc taa @ acm.org #www2009
9:50 AM Apr 25th from TweetDeck
RT @ashishgoel:we won the best paper award at #www2009 (the main WWW conference). The paper @ http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.2496 // congrats!
3:50 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@ashishgoel congrats!!!
3:48 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to ashishgoel
really enjoyed meeting all #twwweet’ers in person at #www2009
1:53 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@janhinrichs welcome to the club
1:44 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to janhinrichs
#www2009 #twwweet twitter messages will be gzipped and encoded and readable only through special clients
1:43 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet breakout group discussing location in social networks .. no problems technologically, but some usability issues
1:19 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet going around the room and “tweeting” on mic 140 chars max
1:03 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet limitation leads to wider deployment, ie. mobile
12:44 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet constraints may lead to creativity .. not necessarily a bad thing but maybe good
12:44 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet shorter links on twitter are ridiculous
12:43 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet this session is about social implications of microblogging ..what does it do to our society and our interaction?
12:41 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet social aspect is most important, not the technology
12:39 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet microblogging brings instant messaging into the web architecture
12:39 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet make sure to use the two tags #twwweet and #www2009
12:31 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet tweet out loud: say on the mic and write it here
12:31 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet Title: social implications of twitter
12:29 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #twwweet is about to begin in L-1 Paris Room
12:27 PM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
REMINDER: #www2009 #twwweet’ers meeting in L-1 at 16:30 #w2ctrack on social web
11:58 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #devtrack – great video of demo of wikipedia made accessible for the blind. JS chars toolbar is now a drop-down list
11:55 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #devtrack wikipedia’s toolbar (charset) is not usable by the blind because it’s javascript and not focusable
11:48 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #devtrack MusicBrainz – using GUID to identify artist, unique ike tinyurl but not so tiny
11:38 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
RT @uberalex: #twwweet will next year’s id badges have twitter id on them for #www2010? #www2009
11:36 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #devtrack 455,465 artist profiles published on the web .. that’s insane | BBC Music Beta
11:34 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@dirkahlers please give summary here after the talk, sounds interesting
11:32 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to dirkahlers
@sharpic will do after it happens.
11:30 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to sharpic
@pgwetzler blame it on lack of coffee
11:28 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to pgwetzler
RT @cj_apes: #www2009 good travel back home everyone!
11:28 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@rcostu ur comments can be of interest to #www2009 attendeed. please tag as appropriate.
11:27 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to rcostu
#www2009 for caffeine deprived addicts like me: cafeteria offers great espresso: “Cafe solo”. Had 2 earlier, more later on.
11:22 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #devtrack completed the StreetMaps presentation. Woho! got one question from audience. Thanks!
11:18 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
Had a pre-#twwweet meeting photo with some who can’t attend: @vipulmathur @mariagrineva @rb and i think @jsr
10:57 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #devtrack will present Street Maps in 10 mins in L2
10:49 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 #devtrack finished presenting Query GeoParser with @jasonmhines
10:48 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@njh that’s why I’m at cafeteria instead
9:04 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to njh
@gaedke you’re doing pretty good
9:04 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to gaedke
RT @cgutteridge – “how do I get URIs out of my mum?” @gaedke – “that’s very easy: She should call my Mum on Skype” #www2009
9:01 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
#www2009 I’ll be : poster 1-2; cafeteria 2-2:20; presenting in L-2 2:30-4:00; coffee 4-4:30; L-1 #twwweet 4:30-6:15. Evening/night undecided
8:59 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
how to recognize me: black GenieKnows.com tshirt with Local Games Health bubbles; pony tail. I’d like to meet all #twwweet’ers #www2009
8:55 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@tommyh you gotta be kidding. really? tell me all about it when you have a chance!
8:40 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to tommyh
@www2009eprints awesome! is there no way to get earlier tweets?
8:40 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to www2009eprints
@cgutteridge what you said is a good topic for #twwweet session. #www2009
8:29 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to cgutteridge
@r12a use tinyurl/bi.ly/etc for shortening names I’m just agreeing with you
8:23 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to r12a
brunch at cafeteria now, poster viewing during lunch – making own conf schedule. conf on demand? #www2009
8:15 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@gaedke 16:30 in L-1 Paris
7:27 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to gaedke
ANNOUNCEMENT: #www2009 #w3ctrack Fri 16:30 L-1. Put face to #tWWWeet’ers and discuss impact of twitter on society. Group photo.
7:19 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
personal thanks to Pavel for offering complementary morning yoga sessions. I look forward to more at another event. #www2009
5:20 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
do you yoga? San Jose room now. I’ll be there in 10 mins. Still waking up. #www2009
4:03 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@SeanGolliher already done: http://www.readwriteweb.com…
1:10 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to SeanGolliher
#www2009 it’s 5am. Yoga in 3h. time for some chamomile tea and a quick nap before the big day. Giving 2 presentations #devtrack after lunch
1:05 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@SeanGolliher RT for me is like a “like” button in other networks. And I don’t dislike anyone, only some of their tweets (which I don’t RT).
1:00 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to SeanGolliher
RT @sheilaellen: @robertobelo Your twitter stream has been excellent. Fantastic idea. Hope you’ve had a great time #www2009
12:56 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@xamat I disagree. Wendy was a true entertainer the American style: say embarrassing things about other in public. I loved it. #www2009
12:54 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to xamat
@cgutteridge sleep is for the weak! Yoga at 8am! #www2009
12:51 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to cgutteridge
ANNOUNCEMENT: #www2009 #w3ctrack Fri 16:30 L-1. Put face to #tWWWeet’ers and discuss impact of twitter on society. Group photo.
12:51 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck
@mzurko I have on column in tweetdeck that shows search results for #www2009. At the bottom, second button is “Filter”. Use spam keyword.
12:49 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to mzurko
@gaedke was out learning how to dance salsa. now back online #www2009
12:47 AM Apr 24th from TweetDeck in reply to gaedke
at #www2009 banquet sitting with the Russian gang criticizing all that comes to mind
5:07 PM Apr 23rd from mobile web
RT @burningbird Every time I read the term “linked data”, I yell out, “Break the chains! Free the data!” and dance about, like a mad woman.
5:05 PM Apr 23rd from mobile web
going to the park. banquet later on. #www2009
2:17 PM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #betavine some of us are meeting after banquet for widget brainstorming/coding. Interested? Reply.
1:52 PM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
ANNOUNCEMENT: #www2009 #w3ctrack Fri 16:30 L-1. Put face to #twwweet’ers and discuss impact and implications of microblogging on society.
1:49 PM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
had a great discussion with @mariagrineva and he colleague about semantic blog search, twitter, wikipedia, … #www2009
1:40 PM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
RT @kevscarr: multiple people can work together for Â£20,000 #betavine widget competition; 1 team member must act as lead to submit.
12:49 PM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
@vipulmathur on my way, ETA 10-15min. Gonna grab a coffee first
11:54 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to vipulmathur
#www2009 Ricardo was chairing query processing. I thought it was customary for the chair to ask at least one question; didn’t happen here.
11:53 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
