I had an interesting discussion with my student Katrina Panovich today. I’m intrigued by the way people use twitter for “ambient awareness”—watching what goes by, but not worrying about what they miss. I find this paradoxical—if you don’t care about missing stuff, why watch at all? Especially given that each arriving tweet provides some degree [...]
After recovery from chairing ISWC 2009, I had always intended to blog about some of the changes my co-chair Avi Bernstien and I tried for the conference. I was prompted to do it today by a very interesting post by James Landay—it describes problems with the current CHI/UIST reviewing process, and led to some fascinating [...]
Having gotten ISWC’s Ontology Panel off my chest, I want to take the time to discuss the Best Paper Awards we gave at the conference. The papers that got these awards received uniformly high ratings from their reviewers, were recommended for awards by the program committee, impressed the program chairs, and had good presentations at [...]
Ever since returning from the 2009 International Semantic Web Conference last week I’ve been bursting to discuss a panel that took place there on the topic “Does the Semantic Web need Ontologies?”. But the WWW2010 deadline was today and we had 3 papers to write. With that deadline now 10 minutes past, I can [...]
A month ago Stefano Mazzocchi published an interesting article on data reconciliation (detecting when two identifiers refer to the same item, and merging them) where he advocated a more centralized “a priori” approach (trying to keep the identifiers merged at the beginning). I posted a response arguing the value of a more anarchic “a posteriori” [...]
Natasha Noy gave a talk at CSAIL with the above title. She works in with a large medical bioinformatics group at Stanford. The bioinformatics community in general couldn’t care less about cool computer science but is one of the few groups that have heavily adopted formal ontologies as a way to get their work done. [...]
Peter Bailey et al. from Microsoft described a study comparing sources of context in predicting the subsequent interests of a user looking at a particular page. (A note of caution, the term context in the IR community refers to auxillary text or documents used to augment a query typically to help disambiguate it and improve [...]
Stefano Mazzochi used to work at our SIMILE project here at MIT, where we explored the use of RDF and Semantic Web tools for the sharing of knowledge. He has since gone to work at Metaweb and, it seems, become much more friendly to their “top down” approach of trying to create a centralized repository [...]
From our friends in Southhampton (correction: and Hasso-Platner), a study of how to differentiate experts (who really know how to tag stuff) from spammers (who want to tag their own stuff, but try to acquire credibility by copying tags others have used). They try to exploit the difference that the people who tag first are [...]
Xavier Amatriain of Telefonica research presented work on collaborative filtering. Usually you do collaborative filtering by finding the other users “similar” to your subject and combining their recommendations. This paper argued/demonstrated that sometimes you are better off figuring out who the experts art and only paying attention to their opinions. You might just create [...]