October 2008 Archives

On Oct. 28, 2008, Microsoft demonstrated a pre-beta release of Windows 7 at Professional Developers Conference 2008 in Los Angeles. Details can be found here.

Below is a summary for the conference. I would like to introduce you some distinguishable features of Microsoft Windows 7.

Fact 1: Release Dates

Microsoft plans to release Windows 7 beta at the beginning of next year, and commercial versions in January 2010.

Fact 2: Windows 7 works on netbooks

Microsoft officially stopped selling Windows XP at the end of June this year, while they are still selling Windows XP for netbooks, low-cost laptops generally optimized for web browsing and e-mailing. One possible reason for this may be the competition with Linux for netbook market in which Microsoft seems to be interested. They said Windows 7 will work on netbooks of 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM.

Fact 3: Windows 7 supports multi-touch devices

(Picture from Wikipedia)

Touch-pads of laptops are likely to be replaced to multi-touch displays as Windows 7 supports them.

Fact 4: When you move with Windows 7, the default printer changes.

When you move with your portable device that Windows 7 is working on, your default printer could change as Windows 7 detects a new network.

Fact 5: Windows 7 runs better gadgets

On Windows 7, you can place gadgets anywhere on your workspace.

Fact 6: Windows 7 provides better task-bar

When you point at an icon in task-bar, you will see thumbnails associated with it.

References

[1] Microsoft PressPass: Microsoft delivers pre-beta release of Windows 7 ...
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-28PDCDay2PR.mspx

[2] Professional Developers Conference 2008 Videos, YouTube

      Part 1 and  Part 2

[3] Netbook, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

[4] Multi-touch, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch

I am going to talk about Dr. Jure Leskovec who was born in Slovenia in May 1980 (The same year I was born in!!) He and I share common research interest, social network analysis. He is famous for the work he has done so far in his research area.

His research focuses on mining and modeling large social and information networks, their evolution, and spread of information, influence and viruses over them. Problems he investigate are motivated by large scale data, the Web and other on-line media. 

It was last month that I saw his presentation video through videolectures.net, which was recorded at ACM KDD-08, the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, in August 2008. He talked about the microscopic evolution of social networks. Click on the image below to hear his very special English speaking.

His Presentation on Microscopic Evolution of Social Networks
at ACM SIGKDD 2008, Las Vegas.

He is a very young scholar. He got his Ph.D. from Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2008.  (Just a month ago!) He is currently working with Dr. Jon Kleinberg as a post-doc at Cornell University. More surprisingly, he will be joining the Computer Science Department at Stanford University as an assistant professor in Fall 2009! (Wow!) Research institutions he has interned so far include Yahoo! Research, Microsoft Research, and HP Labs. I think he could get invaluable data for his research from these institutions.

There's a lot I need to learn from him. A few weeks ago, I presented his work to my social network study group. I will continue reading his papers and find room for improvement. I think this is a good way to publish a paper for those in Research 101. He is one of the best models I need to follow; he got Best Paper Award from KDD-07. I hope I can collaborate with him in the future. :)

For more information about him, stop by his homepage at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/

Last week I talked about academic communities that I would like to be part of, and this time I will continue by focusing on several venues that I hope to have my work in sooner or later. A venue in this context means a journal or a conference where I will "publish or perish" in.

1)  International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM)

ICWSM is an interdisciplinary conference sponsored by Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). ICWSM brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creating and analyzing social media. Past conferences have included technical papers from areas such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies.

The 3rd ICWSM will be held May 17-20, 2009 in San Jose, California.

Though ICWSM is a relatively brand-new conference, it has strong committee members from Google, Microsoft, NIST, Facebook and so on. I personally believe that this conference will be a golden chance especially for those who seek internship opportunities at such institutions. As far as I know, past acceptance rates were higher than 20%.  People interested in participating should submit through the ICWSM-09 website a technical paper (up to 8 pages), poster or demo description (up to 2 pages) by January 21, 2009 (Midnight PST). Papers must be must be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style.

There are NOT many conferences that contains "A.I." in their names. ICWSM has very good reputation, and I expect it to be a place where I can socialize with the great people in A.I field.

2) iConference organized by iCaucus member schools

The 4th iConference will be held Feb 8-11, 2009 at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Contributed papers presenting original research, design products, theoretical developments, educational applications and engagement implications related to one or more of the conference themes will be considered. Papers should be 5-8 pages in length and suitable for publication in scholarly or professional journals. This conference also requires to use the official ACM Proceedings Format for all submissions.

The deadline for submission of complete papers, abstracts for posters, roundtable discussions, and wildcard sessions is Sunday, November 30, 2008. Authors will be notified of review decisions by Monday, December 22, 2008.

This is a "must-attend" conference to me. It doesn't seem to be very competitive yet, but it is one and only one conference that I can meet people from other iSchools and see what they are working on. Perhaps I can find a good partner for interdisciplinary research, if I am lucky. Hope it be a place where I feel proud that I am an iSchool student and I am part of iSociety... haha.

3) ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,

The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences. KDD-09 will feature keynote presentations, oral paper presentations, poster sessions, workshops, tutorials, panels, exhibits, demonstrations, and the KDD Cup competition.