@vipulmathur ah, that one is yours. I saw it earlier, looked interesting. I liked the diagrams
11:51 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to vipulmathur
@rcostu agreed. I plan to incorporate this concept in the one I’m building. BTW, facebook already has URL for almost everything
11:45 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to rcostu
@yesilady can you provide title or link to paper? full text search at www2009.eprints.org #www2009
11:43 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to yesilady
@joaop the example was : type “angelina” get “angelina jolie”. I think they used Google’s search suggest through a local proxy for caching
11:36 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to joaop
RT @caffeinator: twitter is helping me in my phd research… wow.
11:34 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 listening to: GPU4IR – Using Graphics Processors for High Performance IR Query Processing
11:30 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 looking forward to @mariagrineva‘s demo of semantic blog search during the coffee break (poster area)
11:27 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009: RuralCafe – search queries are poorly formulated in developing countries and require assistance [query recommendation]
11:25 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #betavine mobile widget challenge – only individual entries, no teams. bummer.
11:23 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 RuralCafe: enable developing regions to search for angelina jolie. Jay said angelina like 10 times. I don’t blame him
11:21 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 RuralCafe: Web 2.0 + acoustic modems = ….
11:07 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 ALL: if you have a poster, promote it here and say when you expect to be at the poster
11:04 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
@vipulmathur which is your poster?
11:03 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to vipulmathur
#www2009 i thought the index compression talk was good .. but there were no questions asked.
11:02 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 query processing: reordering of pages can significantly reduce index size per query for most queries
10:50 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
@rcostu yes, each piece of information: review, update, event, etc should be accessible individually – makes api and integration more usable
10:45 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to rcostu
#www2009 at query processing
10:44 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Pavel the yoga man discussed an analysis of the web graph, grouped by nations. Check out all the poster near the registration area.
10:37 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 time for lunch
9:06 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 tip to all social sites: one of key features of twitter is that each tweet has own URL
9:02 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #w3ctrack #mobilewidgets onto brainstorming of topics for discussion. See wiki: http://bit.ly/1n7nv
8:49 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #w3ctrack #mobilewidgets Traffic Jam Killer: collaborative traffic monitor based on participant’s location and speed
8:37 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #w3ctrack #mobilewidgets Opera comes with a lot of cool features like geolocation, file I/O, offline storage …
8:27 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
people stop using the wireless so I can do some tweeting .. everyone is so selfish [joke] #www2009
8:14 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #w3ctrack #mobilewidgets “You don’t need to be an experienced mobile developer to make great widgets”
8:05 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
@SeanGolliher Friday
7:39 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to SeanGolliher
ANNOUNCEMENT: #www2009 #w3ctrack Fri 16:30 L-1. Put face to #twwweet’ers and discuss impact and implications of microblogging on society.
7:25 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
@SeanGolliher Madrid is absolutely fantastic. see my earlier tweets tonight
2:10 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to SeanGolliher
you can drink all night in Madrid without paying. But the good drinks cost. Totally worth it! #www2009
1:43 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
foosball against Italians&Spanish was a lot of fun. Won some & lost some. Canada is better at hockey. Time for morning tea&nap. #www2009
1:42 AM Apr 23rd from TweetDeck
caipiroskos are so strong yet sweet .. soft rock music ..
10:57 PM Apr 22nd from mobile web
fantastic mojitos and Spanish music somewhere downtown
10:18 PM Apr 22nd from mobile web
ANNOUNCEMENT: #www2009 #w3c session Fri 16:30 L-1. Put face to #twwweet and discuss impact and implication of microblogging on society.
7:31 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
ANNOUNCEMENT: #www2009 #twwweet session Fri 16:30 L-1. Put face to twwweets and discuss impact and implication of microblogging on society.
5:44 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
had a good chat with @roessler of #w3c regarding #twwweet logistics. Friday @ 16:30 for 30 mins. All #www2009 tweeter are asked to attend
5:41 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@sgala where to? I’d like to go out after taking some rest. Share location if you wish to meet up downtown.
5:21 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to sgala
#www2009 flamenco is over. Next: drinking, socializing, and maybe, just maybe, dancing
3:11 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
TOP 10 Linked Data Research Issues from BOF http://bit.ly/ymwnj #linkeddata #lod #www2009
2:58 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@gaedke one of them flamenco was on TV this morning .. it was something
2:48 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to gaedke
@bengee the front page of program is mirrored at http://tinyurl.com/d77wtb
2:45 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to bengee
@caffeinator found a couple paper w/ twitter. See http://bit.ly/Uv6On thanks to @www2009eprints for maintaining a searchable site #www2009
2:37 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to caffeinator
RT @juansequeda: Flamenco presentation at #www2009 but all re geeks are on their laptops! http://twitpic.com/3rxov [priceless!]
2:34 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 in auditorium listening to Spanish guitar, singing, and soon flamenco.
2:26 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 poster: Ralitsa’s “Graffiti” algorithm extends Topical PageRank to classify diff node types to diff classes in social networks
2:13 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 poster: Otkie’s work on semantic linking of databases using SQL has great potential, should extend to distributed data. Efficient?
2:11 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 poster: Yandex identifies link exchange by combining short text classification with HITS analysis. High precision and recall.
2:09 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@roessler Who do I talk to about this? @www2009eprints take notes. #www2009
2:05 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to roessler
#www2009 so, tentatively on Thur in M-2 at 16:30. do people like calling it #twwweet BOF? objective?
1:57 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@xamat they get to tweet out loud #www2009 #twwweet
1:54 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to xamat
RT @cgutteridge: #linkeddata is to “semantic web”, as XML is to SGML. (ie. significantly easier and having most of the benefits) #www2009
1:51 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
how do #www2009 tweeters feel about having a virtual/physical B.O.F workshop where we book a room but also talk on twitter? Reply
1:49 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
Excellent discussion with @www2009eprints and @gaedke over coffee about data management and linking on conference websites. #www2009
1:04 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #linkeddata BOF: lined data is like semantic web without reasoning. SemWeb is years away, but linked data on the web can happen now
12:07 PM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@roessler I blame it on lack of coffee during lunch
11:57 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to roessler
#www2009 #linkeddata BOFdiscussion on the wiki at http://bit.ly/12f5xk http://bit.ly/12f5xk including communities, and research topics
11:57 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @clintandrewhall: Slow network connection. Presenters reverting to screenshots, saying “dunno if this will work.” #www2009
11:49 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @clintandrewhall: people are complaining, not just in Twitter. Presenters reverting to screenshots, saying “dunno if this will work.”
11:48 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 #linkeddata communities: databases, Web eng, NLP, multi/hyper-media, legal, HCI, REST, App/Domains-specific, Geo-information, KM/KR
11:38 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@www2009eprints err. L-1 #linkeddata BOF. Pick a spot for coffee break (not sport)
11:37 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to www2009eprints
@clintandrewhall How can I help?
11:28 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to clintandrewhall
#www2009 #linkeddata BOF: provenance and related issues are very hot topics
11:23 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@vipulmathur BOF are created on the fly and happen in L1. They should be posted outside of L1.
