Yearly Archives: 2004

L’esperimento Caravita: Italian Blogger candidate for European Parliament

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Beppe Caravita, an Italian blogger and open source supporter is running with the Italian Green Party for a place in the European Parliament. He posted his program on his blog. Since he is in my blogroll, in a sense I already voted for him, so I guess I’ll follow and support his campaign. For now I added his blog on the Emergent Democracy in Europe Wiki page.
But I really think he needs a wiki where to let us collaboratively write his program.

Genocide, Sudan and the blogosphere

Ethan’s attempt of using Blogs to Hack the Media is about increasing attention to news from the developing world:
“Blogs let us tell offline media what we want. When blog readers made it clear we wanted to know more about Trent Lott’s racist comments, mainstream media picked up the ball and dug deeper into the story. What would happen if we started sending an unambiguous message that we wanted to hear lots more about Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America? What sort of effort would it take to choose an important issue – say the Sudanese government’s involvement in Darfur – and get enough momentum in the blogosphere that CNN was forced to bring a camera crew to the region?”

In Sudan, just as you are reading this, a genocide could be happening.
In the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide,
the op-ed columnist Kristof asks on NY Times Will We Say ‘Never Again’ Yet Again?
“Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000 people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan’s Army is even bombing the survivors.
And the world yawns.
(…) The convention against genocide not only authorizes but also obligates the nations ratifying it to stand up to genocide.”

So in this case the goal is clear: Use your blog to tell mainstream media that you want news coverage of this possible genocide.

Boycott the Daily Me!

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From Boycott the Daily Me! by Sunstein:
“For democracy to work, people must be exposed to ideas they would not have chosen in advance. Democracy depends on unanticipated encounters. It is also important for diverse citizens to have common experiences, which provide a kind of social glue and help them to see they are engaged in a common endeavor. A world where people only read news they preselect creates a risk of social fragmentation.”
This is my greatest fear about Trust-aware Recommender Systems (or in general systems that personalize user experience): that people will be exposed only to what they already approuve and like.
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New personalized services

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Erik comments on personalized services presented in these last couple weeks:
– a9.com: (by Amazon) a personalized experience, though not quite personalized search).
– Newsbot (also in Italian): (by Micro$oft) personalized news (with or without login).
– Findory: personalized news (with or without login), but not new.
– Google Personalized (weak attempt).
Interesting competition.

Google Bug?

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google_bug_snapshot.pngI was searching in google for “Beth, T., Borcherding, M., Klein, B.: Valuation of trust in open networks.” and I got this result page: the link of the homepage (in green) is displayed not correctly.

It is so strange to receive something not perfect from google. Could it be a bug? Or maybe it is a feature? I tried some other queries and it seems that “B B.” is treated as some sort of bolding directive or so.

Try it yourself

Jung (Java Universal Network/Graph Framework)

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For my studies on trust metrics, I need to code trust metrics. I was looking for a Java package for modeling, analysis, and visualization of graphs (possibly weighted and directed). I tried many of them (see below) but I found a wonderful one!
Java Universal Network/Graph Framework hosted on SourceForge so open source under a BSD licence (javadoc).
JUNG — the Java Universal Network/Graph Framework–is a software library that provides a common and extendible language for the modeling, analysis, and visualization of data that can be represented as a graph or network. It is written in Java, which allows JUNG-based applications to make use of the extensive built-in capabilities of the Java API, as well as those of other existing third-party Java libraries.
The current distribution of JUNG includes implementations of a number of algorithms from graph theory, data mining, and social network analysis, such as routines for clustering, decomposition, optimization, random graph generation, statistical analysis, and calculation of network distances (Dijkstra Shortest Path), flows, and importance measures (centrality, PageRank, HITS, Random Walk, etc.).
JUNG also provides a visualization framework that makes it easy to construct tools for the interactive exploration of network data. Users can use one of the layout algorithms provided, or use the framework to create their own custom layouts. In addition, filtering mechanisms are provided which allow users to focus their attention, or their algorithms, on specific portions of the graph.

If you don’t trust me, you can try the Ranking Demo or the other demos.

It is of course an evolving project, I already wrote some code to draw arrows and to label edges with weights and I’m trying to integrate it. I plan to code some of these trust metrics. JUNG is maintained by some great PhD students.
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Cai Ziegler

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During the past week I was in Oxford for the 2nd Trust Management Conference. The presentation (pdf) (sxi) of my paper went well.
Most of the participants were concerned with privacy and the problem of setting up a secure environment for virtual organizations (business basically). I am not too much interested in this topic that is basically agreeing with Microsoft, IBM and HP (that were present with some representatives) about standards for the trust management processes, often reduced to simple access control lists.

Instead I was very happy to meet Cai Ziegler. Cai is working on topics very similar to my interests. But it is doing more (his scope on semantic web recommender systems is broader, since he also takes into account taxonomies), better (its English is simply wonderful) and faster (he is still in his first year of PhD). Can I at least say I’m humble? ;-)
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Google Personalized

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google_personalized.pngGoogle Personalized.
Google Personalized web search delivers custom search results that are based on a profile you create describing your interests.
The slidebar (with which you can ask for more or less personalitazion) is cool.

But I still prefer the idea behind Eurekster: “Eurekster shows you What’s Hot with your friends“.
It would be great to be able to tell Eurekster “here is my FOAF file where my friends are already expressed” and then receive search results.
(via Mark Carey)