multitouch vnc?

has anyone looked at thin 3G client + cloud computing?

basically ,multitouch VNC and a remote service...

would make the battery life really good and with most the android/t-mobile and iPhone/O2 contracts being unlimited data, one could just win big compared with those platforms...

dasher for cell phone or other consumer electronic config

has anyone looked at using dasher for input for configuration of applications ? It would be quite easy compared to using it for probabilistic text input..

time to leave facebook?

now they've made it as pointless as twitter!

TINA in Hong Kong

Later today, I'm presenting some work on the
Intelligent Networked Airport project
at a Cambridge Alumni event in Hong Kong at the
Polytechnic University

Aside from the slightly alarming jetlag, its a great place to visit! some more info of my home talks page

I also had a tour of CS in the PolyU and saw some excellent mobile/mesh demos, and a really cool biometric lab (with chinese medicine intergrated in biometric ID!), and a model car/ITS lab, plus of course Henry Chan's new lab for the airport work.

on the way back, i was pleased to be flying Air New Zealand who were not only cheap, but also very good - 30-40 films on a VOD system - including (what I watched)

twilight - kind of like Near Dark, but slightly better

4 xmases - reese withersoon vehicle - basically naff, but likeable - the bloke is very drop dead pan amusing

slumdog millionaire - i prefer the book, but the film doesn't pull many punches - very good

my best friend's girlfriend - great idea fairly well done (bloke messes up dates deliberately for money from ex-s who want their girlfriend back) _ typical hollywood bottleout ending ruins it.

happy-go-lucky - mike leigh movie in a good mood - simply awesome

body of lies - not as good as other recent sensible US movies in the middle east, but not bad at all.

enchanted - fabulous combination of animation and pretty camp live action in NY.

the day the earth caught fire - diabolical remake of classic story.

quantum of solace - bond - better than US government bond, but only just

grading and reviewing

so in academic life, the one thing I think almost everyone would agree is the most negative experience is grading papers - (or marking exams) - teaching is fun (lecturing, supervising) and research is fun (coming up with ideas, building stuff, writing papers, giving presentations) - even some admin (interviewing, teaching/research admin) is ok

but grading is really de-grading.

so why is it the, that so many academics also volunteer for reviewing (i.e. being on Technical Programme Committees, and on Journal Boards of Editors)??

I suppose the main difference is that at least some of the things one reviews for conferences and journals are new and interesting, whereas most of the things one sees for exam answers are at best correct answers to something we already knew.

But to be honest, the payoff is pretty small, and in exam marking, at least sometimes you get the pleasure of seeing someone do a neat slightly novel answer (or the amusingly awful answers of course)...whereas there's very little amusing about awful paper submissions to conferences... ... ...

this week in european comms research land...

today I am at Pablo's Lab in Barcelona
but then shortly after I'll head off for this unusual workshop in swizzerland, where I may travel under the name of dr necessitor, in the hope of meeting and reconciling Michael Hfuhruhurr and Helen
Uumellmahaye.

some pix of barcelona...are at
the usual place

I has ta say any city with an actual Diagon Alley (as Barcelona has) nearly makes me forgive Harry potter.

today's mad idea - virtualise cell phones so you can migrate all the expensive p2p comptutation onto the Cloud, and save battery life in the handset:)

ignoble prize alert - the impact on reviewers judgement of being cited in the work under review

so how much is our judgment affected (unfairly) by seeing a citation to our own work in a paper (or book or whatever) we are reviewing?

devising an experiemnt to test this is tricky - there are effects like
a) very bad people who accept a paper because they want to boost their citation count to prepare a bigger H factor
b) there's the simple (correct) effect of being more familiar with the previous and related work (which is why presumably one was picked as a reviewer

to conduct an experiment to test this effect we need to submit some papers with
i) blinded citations for PC members
ii) citations replaced with irrelevant citations
iii) citations with authors names changed
iv) citations replaced by equivalent works (e.g. level of indirection - cite instead a work (survey, similar paper) that cites the original citation)

it should be done:)

facebook minimal age captcha

so its well known that if you break someones legs, the time to heal in weeks is the same as the age of the person.

hence a very big robot controlled mallet connected to the keyboard and remote run by facebook through a browser plugin could deter underage facebook users...

one problem is that the sense of the test is wrong - i am working on that:)

not to muckrake or anything, but...