11:12 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to vipulmathur
@www2009eprints hi! i’m with the pony-tail and blueish shirt. also white macbook
11:11 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to www2009eprints
#www2009 no power in outlets in L1 Paris … laptops are slowly shutting down
10:40 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 @ BOF on “Research Directions for Linked Data” #linkeddata
10:39 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @juansequeda: New BOF: Defining Research AgendaFor Linked Data. Today 14:30 Room L1 Paris #www2009 Please RT
10:23 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
Tasty espresso at the conference centre cafetria. Good price too of $1.10 euro. #www2009
10:22 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 off to lunch. More caviar today?
9:30 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @juansequeda: @mhausenblas we want to organize a BOF about the open scientific research problems for Linked Data. [I'm attending]
9:28 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Twitter , Flickr, and Facebook links for WWW2009 are available at the left column of www2009.org
9:25 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @robertobelo: Google getting a bit more “evil” lately
9:23 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 spoke to Kevin from BetaVine; an interesting organization to promote mobile app development. Added to the list of services to check
9:21 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Cerf: we are becoming more and more accustomed to real time access to information.
9:20 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 “What would the world be like with the Internet and the Web?” Cerf: “Very awkward.”
9:19 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: volunteer contributions as price for goods exceeded planned asking price
9:19 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: “putting teenagers in jail is not the right way of doing things”
9:19 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 illegal download of music in Spain and Latin America is very high
9:18 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: UK tried monitoring networks at click levels. US tried but abandoned, now illegal.
9:18 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: ISP should be like water providers – provide clean water from end to end
9:18 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Openness and neutral access to information are very important
9:18 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Cert: control of copy doesn’t work when it’s easy to copy. need to adapt our business model to the new environment.
9:17 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 ISP shouldn’t be responsible for examining the content of the network and determining access control
9:17 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: users are starting to use websites only if they allow them to get the data back and use it for other things
9:17 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 @ Press conference with Tim Burners-Lee & Vincent Cerf. 8 Video cameras and numerous photographers.
9:16 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#wwww2009 wireless was partially disconnected from the internet.
9:16 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 coffee/bio break is on.
7:44 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: users and groups will have URI, and maybe that’s it – all we need for access control
7:42 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL still focuses on queries, downplaying the need for natural language interfaces
7:39 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL – a very interesting discussion of social responsibility, access to data, and the need for tools to express all this
7:38 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL promotes OpenStreetMap as community-edited maps.
7:33 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: don’t make any assumptions about anonymity with using pseudo-names, very easy to figure out, programmatically, the real name
7:29 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@jaime_estevez, @adrienmangin i take your word for it. I don’t speak Spanish unfortunately
7:25 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to jaime_estevez
#www2009 TBL: another plug for twitter
7:23 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: Walled gardens are very attractive, but can’t compete with openness. Open Social Networking ftw
7:23 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL bashing IE regarding scalable SVG
7:19 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@adrienmangin thanks. Although @jaime_estevez is only RT so wasn’t sure
7:16 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to adrienmangin
#www2009 TBL puts a lot of emphasis on JavaScript – web pages are programs
7:14 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: static HTML will always be an important part of the web. … now we have wikis, twitter …
7:12 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: SEO is a science. Me: SEO experts tell me it’s black magic more so than science.
7:10 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: Web years from 2.6 to 1?
7:08 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Tim Berners-Lee is a very energetic and entertaining speaker
7:04 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@jahendler time limits?
7:03 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to jahendler
#www2009 the prince and his party sit among the audience. paparazzi are permitted to come in and take a few hundred shots
7:02 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 in 2010, all public services in Spain will be online
6:59 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @dajobe: everyone applaud if the prince mentions twitter #www2009
6:58 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Web 2.0 is beyond recreation and social interaction, spreading into business as well
6:57 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@mzurko what’s the attendee count? (from @torgo)
6:54 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to mzurko
#www2009 the program site is down again. Here is a backup site http://tinyurl.com/d77wtb I hope it holds for a bit
6:51 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@shaver I enjoyed it too! Good job guys
6:40 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to shaver
#www2009 “there is a continuous process of webilization”
6:37 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 after taking some photos, paparazzi were asked to leave the room.
6:35 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 the Prince arrived.
6:34 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
@tadejtadej could be
6:34 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck in reply to tadejtadej
now i regret leaving the camera at the hotel .. should’ve borne the extra weight
6:33 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 “walking on webshine” is the web’s 20th anniversary slang
6:28 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 there are more professional videographers in the room than www2009 tweeters ..
6:24 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 panel concluded. ceremony follows
6:23 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Q: authenticity of information? Shaver: citations are important. Invest in educating about critical thinking
6:22 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Q: authenticity of information? Dougherty: still trying to figure that out in the publishing industry.
6:21 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Q: authenticity of information? Cerf: if no provenance then be skeptical – no guarantees of anything on the web
6:20 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Q: authenticity of information? Cailliau: must accept it for what it is
6:20 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Q: authenticity of information? TBL: semantic web links to the source that produced the information
6:18 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: #w3c will be a long-tail organization; looking into open licensing to support #opensource community
6:16 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: #w3c doesn’t have a fixed policy, believes in decentralization, must stay open to new ideas
6:15 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: we have opening for a CEO on #w3c to take it to the next level
6:14 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Shaver: the web is complicated because we only had 20 years – not enough time to make it simple
6:11 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Cerf : theorem 206 – everything is more complicated
6:10 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 video streaming will be replaced with super-fast file transfer, currently happening in Japan
6:06 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Cerf: google received 15 hours of video per minute
6:05 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: audio and video will become more important than text, especially in mobile
6:04 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 onto Q&A
6:01 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Cerf: it’s no longer just internet of people, docs, data, but also devices that accept control and report status
6:00 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Cerf: more people will have their first interaction with the web through mobile and not laptop
