Blog Category: Research

“Authoritarian Governments in Cyberspace”

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A while ago I wrote about Evgeny Morozov’s Stanford talk (“Authoritarian Governments in Cyberspace”) about the use of social networking and other technology by authoritarian governments. While the Stanford talk was in some ways similar to his TED talk, it had more content and a slightly different focus. For those interested in the details, here’s a link to the slides.

While the slides were meant to illustrate rather than to echo the talk, they draw considerably on sources available on the web that could be followed up with a simple search.  It will be interesting to watch this space over the next few years as technology evolves and as governments get even more sophisticated.  While much of the effort that Morozov documents is aimed at controlling citizens of these regimes, the core competencies involved are also central to cyber-warfare.

Marking Up a World: Physical Markup for Virtual Content Creation

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FXPAL’s Pantheia system enables users to create virtual models by ‘marking up’ a physical scene with pre-printed visual markers and then taking pictures. The meanings associated with the markers come from a markup language that enables users to specify geometric, appearance, or interactive aspects of the model that are then used by the system to construct the model.  Our “Marking up the World” video appeared at ACM Multimedia this week. In the video you can see how our system works, our viewer features, and a selection of the spaces and objects we have used the system to reconstruct.

Thanks much to Qiong Liu for presenting it, and to John Doherty for putting it together from our clips and for narrating it. The geometric reconstruction work I spoke about last week as part of the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures series was inspired by the issues we discovered while building the system. For more details on our work, see the paper we presented at CGVR ’09 Interactive Models from Images of a Static Scene.

Talk at NIST on collaborative search

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I am giving a talk today at NIST on collaborative search. Abstract:

In the library sciences, information seeking has long been recognized as a collaborative activity, and recent work has attempted to model group information seeking behavior. Until recently, technological support for group-based information seeking has been limited to collaborative filtering and “social search” applications. In the past two years, however, a new kind of technologically-mediated collaborative search has been demonstrated in systems such as SearchTogether and Cerchiamo. This approach is more closely grounded in the library science interpretation of collaboration: rather than inferring commonality of interest through similarity of queries (social search), the new approach assumes an explicitly-shared information need for a group. This allows the system to focus on mediating the collaboration rather than detecting its presence. In this talk, we describe a model that captures both user behavior and system architecture, describe its relationship to other models of information seeking, and use it to classify existing multi-user search systems. We also describe implications this model has for design and evaluation of new collaborative information seeking systems.

Slides:

There are references in the slides.

Securing the identity of a past FXPAL researcher

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Volker Roth left FXPAL last year to become a professor at Freie Universität Berlin. There he leads the Secure Identity Research Group, which takes a user centered approach to addressing security and privacy issues related to mobile devices, cloud computing, and the internet.

He and his group have gotten press recently due to a well-publicized celebration of the opening of their new building. There are some great photos of Volker at this opening on the  Bundesdruckerei web site (Bundesdruckerei endowed the position Volker filled and provides other support for the group).  On the same site is a picture of Volker hobnobbing with Horst Köhler, the president of Germany, and his wife! It is great to see Volker thriving.

Google Squared: any sign of progress?

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At Daniel Tunkelang’s suggestion, I revisited Google Squared, having written about it when it was first released. At the time, I tried a couple of queries (not a formal evaluation), and found some useful results, and some bogus ones. This time, I re-ran the same queries as before, and compared the results with my saved queries. For the query ‘airplane accidents’, the new results were considerably worse. For the query ‘acts of terrorism’, there were no initial results, but when I put in some instances (WTC attack, Oklahoma City bombing, Khobar towers, marine barracks) I got back a similar list to the one I had constructed in June.

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Social Media Rules

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Social media: a bigger game-changer than the Gutenberg press? More popular than porn on the Internet?

Socialnomics has collected some very persuasive stats into this beautifully designed dynamic-text video, “Social Media Revolution.” It’s worth watching in HD, full-screen mode (you’ll need to click through to YouTube for that though). Also, some YouTube commenters take issue with a few of the stats – so I wouldn’t necessarily use this for source material. I think it’s true in essence, however.

Ode to Google Wave

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OK, it’s a sonnet, not an ode, but still. Making Light is one of my favorite blogs, run by science fiction editors Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden; it has a rich subject range and a great community of commenters. I also enjoy its commenters’ tendency to break into verse at the least provocation. Google Wave (which Jeremy discussed here) was the topic of a recent post titled “Panhandling for invites” in which Abi Sutherland offers this delight:

The sea has depths in which no net is cast,
With trackless kelpine forests where great squid,
Like Sasquatch in his mountains safely hid,
Dance dreaming with the fishes swimming past.
And human interaction is the same.
Beneath an email surface lies the deep:
Unmodeled work and social patterns creep
And spread in ways existing tools don’t frame.

Go here to see the whole sonnet.

I is for Implicit

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An e-mail exchange with an old friend caused me to reflect on research in HCIR a decade ago: in the Hypertext conference series there was a lot of churn and innovation around ways to represent structure, about literary hypertext, and about novel interaction techniques that allow people to express information seeking intent in interesting ways. Much of that cottage garden research was swept away by the steam engine of the web, for better of for worse. The demands of scalability led to the abandonment of all sorts of niceties (such as link integrity, for example), including a rich model of interaction. SIGLINK, ACM’s SIG on hypertext, renamed itself SIGWEB in an attempt to stay relevant. The main impact of all that research seemed to be the idea that you could click on blue-underlined text to do something.

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Workshop: Virtual Worlds in 2020

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A quick pointer to a workshop sponsored by SDForum’s Virtual Worlds SIG  (which I co-chair along with Bob Ketner of The Tech and  Eilif Trondsen of SRI-BI):

The “Virtual Worlds in 2020” Workshop
Palo Alto, CA
Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009

From the program description:
This is the 3rd annual “Future of Virtual Worlds” session – the Virtual Worlds in 2020 Workshop. This year it’s an interactive workshop where you can bring ideas, input, and questions for a rare, long term view of virtual worlds, at the Virtual Worlds SIG.

In just a few weeks we enter a new decade equipped with abilities that existed only in science fiction a few years ago. Although plans for using using graphical, collaborative virtual worlds predate the internet itself by many years, many advances in productivity remain unclaimed. It’s time now to take a look ahead. This workshop will produce a set of inputs showing what might be possible – along with a list of challenges to be overcome along the way over the next decade. Continue Reading