...today i see they are spreading signage
on the field in front of the vet school
opposite the WGB:)

i'd love to see a picture of a herz rental outlet a donkey and cart with the sign
(Carriage Return, Line Feed) :-)

A Game Called Stop & this years 1b project demos

This is played on a board which is 1 square wide and deep, but 361 squares high. Each player has pieces (koans) made of clear glass.

i thought of this when lookin at the robot ("magic") game board in
this years 2nd year group proejct demos in the lab

idea for a project -seamless integration of pause live program, and download (faster than play - c.f. flash plugin) - so you have a back-to-the-future as well as a beam me forward scotty, button on a PVR combined in one nice package, with a P2P (torrent) delivery and DTN where you need it

local error, global fault - internet infrastructre critique

so i was talkin to some folks from our national funding agenc about what is interesting net research to do - they were not aware of the set of failures in the internet over recent years caused by "small" errors of configuration leading to global problems -
e.g.
0. the root DNS zeroing the boot dbase so returning nxdomain for the planet for 6 hours

1. the youtube blackout caused by local BGP config in small asian ISP

2. google mistyping a config rule for listing search result sites as "risk of harm to your computer" and marking 100% of the world as bad

there are others - these represent the problems caused by NOT STAYING WITH THE PROGRAM - the internet is decentralised - organisations that want to own pieces of it horizontally cause problems (there are tools to avoid most of these problems, but they require a modicum of cooperation)...people forget these design philosophy rules (aka architecture) at their peril (and ours:)

social networks cause autism

bad science yet again correctly refutes the daft claims in the press, and those behind the stories that social nets cause anti-social behaviour- we have research in social anthropology on people going from school to university, and people retiring, that shows that social networks, just like computer games, increase peoples' social group size and activity in the real world.
This is not published or definitive work yet, but other early work this year also shows this (it ain't hard to do, but it takes time and involves ethics committees since you're seriously treading on peoples' privacy)

muggling along

yesterday, I was at St Andrews and had a very nice attendance at a 3 hour seminar I gave on Delay Tolerant and Opportunistic Networks with about 120 students and staff and some very useful questions.

In the pub with Saleem Bhatti and Tristan Henderson, we discussed the new mobile phone game I invented called "muggling" - you juggle 3 cell phones, each with a live in progress call to a different person, while time division multiplexing the 3 conversations

I think this would be quite a skill...

proceeding to a new type of conference....

in the last few years, several conference organisation cttes have experimented with
the idea of Shadow programme cttes - these serve to trai nup new researchers in the process, as well as potentially acting as an error checker for the main conference and providing the paper authors with copious amounts more feedback - sigcomm and conext have both done this a few times...

now here are two proposals for the next step.

1. Run complete shadow conferences as well - instead of just having 1 "main" "real" PC and the shadow PCs just being training ground, let the shadow pcs selerct their actual top n papers and (at the same time in the same place in parallel tracks) have a full set (2, 3 - as many as you like) of conferences - like parallel worlds if you like - clearly if the various PCs select overlapping sets of papers, then they merge for those presentations...

2. two many people invest far too much importance in CS conferences - nowadays grad students in the US think their academic career is over if they don't get their work in SIGCOMM or SOSP, and practically never submit work to Transactions on Networks or TOCS despite those being easier to get into and just as weighty.

The solution is to STOP PRINTING conference proceedings - just have presentations only



3. Even more radical proposal - have a final shadow PC that accepts "all the resr of submissions that weren't accepted by any other PCs, and allow all the authors to present their papers in the "shadow of shadows" parallel track...

pre-0wned

some things you don't normally thing of as pre-owned

1 preowned child
1 pre-owed food - in a coffin - fit for non vegetarian species
1 preowned idea
1 pre-owed joule
1 pre-owned bit - as new, can be set to 0 or 1, true or false, on or off.
some pre-owened order - a little increase in entropy, but still reasonably rare fnd.

google map+cal -> travel planner

imagine you had an app where you could click on a set of locations
and then a timeline editor (see below) an then say
get me from here to here in spacetime (with a bike, car, bus, train, plane, sapace elevator, tardis)....(could show constrains like Lorenz space/time/funnel visualiser)

google maps + ical + a web browser plugin/gui and a backend to talk to one of the expedia
type things and game over...

go build - easy:)



london.........paris....madrid......zurich
mar 1------->apr 2---> apr 4---->apr 7