5:59 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Cerf: people providing transport should not interfere with applications
5:58 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www20009 RC: there is a legal vacuum on the web: were the companies are located, where data is stored, how, who ..
5:56 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Robert Cailliau: most excited about going mobile
5:55 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
follow the steps of @gaedke and tell your colleagues who didn’t make it about the twitter coverage of the event #www2009
5:54 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 note to self: the future of the web is simplicity
5:53 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Mike: people need to understand the web with simplicity or they’ll move to something else (prompted applaud)
5:50 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Mike Shaver: strong tendency to add complexity [to internet and web] by those who understand the web technologies inside out
5:49 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 twitter is stream is linked from the program page http://bit.ly/ZdDqu
5:47 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 Dale promoting twitter!!!
5:45 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www209 the program is back online http://www.webshine.org/200…
5:40 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
#www2009 TBL: people do things if it was cool if everyone else did, even before others do – bootstrap effect of new systems
5:39 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @roessler: Tim, A product where people would have to write angle brackets was unthinkable. There was WYSIWYG! #www2009
5:37 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
past security and in the auditorium listening to the panel. #www2009
5:34 AM Apr 22nd from TweetDeck
was shot for a commercial – that’s awesome!
7:45 PM Apr 21st from mobile web
sitting at Plaza Mayor drinking sangria
5:14 PM Apr 21st from mobile web
off to Novotel lobby for a bit and then to city centre. feel free to join us! #www2009
1:25 PM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
apparently twitter doesn’t like hashes in urls .. so primitive
1:24 PM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
Facebook event page: http://bit.ly/jdL6i connect with others attending #www2009
1:24 PM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
RT @shaver: Madrid is making me very hungry, but it’s still 3 hours until supper. Might be time to find a patio and some pinxtos. #www2009
1:15 PM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
@www2009eprints I like it a lot. nicely done. will release the scripts? I’m a regexp junkie
1:09 PM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to www2009eprints
@www2009eprints regexps are fun
12:50 PM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to www2009eprints
any evening gatherings for today aside from the yahoo party? I’m going to the city centre for some photo taking/food/shopping #www2009
10:52 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
decided to take a break until coffee time. lunch without coffee is hard. feel sorry for early morning and after-lunch presenters #www2009
10:49 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 is paused for lunch. Was informative and easy to follow. I also liked the flexibility of the speaker based on questions
9:00 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 POST -> changes state on the server; problem with fault tolerance; not safe to repeat
8:52 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 PUT -> can be repeated with same outcome ; safe to retry but need to know unique ID of resource
8:51 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 GET is a “read-only” op -> can be repeated without changing state on server
8:46 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 many differences between PUT and POST in REST, but not clear enough when to use which
8:35 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
@dirkahlers with some planning could’ve been done in facebook maybe … there is an event page, but it’s inactive
8:29 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to dirkahlers
#restful #www2009 network slowness is causing me neural slowness
8:24 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#www2009 linked data => URI/RDF => semantic web. Is linked data == semantic web? How are they different?
8:16 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 design space for REST: fixed methods X variable resources X variable representations
8:09 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 design tips and anti-patterns are being discussed
8:01 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 “practical part will be done by Eric in the afternoon”
7:51 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 a question of #linkeddata use with RESTful services … speaker is less familiar with linked data.
7:49 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 disconnected microphones make audience giggle
7:45 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 going over some basic concepts – URI, XML, JSON, AJAX, etc Good differentiation between AJAX and JSON
7:42 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#restful #www2009 the speaker is energetic and clear. Use of loud mic keeps audience engaged
7:39 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
@VictorSanchez use #www2009 in tweets for people who follow the conference through http://tinyurl.com/d2ql7o
7:37 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to VictorSanchez
switching gears to #www2009 #restful – Designing and Implementing RESTful Services
7:32 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 break on time. see you all with coffee
7:01 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
@javiercuervo any gnu/linux laptops around?
6:57 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to javiercuervo
#semanticannotations #www2009 pattern learning requires labelled data. Can patterns be extracted from unlabelled data?
6:52 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 SVM is good if you don’t have explicit vector representation,but have a binary comparison function for obj’s
6:51 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 a lot of interesting ideas for automated pattern discovery, could be useful for question-answering systems
6:47 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
@besbes fully recovered during yoga this morning. ready for another gathering.
6:33 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to besbes
#semanticannotations #www2009 less than 10% of tutorial attendees are NOT using a laptop atm .. not enough of them tweeting though
6:30 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 iterative approach to pattern discovery using generic patterns: Left-word-centre-word-right
6:25 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 unfortunate that slides are not printed/distributed .. hard to write comments for personal reference.
6:23 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 bootstrapping fact and pattern finding to identify relationships in text
6:18 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 loss augmented inference problem can be solved by dymanic programming
6:07 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 some started leaving .. a bit too much dry math
6:05 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 “StructSVM to the rescue”
6:04 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
@janhinrichs remember to tag posts with #www2009
5:58 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to janhinrichs
#semanticannotations #www2009 interesting approach to MC -like graphs through frequency estimates
5:57 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#semanticannotations #www2009 there is an algo to emit 10 shortest paths efficiently, non-trivial
5:43 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
at the semantic annotations tutorial #www2009, going over the basics now – markov chains and all
5:40 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
yoga this morning was excellent. my 1st time and now I’m hooked. Pavel is a certified instructor, so join him tomorrow morning 8AM #www2009
5:39 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
#photo #www2009 crowd during lunch http://bit.ly/hvJwr
3:35 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
RT @gaedke: Attending TUTORIAL at #www2009? Please reply/DM how you like it. As tutorials chair: Did we select tutorials of interest to you?
2:30 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck
@SeanGolliher no comments about www2009 where?
12:32 AM Apr 21st from TweetDeck in reply to SeanGolliher
@rcostu yes, this is more of a social event organized by an attendee. It is said to help overcome jet lag.
11:53 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox in reply to rcostu
@shaver piece of cake, nothing an espresso can’t fix.
8:47 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to shaver
highlight of the evening: lightning talks of 1.5 mins from #linkeddata #www2009 dinner participants .. so many interesting and diverse works
8:44 PM Apr 20th from web
@taktak mmm sushi .. will you have some hamachi? nigiri, maki, sashimi; it’s all good. count me in! Any good sushi places in Madrid? ja mata
8:15 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to taktak
@mzurko never did yoga myself. But I heard the event organizer, Pavel, is an expert! If I’m up early enough I’ll give it a try.
8:14 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to mzurko
@mariagrineva at least you did the important stuff in advance. See you soon
