Yes, today was the deadline for the Ninth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature. Submit your paper here. The deadline has been extended till April, 5th.

The DISCUS project has always supported that intuition that annotation capabilities are a must for knowledge and information exchange. For instance, imaging that you are analyzing the KeyGraph generated from a particular discussion (here you can find an example). You may want to enrich such graph with your analysis, comments, or related information. Basically, you want to add metadata to the KeyGraph. If such a capability is available, a whole new bunch of information will need to be efficiently stored to allow, not only fast and easy retrieval, but allow analysis of the added metadata. The Kowari project is an Open Source, massively scalable, transaction-safe, purpose-built database for the storage, retrieval and analysis of metadata. It provides a simple query language to interact with the metastore (iTQL). If you are familiar with SQL the resemblance will help you get up to speed very fast. The design is oriented to efficiently manage large volume metadata. Informal tests from Joe Frutelle, a NCSA colleague, have convinced me that this metastore can be the way to go for storing the large volumes of metadata that annotation may produce in DISCUS. ...

by Xavier Llorà and David E. Goldberg, Yukio Ohsawa, Naohiro Matsumura, Yuichi Washida, Hiroshi Tamura, Masataka Yoshikawa, Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil, Duane Searshmith, Kei Ohnishi, and Chen-Ju Chao (2006). New Mathematics and Natural Computation, World Scientific, pp. 2(1):85–100. Link to the Journal publication. Abstract Creativity protocols and methodologies tend to be time consuming if applied manually. This paper presents how information technologies can support innovation and creativity for collaborative scenario creation and discussion. The fusion of change discovery, genetics algorithms, and computer-supported collaborative tools provide computational models of innovation and creativity. The proposed technology allows groups of participants in a creative processes to have pervasive access to the analysis of the current scenario in real time. This paper introduces such innovation technologies gathered in the DISCUS project, and summarizes initial successful usages of DISCUS on marketing research workshops. ...

Eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds was the fencing time of the semifinal between Peter Habala and David Lidow. By far, this bout was the best fencing at the Illinois Open. I ever seen in my two and half years of foil fencer. Everybody knew that this was the anticipated final. To impressive details: David’s point accuracy was from another world, Peter fleshing could cover in less than half a second around four lethal meters flying in the air. We were all speech less. The 64 tableau for the DE was totally skew since one fencer of my pool did not show up. This lead up to all A fencers to the same quarter. So after I was eliminate by Carla Esteva (A2002), she run into Peter Habala (A2006), and then Peter run into David Lidow (A2006). The other three quarters were not so nasty. Anyway, it was a memorable Illinois Open and I forgot my camera home. Oh, one last thing, the results can be found here. ...

by Xavier Llorà and David E. Goldberg (2006). IlliGAL TR No 2006011. Link to the PDF. Abstract The pervasive expansion of computers and Internet has change the way people collaborate. Terms such as cybercollaboratories are getting traction in day-to-day work. Web boards, blogs, e-mails, and instant messaging have become de facto mainstream communication channels. People scattered across the globe collaborate thanks to such technologies to carry out their daily work. Creative processes—such as collaborative engineering—have also taken advantage of such new communication media. This paper reviews the new framework set after these technologies and presents how collaborative creativity and innovation can be modeled and supported using computational models. The paper continues presenting a innovation-support model based on the usage of genetic algorithms as computational metaphors of human innovation. The paper also briefly discuses the results achieved using the proposed technologies in real-world collaborative creative processes. ...