Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

A paper of mine got accepted for the AAAI conference (see previous post). So I need (1) to go to Pittsburgh on July 9, 2005, (2) to find an accomodation in Pittsburgh from July 9 to July 13, 2005, and (3) to pay for conference registration. Since my institute is not sailing in the gold (this is probably not an English expression, it is an Italian one, “non sta navigando nell’oro” and i liked to write it here), I’m going to ask you if you can help in some way.
I tried to enroll for the Student Scholar and Volunteer Program, some volunteering and being a student can maybe help with (1) and (3), however if you know of any grant for students for travelling from Italy to USA for example, please let me know. About (2), I’m going to check on couchsurfing and on hospitalityclub. However if you live in Pittsburg and are dying of wish to host me (again it is an Italian expression “muori dalla voglia di…”), let me know. I’ll be happy to be hosted … and I promise I’ll not use Italianish expressions ;-)
UPDATE: i got a suggestion to put here a PayPal button, at first I thought it was a unreasonable suggestion but then “hey maybe it can work”. Just 2 notable examples: Kottke becomed a full-time blogger and the authors of the randomly generated paper accepted for conference will give a random-presentation thanks to received donations.
So, before I spend time (sort of money, no?) in setting up a PayPal account, would you donate? … Never thought I could write something like this. The Web is an expected socially created strange creature, isn’t it?

A paper of mine titled “Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community” (pdf) got accepted for the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05)! Cool! The email I received this morning says “Your paper was one of 148 accepted to AAAI-05, out of 803 submissions. AAAI is a highly selective conference, and you are to be congratulated on your paper’s acceptance.” This means acceptance rate is 18%. Let me know if you like/dislike the paper or want to discuss its topic a bit. I think controversiality is an important theme and I think there are too many papers that assume that every user/agent has a global goodness value that is the same for everyone (there are some users that are bad for everyone and the goal of the technique is to spot them out). This assumption is unrealistic: just think of Bush or Berlusconi … some people like them (yeah, I know it’s kinda incredible) and some other don’t. My paper hopefully provide some evidence about this intuitive phenomena. You might also want to check other papers of mine.

Title: Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community
Abstract: In today’s connected world it is possible and very common to interact with unknown people, whose reliability is unknown. Trust Metrics are a recently proposed technique for answering questions such as “Should I trust this user?”. However, most of the current research
assumes that every user has a global quality score and that the goal of the technique is just to predict this correct value. We show, on data from a real and large user community, epinions.com, that such an assumption is not realistic because there is a signicant
portion of what we call controversial users, users who are trusted and distrusted by many. A global agreement about the trustworthiness value of these users cannot exist. We argue, using computational experiments, that the existence of controversial users (a normal phenomena in societies) demands Local Trust Metrics, techniques able to predict the trustworthiness of an user in a personalized way, depending on the very personal view of the judging user.

Congrats! 50.000.000 downloads for Firefox!!! I think this is the best way to let “normal people” know what free software (or open source) can achieve, and it also demonstrates fantastically how the proprietary software development model lacks behind hundreds of years when considering features. extensions, security, …. everything! Go on, keep choosing freedom!

It is good to know I’ve chosen an interesting research topic: Google is going to adopt/embrace TrustRank. See this article on searchenginewatch.
One more paper to read: Combating Web Spam with TrustRank; actually one of the author is Pedersen of Yahoo! (the other are from Stanford).

1) Stallman was in Trento and I got the chance to be pictured with him.
2) Gavin Hill found the picture and emailed me asking to use the picture for a video he was making. I release everything on my blog on a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 Creative Commons Licence but he preferred a more strict one and so I re-released this photo to him under a Attribution Creative Commons Licence.
3) He created a video about “How Software Patents Actually Work” with the picture. [He wrote me in first email that he would release the video under CC licence as well. At the moment, I think he forgot to write it on the video page so I emailed him about this] [UPDATE: he told me that “The video itself has details of the CC license at the end”]
4) I’m in the “thanks list” at the end of the video.
Everything thanks to CreativeCommonsLicenses, the copyright for the 21th century!
Napo is the guy that appears in the picture (and the guy I ask to when I have a problem with my GNU/Linux and the guy I share the office with every single day) and wrote about it on his blog on persone.softwarelibero.org an entry in Italian.
You can also translate the video in your language, if you like.

From BoingBoing: Software Patents Stopped in India. Well, India acted much savvier than Europe but we are still fighting against Software Patents in Europe. Software patents are good only for mega big companies that use them to destroy, via legal fights, small and medium companies. Imagine being sued by, say, IBM for patent infringement. You will lose a lot of time and money to defend your reasons and you will eventually give up and bankrupt. Software Patents are a nightmare for European IT market and for Europe. Help in stop them.

Too funny, too sad. SCIgen is an Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator. The program (GPL-licenced and hence Free Software) generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. I was thinking about doing something like it since a lot of time, but wait … one of the random paper got accepted for a conference!!!
One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to “fake” conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (for example, check out the gibberish on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005! See Examples for more details.
The accepted paper is Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy by Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn and the “authors” say We are currently working on the “camera-ready”, and received many donations to send us to the conference, so that we can give a randomly-generated talk. Ehi, researcher! You can cite it! After all it is a published paper! Not the crappy stuff you find on blogs! Beware, never cite an online article, only articles published on the old paper at one of the millions of crappy iper-expensive conferences!
And, in case you want to cite a paper of mine, I just created “A Case for Randomized Algorithms” and “Comparing XML and Markov Models” or you can just generate a new paper for me. Writing a paper is now easier than ever!!! I need to click 8 more times on this link and then I can just spend one year on holidays since I already produced a good amount of papers.
[I found the news on BoingBoing, a blog reseachers should cite sometime…]