8:08 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox in reply to mariagrineva
@dajobe you didn’t drink enough! the beer is good. the wine is good. and there is always coffee
8:07 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to dajobe
@juansequeda so semantic-webbie
8:06 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to juansequeda
#ldow2009 #www2009 the dinner is absolutely awesome! the people, the drinks, the food .. love it!
5:24 PM Apr 20th from mobile web
#www2009 Pavel is organizing daily yoga sessions 8:00 – 9:00 AM in room San Jose of the conference centre
3:09 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox
#wicow2009 #www2009 discussions continue at the Novotel’s restaurant 7:30 PM.
3:07 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox
@kidehen will discuss further today if I make it to free beer
2:31 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to kidehen
#www2009 first day concluded. I’m impressed (the official part). A very long day, however, compared to other events.
2:29 PM Apr 20th from web
surprised @ the heated discussion of PageRank efficiency. A. Broder previously said that this is solve – easy & fast #www2009 #ldow2009
2:28 PM Apr 20th from web
RT: @tommyh: all the #ldow2009 slides will be online at http://events.linkeddata.or… . some are already, the rest shortly.
2:23 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox
#ldow2009 #www2009 using pagerank for ranking datasets is interesting, but be aware of link spam; not spam resilient as speaker suggested.
2:22 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox
@SeanGolliher gracias!
1:53 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to SeanGolliher
@seangolliher explains why I couldn’t find it. Let me know when it’s released. taa @ acm dot org
12:57 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to SeanGolliher
@SeanGolliher sounds interesting. will check it out
12:51 PM Apr 20th from web in reply to SeanGolliher
@gothwin fuelled on coffee and ready for more brain fuels
12:48 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox in reply to gothwin
now @ #linkeddata #ldow2009 #www2009
12:47 PM Apr 20th from web
it was good finally meeting @gaedke in person and talking about twitter over coffee
12:45 PM Apr 20th from web
@besbes worth $14.95?
12:10 PM Apr 20th from TwitterFox in reply to besbes
RT @jokinc #www2009, as more relevant the snippet is, more the people clicks on it, even if it provides all the needed info
12:00 PM Apr 20th from web
@ivan_herman unfortunate name though as there is a SiLK for network analysis: http://tools.netsa.cert.org…
11:19 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to ivan_herman
@mhausenblas would you use #www2009 as a tag instead of #www09? many people are following the activities by searching for www2009
11:15 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to mhausenblas
@gothwin I second that. I think coffee should be available at all time #www2009
11:09 AM Apr 20th from TwitterFox in reply to gothwin
@gaedke #searchmetrics was pretty good .. should’ve listened more and tweeted less
11:07 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to gaedke
@mariagrineva would love to see your blog search. Are you presenting a paper?
10:57 AM Apr 20th from TwitterFox in reply to mariagrineva
#webcentives #www2009 “Varying conclusions from survey data and experimental research” re public vs. private models
10:45 AM Apr 20th from web
“if you torture the data long enough it will confess”
10:43 AM Apr 20th from web
RT @jahendler you might also encourage use of tag #www2009 (someone could put this in kickoff remarks)
10:38 AM Apr 20th from web
now @ #webcentives #www2009
10:34 AM Apr 20th from web
the lunch is absolutely fantastic! well done guys
9:41 AM Apr 20th from mobile web
caviar for lunch
9:16 AM Apr 20th from mobile web
#searchmetrics #www2009 concluded. Off to lunch twwweet
9:07 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 big question “What is the best way to manage user attention?”
9:06 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 rounded corners are easier on the eyes
8:48 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 some practical tips on ‘Presentation aspects and issues”
8:47 AM Apr 20th from web
@xamat full disclosure: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net
8:43 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to xamat
@xamat better unofficial than nothing, wouldn’t you agree?
8:39 AM Apr 20th from TwitterFox in reply to xamat
RT @mariagrineva: Who is at www2009, I suggest you to follow @www2009
8:35 AM Apr 20th from web
@arkaitz installing. thanks!
8:29 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to arkaitz
@gkob vertical search is the future of search, at least until we invent thought readers
8:19 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to gkob
#searchmetrics #www2009 chicken&egg: how to find undiscovered URLs to test crawler discovery rate?
8:17 AM Apr 20th from web
inconvenience: posting updates to #twitter doesn’t fetch new tweets, need to reload manually.
8:15 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 on to profiling URL ages in search engines. Reflects crawler quality among others
8:14 AM Apr 20th from web
@twitter RT @heycam nice idea for a service: a twitter account that detects tweet language and retweets translated to another language
8:09 AM Apr 20th from web
So many Spanish tweets at #www2009 that I’d like to read. Where is twitter translator when you need one?
8:02 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 measuring coverage and diversity in search engines. Many approaches, some yet to be published, no winning strategy
8:00 AM Apr 20th from web
@tommyh I was actually talking to one of them earlier .. turned out he works at Yahoo
7:54 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to tommyh
@tadejtadej what else is new, eh?
7:52 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to tadejtadej
@alexgarciac Do tell what the actual news is
7:50 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to alexgarciac
#searchmetrics #www2009 Query by Content flowchart .. how to estimate coverage in search engines
7:43 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 resumes after the coffee break
7:36 AM Apr 20th from web
@xamat which tutorial?
7:30 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to xamat
Talking to creator of www.newsclub.de
7:25 AM Apr 20th from txt
on to #tWWWeetCoffee
7:04 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 is now on break, only 3 mins over schedule. So far so good.
7:04 AM Apr 20th from web
ops .. beeing a twitter n00b, just discovered RT meant retweet and not reply-to.
7:03 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetrics #www2009 indirect use of user clicks by way for differences in expected #DCG between two engines; depends on relevance model
6:55 AM Apr 20th from web
@tommyh similarly at @searchmetrics plenty of Q&A
6:52 AM Apr 20th from web in reply to tommyh
#searchmetric #www2009 balanced interleaving combination of results is a good method to compare engines based on direct user clicks
6:50 AM Apr 20th from web
RT @gaedke #tWWWeetLunch is a yes! Anyone else?
6:49 AM Apr 20th from web
too much “follow” spam. Please post at least 1 post with #www2009 before following to identify yourself as interested in the conference.
6:46 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 nDCG and q-measures are best for comparing search engines in practice
6:40 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 Graded version of #bpref is #rpref – a cumulative gain approach, as recent as 2007!
6:37 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 Kandall Binary preference #bpref works with binary preference judgements (yes/no) – easier for judges
6:33 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 Discounted Cumulative Gain #DCG is useful for graded relevance feedback, e.g., star rating system
6:25 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 Mean Reciprocal Rank (#MRR) looks at top relevant results
6:23 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 for MAP@10, if some queries don’t have 10 results, use R-precision instead.
6:22 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 mean average precision (#MAP) is the next metric on the list. Shows averages as a single number
6:20 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 the most basic metric is precision, recall, and their combination as f-score. As precision varies, f-score is a graph
6:19 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 hard to compute recall but can be estimated by sampling
6:17 AM Apr 20th from web
#searchmetric #www2009 still going over the basics – precision, recall, F-measure
6:13 AM Apr 20th from web
Yahoo is talking about Search Engine Metrics @ #www2009. The intro was pretty basic but comprehensive.
6:05 AM Apr 20th from web
What people are saying about #www2009 on twitter: http://tinyurl.com/c6jv3m
6:03 AM Apr 20th from web
#LinkedData food&drinks today @ 8pm. Details – http://esw.w3.org/topic/Swe…
5:58 AM Apr 20th from web
Took 10 minutes to find M-4: medium room on the 4th floor on the “Left” wing. If you end up on the right wing, cross over on the 3rd floor.
5:44 AM Apr 20th from web
Registered. I’m in. On to room finding. Bags can wait for later.
5:42 AM Apr 20th from web
#www2009 tutorials and workshops start in 20 mins. See you there!
5:10 AM Apr 20th from web
See what twitters are saying about #www2009 on the @www2009 profile. Follow me to be added to the list
5:09 AM Apr 20th from web
These tweets are an unofficial account of #WWW2009 on twitter by one of the attendees. http://www2009.org
4:37 AM Apr 20th from web