The 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining will take place in Paris, France on June 28 - July 1, 2009. Important dates are

• Abstract Submission: February 2, 2009
• Electronic Paper Submission: February 6, 2009
• Notification: April 10, 2009
• Conference Dates: June 28 - July 1, 2009

This is one of the most prestigious and rigorous conferences in my research area. I would love to attend this conference not just because of the fame but the romantic place that I haven't ever been in yet! I have to work hard and make a great output though.

So far, I have talked about conferences. I will try to turn conference presentations and papers written for courses into journal articles in order to get one step closer to my goal. Obviously, publishing many papers in first-tier venues is a crucial condition to obtain a faculty position.

"By the end of this year, all of 1,500 Internet cafés in Beijing will be equipped with a camera and an ID card scanner. The cafes will be required to take photos and swipe the IDs of first-time visitors before they are allowed to surf the Internet. Once acquired, the information will be passed to Municipal Law Enforcement Agency of Beijing, which is in charge of the monitoring work. Repeat visitors would get a net café user number which they can input to log in the computer." [1]

An Internet Cafe in Beijing (Photo by AP/WWP)

It's been already a long time since people in China began to show their IDs to use computers in Internet Cafes in many cities of China. I agree that it helps prevent cybercrimes arising from anonymousness on the Internet. However, the policy of storing scanned images of IDs and photos taken[2] will probably cause more serious problems. How can we ensure that there won't be the leaking of personal information? We already have such experience too many times. More seriously, it is also possible that the information is obtained by criminals. What will you feel like if some criminals recognize you and know your home address? I don't even want to imagine.

Do you have any good idea for the identifying system? I would like hear your opinion. Thanks!

References

[1] "Cameras Draw Closer to Beijing's Internet Cafes", China Journal, The Wall Street Journal

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2008/10/17/cameras-draw-closer-to-beijings-internet-cafes/

[2] Xinhua News Agency, "Photo IDs Required in Beijing Internet Cafes", The China Internet Information Center (china.org.cn)

http://www.china.org.cn/living_in_china/news/2008-10/17/content_16625644.htm

For Ph.D. students, it is most important to publish research papers in academic communities such as professional associations, conference-based communities, and journal-based communities. Believe it or not, it is often said that GPA is not even looked at by employers when considering a doctor for a job position. As it may be the first step to find where to publish for a new Ph.D. student, I am going to talk about the academic communities that I believe I might be part of in the near future.

A subsection of professional association usually holds a conference once a year or every other year. Authors whose papers were chosen to be published are to gather and present their work at a specific location, usually in a university campus. After submission of a conference paper, it takes about two or three months for it to be reviewed and chosen for publication. After the decision, authors often refine their papers and submit them again. It is very attractive that the first authors usually get travel grants to the conference they are accepted by mostly their advisors.

A journal, on the other hand, is just to be published in the form of a book without any presentation. Journal papers are usually longer than conference papers in length. It also takes much longer time, about 2-3 years at worst, for a journal paper to be published. For this reason, people in an area where things change rapidly prefer to publish and read conference papers; journal papers in those areas are often out-of-date while they are still invaluable in the areas of traditional studies.

At this time, my interim goal has been set to publish papers at several conferences including IST Graduate Workshop, and i-Conference 2009. Following conferences will be considered afterward. (they are so called top conferences)

• ACM SIGKDD (Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining)

The primary focus of ACM SIGKDD is to provide the premier forum for advancement and adoption of the "science" of knowledge discovery and data mining by adoption of "standards" in the market in terms of terminology, evaluation and methodology, and by interdisciplinary education among KDD researchers, practitioners and users. 

• WWW (World Wide Web) Conference

The International World Wide Web Conferences constitute a series of conferences, usually taking place in May of every year. The location varies year to year, covering Asia, Europe, or North America. The conference is a mixture of academic and industrial content. Beyond the core conference there are also tutorials, workshops, and a separate Developers' Day. The event usually spreads over 5 days.

• IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

IJCAI is the premier international gathering of AI researchers and practitioners. Held biennially in odd-numbered years since 1969, IJCAI is sponsored jointly by International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) , and the national AI societies of the host nations.

As I am working on social network analysis with emphasis on expertise in artificial intelligence, I believe publishing in those three prestigious conferences will be really honorable for my fantastic Ph.D. life and my future career as well.

References

[1] ACM SIGKDD, http://www.sigkdd.org/

[2] WWW Conference, http://www.iw3c2.org/Conferences/index.html

[3] IJCAI, http://www.ijcai.org/

1. Introduction

It has been more than one month since I began to use Google Chrome, a new web browser Google released to the public on Sep. 2, 2008. As Google says: "Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier."[1] I have seen many students already using it; most of you might have heard of the name at least. Surprisingly, on the first day of its release, almost 2% of all Internet traffic to the 45,000 websites that GetClicky, a web analytics startup, monitors was coming from Google Chrome[2] Moreover, for the first week of its release, about 1.93 million people in the United States, nearly 1.4% of its Internet users, have visited the "Thank You" page associated with the download process of Google Chrome.[3] I do not know whether it is because of people's weariness of using Microsoft Internet Explorer or not, but it becomes evident that there have been demands for a better web browser.

