Netflix $50,000 prize awarded to AT&T
, 1 min read
Netflix $50,000 prize awarded to AT&T
The important problems: first update
, 1 min read
The important problems: first update
Netflix $50,000 prize awarded to AT&T
, 1 min read
Somehow I missed this news bite by a few days. It seems AT&T is the the winner of the $50,000 Progress Prize in the Netflix Prize Collaborative Filtering competition! You can download a paper that lays out their strategy. (Source: Turney)
The important problems: first update
, 1 min read
I recently asked what were the most important problems in 2007. I was fortunate enough to get two answers. Peter Turney gave the most elaborate answer. He said Artificial Intelligence and getting computers to think in terms of analogies, is the most important problem. He backs up his claim with a…
Why science will triumph only when we teach it properly
, 1 min read
Wired has an article on Why Science Will Triumph Only When Theory Becomes Law. The gist of the article is that religious extremists leverage the fact that scientists are cautious about their statements to convince the public that the scientists only have a vague idea of the truth. Hence, say the…
How to recognize important problems
, 2 min read
Hamming, the famous scientist, once suggested that researchers should focus on the most important problems in their field (in You and your research). I believe this suggestion may apply to anyone and not just researchers. It sure sounds like good advice, but putting it in practice is difficult.…
How to make sure your paper will be rejected
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Paper quality follows a Pareto/Zipfian distribution, also called a power law. It is a fancy way of saying that most papers are just not very good. In fact, most papers are so bad that you can determine in less than five minutes that they are not good. Here are a few telling tales: The paper has…
IBM is buying Cognos
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IBM buying Cognos? (See press release.) I did not see this one coming. A few weeks ago, I heard rumors of a pan-canadian research initiative supported by Cognos. It did seem to me that Cognos was here to stay, for a very long time. Being bought by IBM, which has a lot of database technology, will…
Skype 2.0 beta for Linux: video at last
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Skype 2.0 beta for Linux: video at last
Skype 2.0 beta for Linux: video at last
, 1 min read
Skype 2.0 beta for Linux with support for video. Go grab a copy!
Non-commercial licenses and university courseware
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Non-commercial licenses and university courseware
Non-commercial licenses and university courseware
, 2 min read
Lately I have been toying with the marginal use of content licensed for non-commercial purposes in my courses. Such content includes flickr images, YouTube videos, and so on. The Open University interprets non-commercial to include the use of content as part of a course for which you charge an…
Non-industrial workplaces
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Harold has an interesting post on democratic workspaces. Actually, I do not think that democracy captures the issue. I think he means non-industrial workspaces. Here is a juicy quote: many of us have learned how to send e-mails on a Sunday night but few of us have learned how to go to a movie on…
Why forbid derivative work?
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The Creative Commons licenses can forbid derivative work and Perl is published under the artistic license which also forbids derivative work. Just to be clear, derivative work include revisions, annotations, and elaborations. In other words, if you publish an article on your web site and forbid…
Your platform is your software
, 1 min read
Your platform is your software
Hidden Gems : seeking diamonds in your data (November 7th 2007)
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On November 7th 2007, Hazel Webb will give a lunch talk at 100 Sherbrooke West room SU-2720 (LORIT) from 12:30 to 13:30 on seeking diamonds in your data. The talk will be webcasted at http://mediasrv.lorit.ca/presentation (Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer under Windows required). During…
Your platform is your software
, 2 min read
Seb Paquet sent me a link to Delusions of Facebook – Should you be a Facebook Startup? I am immediately reminded of McLuhan. The medium is the message. When Microsoft Windows came along, many people only noticed the obvious. Windows made it easy to build a good-looking application. Microsoft…
Cool new native HTML widgets
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I name this the coolest hack of the week. Glen decided to apply the tag-cloud idea to other HTML widgets. See this example and recall that I am only using straight HTML/CSS (no ECMAScript, no flash): Aggregators Blogs Collaboration Joy of Use Podcasting RSS Web 2.0 XHTML Update: according to…
Publish or perish? Let them perish!
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There has been much ink spilled on the evils of public or perish, that is, the way professors and would-be professors are mostly gauged by what they wrote and especially, how much they wrote. Most recently, David Lorge Parnas, one of the most prolific authors in Computer Science (I found 242 papers…
Play the strongest checkers program in the world
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I just attended a talk by Jonathan Schaeffer the guy behind Chinook, the best checkers computer player in the world. You can play a watered down version of Chinook on the Web. The way they built this, is to enumerate all games with 10 pieces or less. Hence, if there are fewer than 10 pieces,…