ICEIS

If you are looking for a list of the related blogging done during ICEIS 2008 just follow this link. During Sunday morning I run into Angel A. Juan, an assistant professor at Open University of Catalonia (UOC), interested on analyzing online teaching efforts and how tools to assist professors monitoring students performance on online media. I visited him yesterday at his office and we got and interesting exchange of ideas. Most of them revolved around the work we have conducted under the DISCUS project, and how similar is our efforts on marketing focus groups and their online teaching environment. His group, Distributed, Parallel and Collaborative Systems, was also interested on the work done under the SEASR project, mostly focusing on the Meadre infrastructure for data-intensive flow computing we are getting close to release. ...

This is the final sprint for ICEIS. I have been mostly focusing on posters this morning. It his hard to pick one up. I would just say that there was some interesting work on personalized recommender systems—paper 219. But as I said, there were a bunch of interesting ones and quite a few interesting by-the-poster conversations. Actually, I am having a very interesting time after the mix of attendees’ profiles. The morning finally meandered into Ricardo Baeza-Yates’s keynote talk. After the initial technical problems—presentation mode of OpenOffice running on Ubuntu 8.0.4 got up just 75% of the slide area—they finally succeeded on getting something up and get the talk started. This was a pretty technical talk about Yahoo! research effort on caching to improve the performance and also help scalability and contain cost on the coming years. Besides several cache techniques, he also presented a bunch of possible paralyzation models based on document/term partitions. A thing he breezed over was the machine learning model for classifying queries. That surfaced several places, from predicting common and rare content, to frequent, unfrequent, and rare queries. I was glad that the technical problems were solve and we could enjoy it. And the conference is finally close. Next year, Milan. ...

The morning started with Jean-Marie Favre and his invited speech about “Software languages through the ages”. Quite an eclectic presentation that was quite a bit thought provoking. Some excerpts out of his amalgam of concepts: Human kind is defined by language Civilization is defined by writing Languages expand across a vast period of history, computer science for just a few millimeters in such history line You may agree or dispute his claims, but you cannot dispute that it was a thought provoking talk. His bottom line, the next research frontier software language engineering and software linguistics. You can find more information at planet-sl.org. Then I run to attend the presentation of paper 263 and 344. I would mention Texas Tech’s SORCER effort and their effort on service-oriented infrastructure to approach programming large-scale networked systems—their approach also take from the get go issues like availability and fault tolerance. Unfortunately I could not finish the presentation because I had to run because it was my turn. The afternoon started with papers 331, 346, and 723. The last one was presenting IBM’s work on modeling life cycles, and their effort of making it a generic model. The last round of papers 87, 614, and 655 where rather eclectics, RDF, RFID tags, and Wikipedia. Quite an interesting combinations. Also the afternoon was crowded with interesting hallway conversations, despite the gray day outside :) ...

This afternoon has been quite slow. My path 340, 348, 495, 612, 193, and 467. The key slower of the afternoon has been the fact that for each of the session there has always been a missing presenter. May be because it is a Saturday afternoon in Barcelona, but then I check the rest of the parallel tracks and it seams quite endemic it. Anyway, I run into an interesting talk about how to map workflows onto multicore architectures—paper 340. It was just a talk that lead straight to scheduling problems of direct acyclic graphs. I ask about the cyclic cases and their approach was to break the cycle and use the acyclic schedule. Mmh. I also found myself how they plain to make those schedulers a reality without messing with the underlying OS one. Another paper that cough my attention was paper 193, where they were focusing to fraud risk reduction. The interesting twists there were that (1) it is, by nature, an unsupervised problem, and (2) they were trying to do both detection and prevention. Unfortunately the only evolutionary computation related paper— paper 306-–had no presenter… A total different story has been Moira Norrie keynote speech. She has presented their research efforts on paper & the digital world. A very interesting presentation covering from basic technologies—Anoto-–and latest digital paper products—Livescribe-–to their research on interactive paper. The basic idea, paper that allows you to interact with the content—for instance multimedia one. Their research involves from clicking on paper, to gestures, to the infrastructure (iServer) their cross-media information server, and their plugins—such as iPaper. Active components (no, not the Microsoft ones) are the bridges they build to control media from a paper and digital pen. Of course, they can also record annotations, whiteboards, audio, or also support collaboration via multiple pens usage. Other interesting usages of the digital paper was information search and proofreading to mention a few. You can find more information on Moira’s home page. ...

My morning jam involved papers 102, 363, 395, 450 709, 234, 392 and 499-–that included a poster session too. There were some puzzling questions running around my head. Just one example out of paper 450; there are always many terminologies meaning the same and rewrite or revolve around the same problem: where is the difference between multicriteria optimization instead of multiobjective optimization. As I said, puzzling. I also ran into a poster during the jam by Intel folks (paper 234) worth to mention. It was not proposing new technology but building on the creation of distributed data centers via virtualization technologies. They coined the term SVG’s to describe virtualization + data isolation + services providing. More on the level of exercise to show how people can move to virtual data centers hosted in the cloud, than on proposing new technology—they said they run VMWare for all the virtualization. The question still buzzes in my head unanswered: How is this new or different from Amazon’s EC2? The answer was that they focusses on the infrastructure not on hosting—which puzzled me more after claiming they rely on VMWare-–I guess that I will need to dig deeper to get a better picture of their work. Just getting close to the lunch break, paper 195 presented some work on an engineering approach to determine the emotional signature on clothing website. Built around the Kansei method, the paper resonate in my head very close to the Gladwell’s Blink book. ...