Two Papers Accepted at the WWW 2009 Developer Track

taa — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:06:41 +0000

The World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009) will be held in Madrid, Spain, April 20-24, 2009. I will be co-presenting two papers at the Developer track. The first paper is co-authored with Jason Hines and entitled “Query GeoParser: A Spatial-Keyword Query Parser Using Regular Expressions”. The second paper is co-authored with Christopher Adams and entitled “Creating Your Own Web-Deployed Street Map Using Open Source Software and Free Data”. Both papers will be presented in the afternoon of Friday, April 20. The schedule, as well as a link to the proceedings, can be found on the Developer’s Track page. The paper abstracts follow.

Query GeoParser: A Spatial-Keyword Query Parser Using Regular Expressions

Abstract: There has been a growing commercial interest in local information within Geographic Information Retrieval, or GIR, systems. Local search engines enable the user to search for entities that contain both textual and spatial information, such as Web pages containing addresses or a business directory. Thus, queries to these systems may contain both spatial and textual components—spatial-keyword queries. Parsing the queries requires breaking the query into textual keywords, and identifying components of the geo-spatial description. For example, the query ‘Hotels near 1567 Argyle St, Halifax, NS’ could be parsed as having the keyword ‘Hotels’, the preposition ‘near’, the street number ‘1567’, the street name ‘Argyle’, the street suffix ‘St’, the city ‘Halifax’, and the province ‘NS’. Developing an accurate query parser is essential to providing relevant search results. Such a query parser can also be utilized in extracting geographic information from Web pages.

One approach to developing such a parser is to use regular expressions. Our Query GeoParser is a simple, but powerful, regular expression-based spatial-keyword query parser. Query GeoParser is implemented in Perl and utilizes many of Perl’s capabilities in optimizing regular expressions. By starting with regular expression building blocks for common entities such as number and streets, and combining them into larger regular expressions, we are able handle over 400 different cases while keeping the code manageable and easy to maintain. We employ the mark-and-match technique to improve the parsing efficiency. First we mark numbers, city names, and states. Following, we use matching to extract keywords and geographic entities. The advantages of our approach include manageability, performance, and easy exception handling. Drawbacks include a lack of geographic hierarchy and the inherent difficulty in dealing with misspellings. We comment on our overall experience using such a parser in a production environment, what we have learnt, and suggest possible ways to deal with the drawbacks.

Creating Your Own Web-Deployed Street Map Using Open Source Software and Free Data

Abstract: Street maps are a key element to Local Search; they make the connection between the search results, and the geography. Adding a map to your website can be easily done, using an API from a popular local search provider. However, the lists of restrictions are lengthy and customization can be costly, or impossible. It is possible to create a fully customizable web-deployed street map without sponsoring the corporate leviathans, at only the cost of your time and your server. Being able to freely style and customize your map is essential; it will distinguish your website from websites with shrink wrapped maps that everyone has seen. Using open source software adds to the level of customizability – you will not have to wait two years for the next release and then maybe get the anticipated new feature or the bug fix; you can make the change yourself. Using free data rids you of contracts, costly transactions, and hefty startup fees. As an example, we walk through creating a street map for the United States of America.

A Web-deployed street map consists of a server and a client. The server stores the map data including any custom refinements. The client requests a portion of the map and the server renders that portion and returns it to the client, which in turn displays it to the user. The map data used in this example is the Tiger/LINE data. Tiger/LINE data covers the whole of the USA. Another source of free road network data is OpenStreetMap, which is not as complete as Tiger/LINE but includes additional data such as points of interest and streets for other countries. Sometimes the original data is not formatted in a manner that attributes to a good looking, concise map. In such cases, data refinement is desired. For instance, performance and aesthetics of a map can be improved by transforming the street center lines to street polygons. For this task, we use the Python language, which has many extensions that make map data refinement easy. The rendering application employed is MapServer. MapServer allows you to specify a configuration file for your map, which consists of layers referencing geographical information, as well as the style attributes to specify how the layers are visualized. MapServer contains utilities to speed up the rendering process, and organize similar data. On the front end, we need a web-page embeddable client that can process requests for map movements, and scale changes in real time. In our experience, OpenLayers is this best tool for this task; it supports many existing protocols for requesting map tiles and is fast, customizable, and user friendly. Thus, deploying a street map service on the Web is feasible for individuals and not limited to big corporations.

First Earth Day Celebration

taa — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 05:12:07 +0000

This year was the first time I participated in Earth Day. From 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM Atlantic Time, all the lights in my house were off. My family and I enjoyed a romantic dinner lit by numerous candles.

We had a few objectives in doing this. First, to participate in a growing international movement and save power consumption during this special hour. Second, to remind oursevles of the importance to conserve energy usage and pledge not to be wasteful. Third, to enjoy an evening with candle lights, something that we rarely do.

Who is “the Coolest Guy on the Internet”?

taa — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:50:52 +0000

Apparently there is an unofficial contest in the SEO world that started earlier this month to rank number one on Google for “”the Coolest Guy on the Internet”. The contest runs until the end of February and the winner gets one year of bragging rights. I decided to participate in this contest as an interactive audience by voting for my friend Andrew to be the Coolest Guy on the Internet. I invite you to participate as well, either as a contestant or an active spectator and vote for your favourite SEO guy.

You can monitor the contest in near-real time by searching for the phrase on Google. The current leader in the contest is Mr. Brad Fallon, and it looks like he’s taking it pretty seriously.

GNU grep 2.5.4 released

taa — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:15:47 +0000

After almost two years in the making, and with the assistance of the fine people on the bug-grep mailing list, I have made an official release of GNU grep 2.5.4. This is my first significant contribution to Free Software and the Open Source world. Now I can say with pride and confidence that I am an active member of the GNU project and the maintainer of GNU grep. The official announcement follows.