<< < || > >>

gaussian elimination, revokation, and other CS activities this week

1. Gaussian Elimination

this week I was in Gottingen visiting Xiaoming Fu's group in informatics (for PhD exam and seminar) - I was most impressed with the telekom groups research in multicast (fast recovery), mesh nets, network coding, and security and congestion control - neat stuff. On the other hand, they used to be in the Gauss building but were eliminated from there:-)

While there I saw a BBC World News item on TV where they reported that Fermi Labs claimed they would beat CERN in finding the God Particle (delusion) and that this would explain why matter had mass. The main news reader said this with confidence and then turned to the reporter who was presenting the next item, world economic news. All she had to say is "this is beyond me/over my head" - not surprising then that the world economy is in such a mess if people claiming to be experts don't understand the first thing in simple science. As I've said before, it is insufficient to say "letting allthe banks go broke is unacceptable because it would lead to chaos" - what do we have now if it is not chaos ( is a term in process algebras of course, but few economists would understand those)

2. (Think about the Lavender Hill Mob) Eiffel

Then today I was in an Eiffel meeting talkin about various future internet mad ideas - here's two of mine

1/ run SETI@home on Twitter - see if a) there's any intelligence out there and b) if its not all human

2/ google is not really a program written by humans - its actually a programme written by an AI called Altavista - the worldwide receession was casued by google giving wrong data to share dealers about the future stability of companies products and services and causing them to trade incrrectly - the AI decided that the world war III was necessary to stimulate lots of work on faster AIs and eliminating humans at the same time would be a neat side effect (apologies to samuel delaney - this is a Free Plotware(TM) suggestion). Of course, if this allegation was true, then google would never lead you to sites that when you followed a link said "404" = it would be necessary for it to create the site it understood you to want:)

3. Face-off book:)

facebook think they own and and keep your data, even if you leave and die

well, here's my solution - I already put incorrect facts on my online social net pages to reduce the risk of identity theft - if I close my account (as I have done on some) in UK (and I think EU and US) law I can ask them to correct these facts - I can prove _some_ of the data they have is wrogn (e.g. my birth date, middle name etc) and I can prove it to a third party - but I can also refuse to tell them the right fact. Thus their only recourse to get wrogn data off their system, is to delete the false data.

Game over.

reinventing

routing seems quite useful

meanwhile, recent (UK) showings of CSI have revisited their S&M theme - perhaps this could be "re-inventing the wheal" ?:)

to add insult to injury, Nintendo are going to release a Highland Dancing game -
Wii inventing the Reel?

and one could accuse the long now foundation
of re-inventing the while...

thomas hardy spent many novels re-inventing the weald

thats enuff now..

From fleedom to fleadom - 800 years of Cambridge...

ross anderson's
unauthorised history of why Cambridge University has an impact is worth a read - from fleeing religous persecution in oxford, and going on to annoy the government, the story is quite a shaggy dog....

digital lives and the wild...

Today I was at the 3rd (last) day of the
Digital Lives conference at the BL in London, and jolly interesting it was too.....

1. very nice talk on Mass Oversation Archive from Sussez - fascinating history on very long running society as observers, and how things changed between 1930s technology and social acceptance/use, and today's near-blogging based approach...

2. Wendy Hall could emember meeting David Beckham n 9/11 but couldn't quite recall the name of the Pleasantville like Jim Carrey vehicle, the Truman Show (neither could I without cyber help) in a relevant talk about M4L

3.Excellent talk from the Centere for Longitudinal Research (no, not Harrington clocks)
and how to keep a project going for > 50 years!

4. Interesting view on the future of scientific publishing from Nature! (see earlier blog entry from yesterday!)

5. Big Ad from Amazon about Cloud computing

6. Really cool talk from Soton/dh.ie about fan-generated content - thesis has cool social graphs of the fan/author and interest groups- (thesis from southampton, author now with staff at royal irish academy)

7. me

8. nice talk on vera (virtual field archaeology) - well worth a looksee for people worried about robust kit for adversarial environments for inputting analog data but capturing it in usable digital form...

9 peter bentley standard "here is evolutionary computing and what it is good for" talk

10. fantastic talk about artistic capture (manaual, not computer based) of the writing of Jack Kerouac, with then computer visualisation of structures generated - very crazy in a good way!

then I had to go:)