Author Archives: paolo

Microsoft isn’t exactly in fighting trim

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From fortune.com: But Microsoft isn’t exactly in fighting trim. Its ambitious new operating system, code-named Longhorn, is more than a year late, even after having been scaled back. Linux, the free operating system that Gates once scoffed at, is fighting Microsoft for share in both the server and desktop markets, forcing the company to do the unthinkable: offer customer discounts. Last year it had to spend $1 billion to rewrite thousands of lines of code to make its programs less susceptible to viruses. Its Xbox gaming console is winning raves from players but has yet to make serious money. Meanwhile, Apple has stolen the show in online music with its hugely popular iPod and iTunes Music Store. Plus, the recently released Firefox browser, which can be downloaded free, has forced Gates to reconstitute an Internet Explorer development team. Indeed, four years have passed since Microsoft released a piece of software that generated the kind of buzz Google seems to generate every month.

Teens share innermost feelings with parents or ….?

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When teens are asked to choose whether they prefer to share their innermost feelings with their parents or a blog, they are split with roughly half (51%) selecting their parents and 49% choosing a blog. (from BusinessWire, via an email on SocNet).
Yes, I didn’t follow Clay’s advice with this entry, posting a news that just is too postable not to be posted.
Most of us will not be able to afford the calling and re-calling of sources to double-check a quote, but all of us can ask ourselves, just before we hit Submit, ‘Is this true?’. And the time we should be most careful to do that is if we feel really satisfied with what we’ve written.
This result seems so perfectly fabricated for having bloggers post it … with self-satisfaction and I’m brainlessy posting it not pondering enough ‘Is this true?’, but that’s how the world goes these days …

An Automatic Patent Requests Generator: overflooding the Patent Office?

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Since really trivial patents get granted (as long as you pay), i was wondering how hard could it be to organize a Distributed Denial of Service Attack on the Patent Office [the Patent Office probably reviews a bit patent requests, eventually accepting all of them since the only funds they received is from granting patents].
The idea: to modify a bit the SCIgen – An Automatic CS Paper Generator (a wonderful GPL-licenced generator of Computer Science papers who created a random paper that got accepted to a conference!) and overflood the Patent Office with automatically generated Patent Requests. I bet that 95% of the (randomly generated) Patent Requests would be accepted. Did I heard “NoSoftwarePatents“?

Patenting the obvious: Google and how much a news source is trusted

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Google had filed a patent for “ranking news according to quality (or at least NewScientist says so, I didn’t check).
The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google’s database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site. Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.
So can you patent something so obvious? It is as trivial as “I take 2 parameters (how many words you say per minute and your height) and I do a weighted sum on them”. Can it be reasonable that you patent weighted sums of A and B?
This is why we should say nosoftwarepatents.com.
Moreover the idea that FoxNews is a “trusted” source because many people visit its site is really bad for me. This is what I call a global trust metric. If I tell Google that I trust Indymedia, then I should receive personalized results (personalized in the sense that the weight given to FoxNews is 0!).

Contact me if you’ll be in Trieste next week for the School on Structure and Function of Complex Networks.

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I’ll be in Trieste at the Abdus Salam ICTP (Unesco funded school) during next 2 weeks (16 – 28 May 2005) for the School and Workshop on Structure and Function of Complex Networks (i was advertising about it time ago and I got accepted). I’m so excited. The list of speakers is simply great (see below) and there are participants from all over the world, in fact “Although the main purpose of the Centre is to help research workers from developing countries, a limited number of students and post-doctoral scientists from developed countries are also welcome to attend.“.
If you happen to be there and want to discuss a bit about blogosphere, trust, reputation, social software, social networks, languages, globalization, … just whatever, please contact me!
Continue reading →

My first Firefox extension: SemanticLinks

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For the previously mentioned paper, I created a small Firefox extension called SemanticLinks. The purpose? Showing VoteLinks, rel=”nofollow” and information about the linked resource by appending a small icon near the link text (anchor text). SemanticLinks is a simple change of TargetAlert to which I just added a 1%. You can find more information about SemanticLinks and how to install it on the SemanticLinks page. You might also want to see some screenshots.

New paper: “Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority”

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I uploaded another paper of mine in the papers section. This is still under review for the Web Intelligence 2005 conference and is titled “Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority” (pdf). Let me know what you think of it, if you like.

Abstract The basis of much of the intelligence on the Web is the hyperlink structure which represents an organising principle based on the human facility to be able to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant material. Second generation search engines like Google make use of this structure to infer the authority of particular web pages. However, the linking mechanism provided by HTML does not allow the author to express different types of links such as positive or negative endorsements of page content. Consequently, algorithms like PageRank produce rankings that do not capture the different intentions of web authors. In this paper, we review some of the initiatives for adding simple semantic extensions to the link mechanism. Using a large real world data set, we demonstrate the different page rankings produced by considering extra semantic information in page links. We conclude that Web intelligence would benefit in adoption of languages that allow authors easily encode simple semantic extensions to their hyperlinks.

Looking for accomodation in Pittsburgh and for travel support

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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?

Paper accepted at AAAI05: “Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community”

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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.

50.000.000 downloads for Firefox!

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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!