I’m pleased to announce the release of GNU grep 2.5.4.

GNU grep is a pattern matching program. The grep command searches one or
more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern.
The pattern can be a fixed string or a regular expression. By default,
grep prints the matching lines.

This is primarily a bug-fix release. For a complete list of changes
please refer to the ChangeLog file.

Thanks to all the people who have been testing, reporting bugs,
contributing code, suggesting enhancements, providing feedback, and
answering user questions on the mailing lists . Thanks
to all the translators. Special thanks to Karl Berry for his guidance
and support leading to my first release as a maintainer of grep.

You can find the new release here:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.gz.sig
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.bz2
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/grep/grep-2.5.4.tar.bz2.sig

Soon it will also appear on the sources and GNU mirrors which
are listed here:

http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html

The MD5 checksums are:

92258031d98d4f12dfc6a6d24057e672 grep-2.5.4.tar.gz
5650ee2ae6ea4b39e9459d7d0585b315 grep-2.5.4.tar.bz2

The GNU grep official Web site is:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/

Please report bugs and feedback to .

The grep development discussion happen on the mailing list
. To join, visit:

http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grep

Cheers,

TAA

–
Tony Abou-Assaleh, PhD
Email: address@hidden
Web site: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net

Live Blog: Syntactic Movement in Statistical Translation

taa — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:34:30 +0000

This is a live blog of the Dalhousie CS seminar by Dr. Colin Cherry of Microsoft Research, Natural Language Processing Group entitles “Syntactic Movement in Statistical Translation”

11:33 – People are still arriving. Dr. Keselj is having a conversation with Dr. Cherry. Dr. Cherry said his experiments are in English and French, since he speaks a little bit of French.

11:35 – Dr. Keselj is introducing the speaker.

11:36 – Studied at Acadia, work mostly from his thesis at U. of Alberta. Trying to put linguistics back into machine translation. Adding syntactic constraints.

11:37 – Outline: tutorial on statistical MT, word order, syntactic cohesion. Phrasal SMT – a decoder from French to English and vice versa.

11:39 – Rule based translation is very common, e.g., Babble Fish in Altavista and Yahoo. Hard to fix problems without introducing new ones. A different approach is treat MT as a math problem: trans(e) = argmax_f [ P(f|e)]

11:41 – f and e are not well defined. Ridiculous: search over all French sentences. Instead: find all possible French sentence that can be created by breaking down and reassembling an English sentence.

11:42 – Need a score to evaluate the different possible sentences.

11:43 – Exampe: begins -> debute. Existence of big collections in English and their translation in French. Available free online. Sentence alignment is easy. Word alignment within a sentence is harder, but we assume it works.

11:46 – tri-gram and 4-gram models for language modelling. No need for bilingual text to build these language models.

11:47 – Word order which to translate first affects quality. Reordering a sentence is same as travelling salesman. Factorial complexity. However, language has structure so we don’t need to examine all combinations.

11:49 – Represent a sentence as a dependency tree of which word describes which. Uses CFG. Subtrees are always continuous substrings (phrases). [basically POS parsing]

11:51 – assume that subtrees are units of thought and are language universal, i.e., preserved during translation across languages. This is called cohesion. Can be verified with word alignment in parallel text.

11:53 – project tree from one language to text in another language. If subtrees don’t intersect then we’re good.

11:54 – Fox (2002), used word alignment to validate cohesion, 90% of French-English holds. Both sides win: stats say 90% is not 100%, can’t do much; linguists say 90% is better than 80%, and it’s almost 100%.

11:56 – Google and Microsoft use phrasal MT, winning approach until last year. Similar to example-based MT. Idea: trust what you’ve seen people do before over any computed translation. Phrase or expression translation (hold your horses) vs. translation in context (the voting session begins tomorrow).

11:59 – Phrase tables from aligned text + statistics from aligned text (maximum likelihood of P(e|f) and P(f|e) )

12:00 – Translation process. Load all your options (different translation for each word or phrase). Translation is similar to single-player search.

12:02 – Use beam search, one of the favourite NLP tools.

12:03 – scoring states. A linear update that adds a weighted probability ( lambda log P(e|f) for each word)

12:05 – weights are determined by training to maximize match to some human translator. (BLEU metric). Precision with respect to a reference translation. (word count)

12:07 – Modifying the search to account for cohesiveness. Questions: is that translation cohesive? Not based on POS parsing or tree but on a notion of phrases.

12:10 – subtrees don’t match phrases because phrases cross some arcs in the tree.

12:12 – if intersection happens at a boundary point then we don’t care. What is a cohesion violation then? Should push the process to the decoder and send the decoder in a different direction. Detect if a subtranslation is not cohesive and do something about it.

12:15 – Shows an example of a ‘decoder-eye view’. At the end of the day, eliminating interruption in translating subtrees is equiv to eliminating violations.

12:18 – use soft and hard constraints. Hard: if you detect an interruption through it away. Since only 90% accurate, use soft constraints. Use interruption count as a new feature in the log linear score. Constraints change when you can use a phrase, not which phrase you can use.

12:20 – Lexical reordering: a data driven model by examining the bi-grams.

12:21 – Experiment: English to French translator, built by extending an open source system.

12:23 – in base line, 4/5 are cohesive already, with high BLEU score. The other 1/5 have lower BLEU score, maybe means a difficult translation.

12:25 – Overall, base < lex < coh < coh+lex, where base << lex in 1/5 with violations and insignificant elsewhere.

12:26 – results evaluated with human evaluators. They agree little except when coh helps. System produces more literal translations.

12:28 – conclusion: method to move blocks around as units but then translate them separately. Can be applied to named entity, collocation, etc. Non-cohesive translation means it’s a hard one for phrase-based systems.

12:29 – Six years in PhD. Open for questions.

12:30 – Mike McAllister: how do you account for adjective location differences across languages. Answer: doesn’t play with statistics and doesn’t work well with text-based approaches. Current system can be model as a finite state machine. Need a more powerful model such as CFG.

12:31 – Question: why the 10% exist? Answer: 5% come from ‘not’ -> ‘ne pas’, others include heavy paraphrasing in human translations, NLP parsers are imperfect. Question: how will it work with German where verbs move to the end? Answer: doesn’t work for German. BTW, never seen english parse trees, would be interesting to see the parse tree for ‘ne pas’.

12:37 – Question: what’s the effect of punctuation? Answer: unreliable. Can improve performance a little. Hard to train because human translators are creative. Can help by restricting moving words across commas.

12:40 – Question: how to handle unseen words? Answer: There are approaches based on modelling new words, currently just copy as is.

12:41 – Vlado Keselj: how to handle source language that are not cohesive? Answer: can’t do.

