- Daft invests in boards.ie (the official press release)
- Áine Coffey in the Sunday Times says (regarding the investment) that “talk is not very cheap” (well, there was also that $580 million purchase of MySpace by News Corporation, the ultimate owner of the Sunday Times…)
- The Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan, makes his first post on boards.ie (spotted via IRC and Damien)
- The latest AMAS “State of the Net” bulletin reports on the growth of boards.ie (via the Sunday Business Post)
- boards.ie is shortlisted for “Best Discussion Forum” in the Moviestar.ie Irish Web Awards 2008 (yay, thanks to everyone who nominated us!)
- Over 50 competitors have signed up for the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition (and there’s still a month to go…)
Author Archive for Cloud
Click for the full image. Weird!
It’s been a few weeks since my last confession so here goes…
I started teaching last week - so far it’s going well - I teach EE109 Fundamentals of Electronic Engineering to first year Engineering and Information Technology students. The class is pretty big and there’s no common timeslot so it means I have to teach the material twice, but as both halves alternate between being the first recipients of material, I think it balances out pretty well. We also started the associated first year labs yesterday morning, and both final year and third year projects have been assigned so things are pretty busy.
The week before last, I was in UCD for a one-day workshop organised by staff and researchers with the Intel-sponsored TRIL Centre (Technology Research for Independent Living). We had an interesting session describing the BioMOBIUS platform, which builds on work from the EyesWeb project. My colleagues in the Bioelectronics Research Cluster are associate researchers with TRIL.
Last week, some of us from the College of Engineering and Informatics visited the new Cisco R&D facility here in Galway. It’s pretty impressive. Cisco have 140 people in Galway, mainly developers and testers, with a majority of R&D staff. Their big focus in Galway is on “Unified Communications and Collaboration” (data, voice, video, IM, etc.), and real-time sharing of video content. Their TelePresence demo is really amazing. It’s a conference room where the table almost blends into three huge screens that show the remote participants in the correct proportion to where they’d sit at the table. The audio also moves with the people as they move across the room. You can see some demos here and here.
I’m still carrying out research in DERI for about a half to one day a week, where I meet my students and researchers in my role as leader of the Unit for Social Software. We’ve been taking part in forthnightly (public) telecons regarding the SWAN SIOC joint initiative, looking at synergies between SIOC and Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine (with Tim Clark and his team from Harvard). I was also in DERI briefly yesterday for a meeting with some researchers from Microsoft in Redmond.
…will be the 1st September. I sincerely apologise for the delay; due to technical difficulties (we needed a signup mechanism in place), my holidays during the first two weeks of August, and settling into the new job.
To enter, you should sign up for a user account at data.sioc-project.org; we will ring to confirm your details; then after your account is enabled, you will be able to access the data sets from the 1st September. We will also have an entry submission system available from that date (in case you make something really cool on the first day)! You can make as many submissions as you wish, but use of the data sets is restricted to the duration of the competition and during the demonstration period in November…
Next month, I will begin a tenured lectureship position at the Department of Electronic Engineering here in the College of Engineering and Informatics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. However, I will still do joint research with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, continuing (amongst other things) to work with the Social Software Unit (on SIOC, SCOT, etc.) and with the TripPlanr project. In my new role, I will also be researching with the NCBES Bioelectronics Research Cluster in NUI Galway.
For those of you who have just come across me and my blog as a result of my work with DERI, you may not know that my background was in electronic engineering, having studied it at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and I also lectured for four years full time in the Department of Electronic Engineering before joining DERI in 2004. When I joined DERI initially, I imagined that I would be working on some intersection between electronic engineering and the Semantic Web. In fact, I fell into the world of the Semantic Web and social software, after an interesting discussion about semantic social networks with Stefan Decker, who was a senior researcher in the Institute at the time. I realised that my “hobby” interests in creating community websites could be combined with interesting research challenges around the Semantic Web, and although I (and then director Dieter Fensel) was unsure about how I would fare in a new research area, I’m glad to say that it worked out okay! Now I’m back to thinking about the convergence between electronics and semantics again, with some social software thrown in the mix (e.g. wearable communities).
Below is a collage of some memories from the past four-and-a-half years: including the FOAF Galway workshop, a Semantic Web cluster meeting, ESWC and a DERI offsite meeting, Wikimania, DERI Stanford, BlogTalk, meeting timbl, BarCamp, DERI drinks, the ITAG awards, and our Social Software summer / christmas parties.
I’ve really enjoyed working with all the smart and cool people in DERI, and I shall continue to do so, while strengthening ties between the Institute and NUI Galway’s College of Engineering and Informatics through my new job. (It’s my last day before holidays, so if you’re in Galway this evening, we’re going out for a few drinks in the Westwood Hotel after work at 5:30…)
Please note that the start date for this competition has been delayed while we install a secure authentication mechanism for accessing the data sets
The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway is running a unique competition from 1st August to 30th September 2008 in conjunction with boards.ie, Ireland’s largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in Amazon.com vouchers by submitting an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts from boards.ie over the past ten years:
- The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500)
- The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250)
- The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625)
Read the rules and find out more information on the contest at:
The data set (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) open data format developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!
