The Webby Awards is an international award presented annually by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for excellence on the Internet with categories in websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile.
Alejandro Jaimes and I are organizing a workshop on Recommender-based Industrial Applications to be held in conjunction with the 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. We are just spreading the word for the Call for Papers, and would like to announce the page of the workshop. We are completing the Program Committee, and we will be updating the site as new information becomes available.
Last week I attended UMAP 2009 and participated in its Industry Panel organized by Alejandro Jaimes from Telefonica I+D. In the panel, we discussed what are main challenges the industry is facing on personalization. The topic is clearly very hot for both the industry and the academia, and I hope the panel was interesting for the audience. Panelists came from very different types of companies and areas and I am not sure if this was a good thing to have or not. We had Mauro Barbieri from Philips Research (The Netherlands), Susan Dumais from Microsoft Research (USA), Armen Aghasarian from Alcatel-Lucent (Paris, France) and myself from Strands Labs (Barcelona). We discussed important issues for personalization and recommendation such as privacy, modeling, standards, context, and cultural barriers and differences.
There was some controversy about privacy when personalizing on the Internet. I think there is almost no privacy issue on the Internet, I believe this is a topic that we have artificially created (I know I am controversial here!). We are all using credit cards that collect all kinds of sensitive and private data, and we do not really care. This is because of two factors: a) we get a valuable service back that is rewarding enough to us, and b) we trust credit card companies. I think the game is the same when talking about Internet services. I do not mind if Amazon has my reading taste because a) I can buy books online easily and conveniently, and b) I trust Amazon. I believe we (professionals working on the Internet) are not understanding that young people and new generations are actually using the Internet to expose themselves, they want to tell eveybody about everything. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter are all companies about letting people express and expose themselves to the crowd. Of course, they do not care about privacy, they just want to get their lives out there.
I also believe that is very important to understand that data and profiles users are creating on the Web belong to them. Users should have complete control over their data, they own them. Companies hosting these data should be considered just as data hosting and service providers.
My friend Patrick Hertzog just sent me this interesting post. This is about WorldMate launching an iPhone application for travellers. The application (also available in all other popular mobile platforms) will basically accompany and assist you during the whole journey experience: checking the travel plan, receiving flight alerts, lookup for flight status, get maps and directions, search for hotels, look for weather forecasts, and anything else you think may be useful to have at hand when travelling. The application is well designed and looks robust. This is cool because travel has been one of the most promising areas on the Internet, and especially on the mobile Internet.
Back in 1999, a group of crazy scientists and entrepreneurs (Prof. Boi Faltings, Dr. Pearl Pu, Dr. Christian Frei, Andreas Güenthard and myself) were creating very similar software for business travellers on mobile platforms. We founded Iconomic Systems and were developing a software to plan business trips intelligently and then offering travel support on the road with a PDA. I guess we were ahead of the market… this was 10 years ago. Anyway, we had tons of fun, we learnt a lot, and on top of that we made money! Here you have a taste of what we built a decade ago!
I’ve just read the post Academic Earth Is The Hulu For Education at Techcrunch and quickly check out the Academic Earth site. This is a magnific idea and the site is very well executed, simple and interesting in many ways. You can discover excellent presentations by renown academic professors about any topic. If I could just go back in time and return to the university again…
Xavier Amatriain from Telefonica I+D and I will be organizing the 4th ACM Recommender Systems 2009 in Barcelona. This is an international conference on research and applications of recommender technologies. The conference started with Recommenders 06 Summer School in Bilbao, Euskadi; and has been followed by the 1st ACM Conference in Minneapolis, USA; and the 2nd Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland. This year the conference will be held in New York, USA; and in 2010 we are very happy to organize it in Barcelona, Catalonia. I hope it will be at least as good and interesting as the previous events!
This is a presentation from David Armano who is VP of Experience Design at Critical Mass. I found these slides really meaningful and interesting. This is about realizing and learning how important is to think visually, or as the author claims how to inform, influence + inspire by thinking in pictures. I will also try to get these insights and apply them when transferring knowledge or ideas to other people, notably in presentations.
Traditional wisdom would suggest that Research and Innovation are concepts that are strongly interrelated. Research is about searching new ways to solve problems, and innovation is about figuring out new ways of achieving tasks. In Computer Science, both terms could be interpreted as the former being the predecessor of the latter. Research is more at the theoretical level, and innovation involves some real application development.
In my opinion, Microsoft and Apple have completely different approaches regarding research and innovation. Microsoft is very well known for its research excellence and has developed the most prestigious computer science research centers with top quality computer scientists researching on all kinds of interesting topics. Apple, on the other hand, is not really known as a strong company doing computer science research. Interestingly, in my opinion, Apple is clearly much more into innovation than Microsoft. Doesn’t it seem like a contradiction? Think for a moment about the most innovative products Microsoft has released in the last couple of decades -which is an eternity in computer science. In the last 5 years, Apple has changed the way we enjoy music with iPod+iTunes, the concept of mobile phones with its iPhone, and I think the way we use computers with very advanced UI concepts. They are also proposing very unique and advance hardware and software packs such as the Time Capsule, or the new iPhoto. Read the rest of this entry »
Today I’ve learned about the new features offered in the recently launched version of iLife’09 from Apple. I am astonished to see how Apple is always able to innovate in their consumer products. This time they are revolutionizing the way we organize and search pictures on desktop computers. The most traditional way of organizing the pictures in a computer is to group the pictures into folders that somehow make sense as albums. The user had to do this tedious work, and as expected very often the result is that many of us have very good intentions but very bad results and experiences with organizing (and thus searching in) our large collections of pictures. Apple did a great job in the earlier versions of iPhoto (part of iLife) by automatically grouping pictures by date resulting in folders called events. That was simple, but elegant and useful. But today, they are changing the world, again. iPhoto will recognize faces in your pictures, without any effort, with very insignificant manual intervention. Here you can find out a video that explains very well how this process works. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by torrens 
