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Category Archives: computer science

Aggregators for the New Age

05-Jun-06

I’ve never been completely satisfied with the ongoing state of feed readers. Too many of them take the “mail client” paradigm, in which the user interface is modeled after email readers, and makes the implicit assumption that you want to read every single item. This becomes a cognitive dilemma once one’s list of subscriptions becomes […]

On Rexa

30-Apr-06

Rexa, a new player in community bibliography management, was opened to the public a couple weeks ago. Here’s a blog post from the PI on this project (Andrew McCallum) who details the announcement, and a little more here, from Matthew Hurst’s Data Mining blog. A cursory use of the system shows it to be a […]

On The Success of LaTeX

31-Mar-06

I suspect that the success of LaTeX–and its ubiquity as a format for thesis-writing–is in part due to the fact that learning its arcane subtleties is a wonderful source of procrastination. What a glorious escape from having do to actual paper-writing!

Tagging, Searching, Linking

08-Mar-06

categorization vs ranked search. the old google-vs-yahoo! war of 1998-1999. it struck me the other day that these two paradigms aren’t as orthogonal as we make them out to be in our minds. full-text search is really just categorization where the categorical tags are the words in the text. it’s a very rough heuristic, but […]

Ning

04-Oct-05

Phew, Ning is meme-du-jour. It’s basically a web toolkit to create social software. It’s the first product I’ve seen to come out of Marc Andreesen’s stealth startup 24 Hour Laundry. (reference) My hunch might be wrong, but it seems to be web2.0 applied to raw application development. What I mean is this: the typical read-write-web […]

CALICO 2006 Call for Papers

21-Sep-05

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION CALICO 2006 ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM Online Learning: Come Ride the Wave Hosted by University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, Hawaii May 16-20, 2006 Preconference Workshops: Tuesday, May 16 – Wednesday, May 17 Courseware Showcase: Thursday, May 18 Presentation Sessions: Thursday, May 18 – Saturday, May 20 Use CALICO’s on-line proposal submission form at […]

Physical Metaphors for Problem Solving

20-Sep-05

Attended a thought-provoking seminar last week given by Robert St. Amant on Physical Metaphors for Problem Solving. seminar thoughts Metaphors shape the way we interface with machines. they can be useful (in exposing intuitive interfaces), but also can be wrong/halfmapped. For example, on computers, we use “windows” as metaphors–but while some of our uses of […]

Extracting Semantics from Folksonomy?

25-Aug-05

So, we have some really nice folksonomies out there now. And they’re really good for humans. But what can machines do with them? Can we use del.icio.us to further the sisyphan goals of the semantic web? More specifically, I was talking to HaoChuan tonight about how one might automatically use a folksonomy to populate an […]

latex

13-Jun-05

Urgh, LaTeX. Tools with clunky UIs, nonintuitive markup, unhelpful error messages on failed compiles, and a glass-cannon bibliography manager. Resourcelist: a latex primer mac-tex: latex resources for mac the one thing that made it worthwhile: automatic citeulike2bibtex export TexShop my latex tool of choice on the mac, for now Kile my linux-based latex tool-of-the-day (yes, […]

Mad Paper-Reading

11-Jun-05

Expanding our Eurospeech paper (which we found last week was accepted!) on modeling language learner spoken disfluencies into a full journal paper. Been re-acquainting myself with the masses of related work this weekend. A fun side effect is that I don’t feel so alone in my research any more. Here, where I sit, at the […]