The data reflects ten years of Irish online life, collected between 1998 and 2008 from boards.ie. boards.ie is one of Ireland’s busiest websites, with over a million unique visitors a month. The most popular discussion areas are ‘after hours’, soccer, motors, poker, and computers. Popular topic threads include one about a virtual pub (over 4000 pages), member discussions (2800 pages), poker stories (1800 pages), Liverpool rumours (1250 pages), recruitment in the Gardaí (800 pages long), and a freebie list (250 pages).
To enter the competition, go to data.sioc-project.org to access the data sets and view the guidelines. There will be three prizes for the top entries, as judged by an independent panel of three experts. The contest is open to anyone except current / former researchers with DERI and employees of boards.ie Ltd. One person may make multiple entry submissions. The closing date is the 30th September 2008.
The purpose of this contest is to generate interesting applications or creations that make use of community data represented in the SIOC Semantic Web format. All rights to these creations will remain with the contest participants (not including the underlying data, whose copyright remains with the creators). Neither DERI nor boards.ie Ltd. will acquire any commercial rights to these applications or creations as submitted through this contest. Up until now, this data has been publicly viewable, but it was difficult to leverage it without any added semantics due to the fact that it was embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages.
[DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established at NUI Galway in 2003 with funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). After five years of operation, DERI has become an internationally-recognised institute in Semantic Web research, education and technology transfer.]
As you may know, I’m a bit of a gadget freak. I haven’t gotten around to blogging about my Nokia 770 internet tablet (which I got cheap last year and happily use to check e-mail and listen to internet radio via radioten.com) or my little wifi-enabled Nikon S51c digital camera, but last week I acquired two new friends in my office, a Nabaztag and a Chumby.
The Nabaztag is a wifi enabled “rabbit”, that can read out text and RSS feeds, plays music, displays lights to represent different conditions (e.g. weather, new mail), and it has an RFID reader in its ears which can enable the detection of different objects (e.g. it could read an RFID-enabled book to you if you wave it by the ears of the rabbit). While some aren’t happy, I think it’s a cool device with many applications for those who may not want or need a video interface. My Nabaztag is called Babbitty.
The Chumby has been touted as an Internet alarm clock, but it’s much more than that. It has a touch screen which displays and allows you to interact with a set of multimedia widgets which can be grouped into channels. For example, my default channel shows my Flickr photos, tweets from my Twitter contacts, an NHK-style clock, and news from the BBC and the Onion. There’s even a talking Tim O’Reilly widget in there somewhere! I got it from international-orders.com, and named it after me (Cloud)!
You can see them both above. I haven’t gotten them to talk to each other yet, but many things are now possible…
We had a presentation at DERI today from David Price, one of the people behind the argumentation visualisation site Debategraph. Since modelling and visualising argumentative discussions is something that we have wanted to do in DERI with SIOC for some time, this talk was very interesting to us.
The goal of Debategraph is “to make the best arguments on all sides of any debate freely available to all and continuously open to challenge and improvement by all”. It’s a really nicely designed tool considering it is the work of just two people over the past few years, and was tested by Downing Street on their website last year following a speech by Tony Blair. The maps can be embedded into blogs posts, which is a useful feature. David pointed to some related work from Walton on argumentative schemes and also from Stanford’s Robert Horn.
I’ve had this Bert and Ernie t-shirt for 12 years, but it was lost in a press for a while and it’s starting to get very worn. So, since I haven’t been able to find anywhere online that sells them, I scanned in the picture. Now I can make some backups (and remixes)!
You can see the results above. The first image is the original scan; the second is a vectorised version (via CorelTRACE and some hand editing / filling in CorelDRAW); the third and fourth are just with some background and illumination effects in Paint Shop Pro. I lost some of the original shadows and finer details but can probably add those later…
I read two articles today that explained the need to better illustrate the interesting and exciting aspects of science and engineering subjects to the public (and to also attract future students).
The first is from Engineers Ireland where Dr. Jim Browne, president of the Irish professional body for engineers (and also president of NUI Galway), said: “We focus more on the downside of the Internet rather than appreciating the work of the software and telecommunications engineers whose creativity gave us the world wide web and which has such a positive impact on the lives of so many people. It is amazing to me that young children are so quick to adopt the new technologies and to grasp the opportunities they create and never seem to ask: where did this come from? How does it work?” You can read more here.
Secondly, there was an article in the Irish Times “American Business 2008″ supplement today entitled “Science and technology need to foster interest and enthusiasm in schools”. It doesn’t seem to be on the new free irishtimes.com website, hence the scan below. Dr. Peter Hetherington of the American Chamber of Commerce said: “The perception at times is that you spend your life at a bench or an IT terminal, but if you look at the diversity of careers that are there, it’s quite phenomenal. People are following the so-called money at the moment, and going into careers like commerce or law, but all those services are essentially fed by science and engineering - because if they weren’t there, there would be no manufacturing, no new ideas, no companies.” Read more below.
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