2. Advantages

First, in Google Chrome, there is no "status bar"  which is located at the bottom of other web browsers. Of course, you can hide it if you use Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. If you do so, however, your browser will not show you where the object you are pointing at is linked to and what is being loaded. This might cause you to leave it enabled, though it is a waste of your workspace. Google Chrome solves this problem by showing information when necessary at the bottom as a tool tip is shown. (See below.)

Second, you can drag and drop a tab in order to make it an independent process, or put it into another Chrome process.

Third, a popup alarm is shown at the bottom, not at the top; this prevents shoving down the whole content.

Beside these things, there are still many advantages:

• Faster JavaScript Interpretation
• Site Sandboxing
• Simple User Interface

3. Disadvantages

The first time I used Google Chrome, I had a little difficulty in locating its menu bar; there is a button that shows menu items. I usually press an ALT key to see menu items, but it doesn't work on Chrome.

Second, there are no mouse gestures; it does not support page scrolling by the center button of a mouse, which is a very convenient feature to me, while Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox do.

  
        Microsoft Internet Explorer                            Mozilla Firefox

Last but not least, obviously, Google Chrome does not support Microsoft ActiveX. It is a big problem when using Korean websites as they are making use of ActiveX too much especially in Internet banking systems. I know this is not a problem of Google Chrome. I am just complaining about this dependency which is definitely not advisable.

4. Conclusion

I personally believe that Google Chrome is a well-written and attractive program though there are still some minor problems; the major advantages keep me using it. Since Google Chrome is open-source, there will be tons of plug-ins for it sooner or later to meet users' full satisfaction; it is just a matter of time.

5. References

[1] The Official Download Page of Google Chrome

http://www.google.com/chrome

[2] Michael Arritington, "GetClicky Analytics Service Tracking 2% Google Chrome Usage", TechCrunch

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/02/getclicky-analytics-service-tracking-2-google-chrome-usage/

[3] Stephen Shankland, "Study: Chrome reached nearly 2 million in U.S.", CNET News

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10044530-92.html

I have talked pretty enough about myself and my advisor. This time, I'm going to have the pleasure of introducing Shizhuo Zhu, a Ph.D. candidate of IST, whom I am working with in the Laboratory for Intelligent Agents. Though Shizhuo and I have different cultural backgrounds and research topics, we still have many things in common; we are IST students who majored in computer science before coming to IST, and who are interested in artificial intelligence especially in intelligent agents and being advised by the same professor, Dr. John Yen.

Shizhuo Zhu

• AIME (Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine) 2007, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• NESCAI (North East Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence) 2006, Ithaca, NY
• HCI (International Human-Computer Interaction Conference) 2003, Crete, Greece

I will continue introducing my advisor, Dr. John Yen. This time, I would like to focus on his academic life and career. He has been one of the leading researchers in the area of fuzzy logic. He was the Vice President of Publication for IEEE Neural Networks Council. He has published more than 100 technical papers in journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes. He is an expert in handling uncertainty in intelligent agents and expert systems as well as in general A.I. areas. Journals in which he most often publish are

• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering,
• IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics,
• AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)'s AI Magazine

• IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems,
• IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation,
• ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,
• IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

1. human-agent collaboration, trust, and learning
2. agent-based modeling of coordination of NGO's for disaster relief
3. agent-based support for emergency medicine
4. extracting knowledge from large-scale social networks

1. Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs, College of IST
2. University Professor of Information Sciences and Technology
3. Affiliate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
4. Director of the Laboratory for Intelligent Agents

1. Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
2. Chair of IEEE FIPA (Foundations of Intelligent Physical Agents) Working Group on Human Agent Communications
3. A sponsoring co-chair of AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems) 2008
4. A member of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Senior Member Committee

Now you figure out why he is so busy and he cannot afford to reply all the emails he receives. He is doing a lot of jobs simultaneously indeed. Let me talk about his biographical history in ascending chronological order. [1986] After receiving his Ph.D. degree in computer science from UC Berkeley in 1986, he began his professional experience as a research scientist with A.I expertise at the Information Sciences Institute of USC (University of Southern California). He played a key role in developing A.I. architectures for knowledge-level integration involving semantic web knowledge representations.

USC Information Sciences Institute

[1989] He became Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University in 1989. Also, he was the director of the Center of Fuzzy Logic, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems. [1992] He received Young Investigator Award from the Nation Science Foundation (NSF) in 1992. [1999] He co-authored the textbook "Fuzzy Logic: Intelligence, Control, and Information" published by Prentice Hall in 1999.

Fuzzy Logic: Intelligence, Control, and Information

[2001] He joined the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State in 2001. [2006] He co-authored the book "Emergent information technologies and enabling policies for counter-terrorism" published by Wiley-IEEE Press in 2006. Control, and Information" published by Prentice Hall in 1999.

Emergent Information Technologies and Enabling Policies for Counter-Terrorism

Currently, no class is being taught by him as he is doing a very important role as Associate Dean.