12:43 – Tony Abou-Assaleh: Google won competitions up to last year, who is winning now? Answer:

Chinese to English: MS Asia
Arabic to English: Google
Unlimited Data: Google
Microsoft approch: combine many systems on closed data.
ISI: generally good.

… a couple other questions, but blogging stops here.

Thesis Made of Perks Coffee: Milestone in Coffee Drinking

taa — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:07:54 +0000

This week I reached a new milestone in my coffee-to-thesis conversion project. As you can see in the picture of my Perks Coffee Gold Card, I have completed stamped every cell on it. Mind you, the number of stamps doesn’t correspond exactly to the number of coffees I had: it was a mix of coffee, tea, double stamping on Fridays, multiple stamping from the pretty girl at the counter, and coffee for friends.

The real question though is: “did the coffee turn into something useful?” and the answer is a big fat YES. The misleading free Internet that Perks provides worked really great for me. The way it works is that you are given 30 minutes of free Internet per 24 period, when it works. That’s right – it only works 2 or 3 days a week on average. As a result I was able to isolate myself from the distractions of the connected world and concentrate on turning Perks French Roast coffee into actual thesis text.

There are still a few lines of text missing from the thesis and a new collectible Perks Coffee Gold Card will be started soon. Stay tuned for a report on another full coffee card.

Revolution 2008: Spinning for Life

taa — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:19:20 +0000

On April 18, 2008, I will be joining many other enthusiasts from the Halifax/Dartmouth area to do a 30 minute spin on a stationary bike at the Historic Properties to raise some money for the Dartmouth General Hospital who is going to buy a CT 64 Scanner.

I invite you to join the event in person and show your support for the cause by sponsoring me. I suggest a minimum donation of $5, but if you donate $20 or more then you will get a tax receipt.

Event Details:

Title: Revolution 2008: Spinning for Life!
Location: Historic Properties, 1869 Upper Water Street, Halifax, NS
Date: April 18, 2008
Time: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
GenieWheelies Spinning Time: 5:00 PM – 5:30 PM

My personal goal is to raise at least $100 and I ask for your help. To donate online, please visit:

http://my.e2rm.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=1764952

or send me a message if you prefer to make a cash or cheque donation.

Thank you for your support!

Update 2008-04-18: Spinning with the Genie Wheelies and other participants was a lot of fun. They must’ve had at least 100 stationary bikes there. The coaches were very energetic and up beat, and the music was lively and pumping. Collectively, our team of 7 raised $585 from 22 sponsors, exceeding our goal of $500. My personal thanks go Hathai Tanta-ngai and Kate Patterson for sponsoring me.

My First “smart ride”

taa — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:06:03 +0000

Earlier today I had the pleasure to ride in a smart. It was my first smart ride ever. So what?, you may ask. What is so special about a smart ride? This ride was very special indeed. Not only was it a smart, but it was a smart forfiveone ride!

This car is awesome. It is so awesome that I thought it was manufactured like that. And not until the owner/dirver/creator started pointing out all the different mods that I began to realize how special that ride was.
So much leg room and head room, way more than most economy-sized cars that I drove or rode in over the years. The custom GPS looks as if it was factory installed. The mini LCD displays make it look that much more geeky and sporty at the same time.

I loved the sport shocks going on Halifax streets after a rough winter (well, it still is going, may even get worse). And though I didn’t get to used the add-on arm rest – it was reserved by the driver – I totally appreciated the added comfort the driver was getting.

Only one pickiness I can think of: what’s up with the doors requiring a double slam to close? Makes you want to kick the door every time it doesn’t close.

The original incarnation of this articles appeared at 451s.com

Career Panel

taa — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 03:49:19 +0000

On Wednesday, March 5, 2008, I participated in a Career Advice Panel for International Students at Dalhousie University as one of the panelists. My advice focused on three points: diversification vs. specialization, networking, and self-promotion.
The panel discussion was facilitated by Jennie Brimicombe from Career Services and attended by about 30 students. Members of the panel were chosen for their diversity. They were:

Tammy Holland, an employer from Royal Bank;
Tammy Deubry, an alumnus working as an accountant;
Rong Lu, a recent grad from Environmental Studies; and
Tony Abou-Assaleh (me!), a current student, someone who recently got a job, and an employer.

Below I summarize the main points in my advice to international students seeking a job in Canada:

Diversification vs. Specialization

Early on in your career focus on diversifying your skills. Specification early on is dangerous in that it may limit your options. For example, say you are a computer science graduate who also obtained a Cisco certificate. If apply for a job at a company that doesn’t use Cisco hardware then you are not likely to be hired, even though you may possess all the required skills.

Certification and specialization can be an option later on where obtaining the certificate may result in a promotion or a raise.

Networking

Networking is the single most important element in a job hunt, yet most students, especially from technical programs such as engineering and computer science, tend to undermine its importance. Some things you can do for networking:

Attend networking events such as the ones organized by Career Services or networking organizations (Halifax Fusion)
Join a professional organization in your area of study such as IEEE for engineers and ACM for computer science. These organization often have local networking events and volunteering opportunities.
Volunteer for a committee. Some committee require more work than others, but they all provide networking opportunities beyond the committee members. A committee could be a part of a professional organization, a student society, or an event organizer.

Networking requires maintenance and costs time and money, so you have to be selective in which connections you wish to maintain. If you make everyone in this room your friend then you will never graduate.

Self-promotion and Confidence

In North America, unlike Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Asia, you are usually evaluated based on how you present yourself, not based on credentials you can prove. This means that you don’t need a letter from you instructor to demonstrate that you participated in a group project. Therefore, it is very important that you communicate your qualifications and skills to your employer and show confidence in yourself. The more confident you are the higher your skills are valued.

Registered in One Lap of America

taa — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:36:31 +0000

It is official. I will be a co-driver with Stephen Noton driving his forfiveone at the 25th anniversary, the 2008 Tire Rack One Lap of America (formerly Cannonball Run).

The forfiveone is 451 smart fortwo that has been improved by Stephen. The mods include racing suspension, wider tires, GPS and computers, and many cosmetic enhancements. I recently had the pleasure of taking a ride in the forfiveone.

I am very exited for this opportunity – being part of a tradition and making history. This is going to be the first time that a smart participates in One Lap of America. I do not know if the smart has entered any other races yet.

I have a thing for long drives, and 11,500+ KM of driving and riding is likely to fulfill that desire; and this doesn’t include the on-track driving. I will be posting updates here as things progress.

Note for skeptics: don’t believe me? check the entrants list!

Update:

Unfortunately, I had to withdraw from the OLOA this year. I was hoping to finish the first draft of my PhD thesis before the race starts. Alas, it didn’t happen. Health problems also contributed to the cause.