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The first few entries in the Netflix prize are up. The Netflix prize is 1 millions $ given to the first person to be able to improve by 10% the Netflix recommender system according to RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) metric. People asked me if I would participate. Well, no I will not be involved as a…
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DOLAP 2006 Preliminary Technical Program
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If you are using a computer or a cell phone right now, please continue
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Java´s Momentum Is Running Low
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The DOLAP 2006 preliminary technical program is out. Rokia Missaoui and Omar Boussaid have a paper in called “Enhanced Mining of Association Rules from Data Cubes”. There is one paper on wavelets and range sum queries. At this point, we do not even have the abstracts so I will wait before…
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I agree with Stephen, if you are into e-Learning, and you listen to one talk this year, listen to this one. He begins his talk with “if you are using a computer or a cell phone right now, please continue.” As he says these words, you initially assume he is about to ask you to turn off your…
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Larray Seltzer points out that Java lost to Flash and AJAX: Mostly, in the end, it appears that Java on the client lost out to Flash of all things! (…) It couldn’t even be competitive in the most inessential of tasks. Let this be a lesson to all of us. You can have the nicest framework in…
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Fred responded to my recent anti-Semantic Web post by saying that the “Semantic Web landscape is changing.” I really like Fred’s post. Here is where he agrees with me: The proof that both RDF and web ontologies are useful is yet to be done. Here is where we disagree: Everything is…
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Kamel was reviewing some code I wrote and through a question he asked, I realized that some code I wrote would not compile under Visual C++. Further investigations showed that the following is valid under GCC, but not under Visual C++: #include using std::cout; using std::endl; int main(int argv,…
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In the last two weeks, I have been offered various opportunities as an expert on ontologies or inference engines. Short of being one of the organizers for the last two Canadian Semantic Web conferences, I am not an expert on ontologies or inference engines. Please stop. There are plenty of very…
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New security measures making airports unsafe?
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Downes came up with a new target for terrorists. Forget the airplanes: blow up the airport! You have the equivalent of a dozen 747 flights crammed in a tiny room there, and there is utterly nothing stopping a terrorist from walking in there and taking out the whole building.
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VLDB 2007 (14 March 2007 / 25-28 September 2007)
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When recommendations go bad: Walmart
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VLDB 2007 will be held in Vienna. VLDB 2007 is a premier international forum for database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. We invite submissions reporting original results on all aspects of data management as well as proposals for panels, tutorials, and…
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Through Bruce Spencer, I learned about the Walmart recommendation engine fiasco: people searching for Planet of the Apes were directed to movies about Martin Luther King Jr. Note that Walmart does not seem to use a collaborative filtering engine, but rather uses manually entered association rules,…
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Web is leading a backlash against traditional authority figures
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According to Gerry McGovern, the Web strips away authority from the establishment. In fact, the Web is leading a backlash against traditional authority figures. (Via Downes.) Is this true? Can it be true? Notice that it says traditional authority figures and not bluntly authority figures. What is a…
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YoungFemaleScientist: Men publish in better journals than women
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YoungFemaleScientist is reporting that men tend to publish in better journals than women. She goes on to explain this fact: We all know why that might be: Nepotism in publishing. It’s an old boys network, therefore the boys are more likely to know each other. Uh, women read more than men. Come…