Erik comments on personalized services presented in these last couple weeks:
– a9.com: (by Amazon) a personalized experience, though not quite personalized search).
– Newsbot (also in Italian): (by Micro$oft) personalized news (with or without login).
– Findory: personalized news (with or without login), but not new.
– Google Personalized (weak attempt).
Interesting competition.
If you are interested in Recommender Systems, you cannot miss Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems by Jonathan L. Herlocker, Joseph A. Konstan, Loren G. Terveen and John T. Riedl.
You need an ACM Web Account and some time (it is 53 pages).
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I was searching in google for “Beth, T., Borcherding, M., Klein, B.: Valuation of trust in open networks.” and I got this result page: the link of the homepage (in green) is displayed not correctly.
It is so strange to receive something not perfect from google. Could it be a bug? Or maybe it is a feature? I tried some other queries and it seems that “B B.” is treated as some sort of bolding directive or so.
For my studies on trust metrics, I need to code trust metrics. I was looking for a Java package for modeling, analysis, and visualization of graphs (possibly weighted and directed). I tried many of them (see below) but I found a wonderful one!
Java Universal Network/Graph Framework hosted on SourceForge so open source under a BSD licence (javadoc).
JUNG — the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework–is a software library that provides a common and extendible language for the modeling, analysis, and visualization of data that can be represented as a graph or network. It is written in Java, which allows JUNG-based applications to make use of the extensive built-in capabilities of the Java API, as well as those of other existing third-party Java libraries.
The current distribution of JUNG includes implementations of a number of algorithms from graph theory, data mining, and social network analysis, such as routines for clustering, decomposition, optimization, random graph generation, statistical analysis, and calculation of network distances (Dijkstra Shortest Path), flows, and importance measures (centrality, PageRank, HITS, Random Walk, etc.).
JUNG also provides a visualization framework that makes it easy to construct tools for the interactive exploration of network data. Users can use one of the layout algorithms provided, or use the framework to create their own custom layouts. In addition, filtering mechanisms are provided which allow users to focus their attention, or their algorithms, on specific portions of the graph.
If you don’t trust me, you can try the Ranking Demo or the other demos.
It is of course an evolving project, I already wrote some code to draw arrows and to label edges with weights and I’m trying to integrate it. I plan to code some of these trust metrics. JUNG is maintained by some great PhD students.
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During the past week I was in Oxford for the 2nd Trust Management Conference. The presentation (pdf) (sxi) of my paper went well.
Most of the participants were concerned with privacy and the problem of setting up a secure environment for virtual organizations (business basically). I am not too much interested in this topic that is basically agreeing with Microsoft, IBM and HP (that were present with some representatives) about standards for the trust management processes, often reduced to simple access control lists.
Instead I was very happy to meet Cai Ziegler. Cai is working on topics very similar to my interests. But it is doing more (his scope on semantic web recommender systems is broader, since he also takes into account taxonomies), better (its English is simply wonderful) and faster (he is still in his first year of PhD). Can I at least say I’m humble? ;-)
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Google Personalized.
Google Personalized web search delivers custom search results that are based on a profile you create describing your interests.
The slidebar (with which you can ask for more or less personalitazion) is cool.
But I still prefer the idea behind Eurekster: “Eurekster shows you What’s Hot with your friends“.
It would be great to be able to tell Eurekster “here is my FOAF file where my friends are already expressed” and then receive search results.
(via Mark Carey)
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15
(Red Letter Edition)
Read about The Book of Mozilla on Wikipedia.
(found via Kevin)
In the academic world there is often confusion about the concept of trust. Or better the same world “trust” has two different meanings. From now on, I’ll try to use (and push) these 2 different words for the 2 different concepts: Soft Trust and Hard Trust.
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According to w3schools stats, Mozilla usage is growing fast.
The latest figures state that Mozilla had a 9.0 percent usage share in February, up from 8.2 percent in January. The W3Schools data indicates that Mozilla’s usage share has more than doubled in the last twelve months.
In the meantime even the stars seem telling you: “Use Firefox“. (Via Adot)