A hidden treasure found in the Urbana Free Library. University of Illinois vs a Mummy is a movie made by students at UofI. If you have never been in UofI you will find this movie pretty hilarious.

I found a couple of interesting tutorials. One is on principal component analysis by Lindsay I. Smith and the second one is about independent component analysis by Hyvärinen and Oja. Good introductions if that is what you are looking for.

Last Friday with ALG and DITA people we put a brief presentation for NCSA’s cyberarch group on our common efforts to create a generic framework for querying and visualizing content stored in metadata stores. Mulgara, SOAP, XLSTs, and custom Java code to render content using Prefuse and JFreeChart. You can download the slides here.

The group was created a while ago to unify the research efforts conducted inside the Automated Learning Group. Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil, and I were sitting in Michael’s office a Monday morning scratching our heads. He generated the initial population, Loretta recombined the ideas, and I just selected what I liked. So, we become Data-Intensive Technologies and Applications :D.

This lecture covered some of the work presented in “Mining Social Network in Message Boards” (the paper PDF may be found here (1Mb)) published in the Sympposium on Conversational Informatics for Supporting Social Intelligence and Interaction (AISB’05, 12-15 April, Hatfield, UK, 2005). The lecture covered how to identify relevant topic and player in an ongoing discussion. You can download the PDF here (2Mb)—or see below.