The paper I wrote got accepted! WOW!
It seems I’ll be in St. Anne’s College, Oxford City from 29 March to 1 April 2004 for the Second International Conference on Trust Management.
Next time I must submit to a conference to be held in Hawaii or Virgin Islands. I deserve some sea and beach. ;-)
Since I was out of the blogosphere during the past 20 days, I have many things to blog about.
The first is that I’ve been in Chiapas (Mexico) for new year holidays. New year’s eve in a Zapatista village (La Garrucha). I’ll blog about what this revolution means for me and the world later. For now I just publish the link to photos.
The sign in the photos reads: “esta usted en territorio zapatista en rebeldia aqui manda el pueblo y el gobierno obedece” meaning “You are in Zapatista lands in rebellion, here the people rule and the government obeys”
My blog was down during past 20 days or so. It seems now I’m back again.
I submitted my paper Using Trust in Recommender Systems: an Experimental Analysis to the Second International Conference on Trust Management 2004.
You can read the PDF file or the HTML version (by latex2html).
Abstract:
Recommender systems (RS) have been used for suggesting items (movies, books, songs, etc.) that users might like. RSs compute a user similarity between users and use this as a weight for the users’ ratings. However they have many weaknesses, such as sparseness, cold start and vulnerability to attacks. We assert that these weaknesses can be alleviated using a Trust-aware system that takes into account the “web of trust” provided by every user.
Specifically, we analyze data from the popular Internet web site epinions.com. The dataset consists of 49290 users who expressed reviews (with rating) on items and explicitly specified their web of trust, i.e. users whose reviews they have consistently found to be valuable.
We show that users have usually few items rated in commons. For this reason, the classic RS technique is often ineffective and is not able to compute a user similarity weight for many of the users. Instead exploiting the webs of trust, it is possible to propagate trust and infer an additional weight for other users. We show how this quantity can be computed against a larger number of users.
Italian bloggers need the help of Metafilter of any blogger with our Italian miserabile fallimento. Link and spread, thanks.
I strongly believe Christmas is all but about exchanging unuseful material things.
If you want to give me a gift, give me a call, a kiss, a thought but nothing material, please.
Or better donate to Emergency or Medici Senza Frontiere or to another organization that works for constructing peace.
You can download your Buy Nothing Day Gift Exemption Voucher at Adbusters.org
Happy non-buying Christmas to everyone in the world!
If you look in Google for miserable failure, you get this miserable failure.
We can do the same for this miserabile fallimento (Italian equivalent).
How? It’s easy. Just write an entry with this HTML code
<A HREF=”http://www.palazzochigi.it/Presidente/Biografia/biografiait.html”>miserabile fallimento</A>
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Today, 19 years ago, a world tragedy happened. See The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.
On the night of December 2nd-3rd 1984, 27 tons of methyl isocyanate, hydrogen cyanide, mono-methyl amine and other lethal gases began spewing from Union Carbide Corporation’s pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. Severe cost-cutting meant that six safety systems designed to contain a leak were inadequate or inoperational. Nobody outside the factory was warned because the safety siren was turned off. Not until the gas was upon them in their beds, searing their eyes, filling their mouths and lungs, did the communities of Bhopal know of their danger.
Gasping for breath and near blind people stampeded into narrow alleys. In the mayhem children were torn from the hands of their mothers, never to see them again. Some were wracked with seizures and fell under trampling feet. Some, stumbling in a sea of gas, their lungs on fire, were drowned in their own bodily fluids. It was a massacre. Dawn broke over residential streets littered with corpses. In just a few hours numberless innocents had died in fierce pain and unimaginable terror.
Over half a million people were exposed to the deadly cocktail. The gases burned the tissues of the eyes and lungs, crossed into the bloodstream and damaged almost every system in the body. Nobody knows exactly how many died but in the next days more than 7,000 death shrouds were sold in Bhopal. With an estimated 10-15 people continuing to die each month the number of deaths to date is put at over 20,000. And today, more than 120,000 people are still in need of urgent medical attention.
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Very interesting article about Many-to-Many: Social Capital as Credit
But the point is you can’t monetize social capital in aggregate, because it operates at a micro-scale. (…) The value of social capital is local, but its impact is global.
Every news channel is covering Bush visit to Baghdad every second. But I have seen none of them pointing out how soldiers were waken up to eat bush-served turkey at 6 AM. Yes, SIX AM in the morning.
The article at the end also mentions briefly the “Italian proto-fascist prime minister Silvio Berlusconi”.