Yearly Archives: 2005

Presentation on “Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments”

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I was invited by Stefano Mizzaro to give a lecture in his course in “Web Information Retrieval”. I spoke about “Trust in Recommender Systems: an historical overview and recent developments”. It was a lot of fun (at least for me). And I thought I could share the slides with you. They are in OpenOffice .sxi format (it is an open format, so if you program does not read a commonly used open format, you probably better change it). They are released under a Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence. This means that if you want to use them you just have to give credit to me and re-share your slides under the same licence. If you don’t want to re-share your derivative work under the same Creative Commons licence, you are still free, free of not using them. Enjoy.

My suggestion to Google: getoutfoxed(‘s author)

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Google, do hire Stan before Yahoo! does it. Stan is the author of “Outfoxed – Personalize your internet.” I didn’t play with the code yet (seems a Linux version is not yet ready at the moment, but on the way). Yes, the code is open source (Mozilla Public Licence), sweet! Anyway, the detailed description is fantastic! It is a bit like what I want to do for my PhD thesis. The difference? Stan did it! Check the site: it has a lot of interesting pages such as The Outfoxed Idea (A collection of thoughts on the theoretical aspects of Outfoxed, and the whole idea of using social networks for metadata distribution). Or at least the page A Third Phase of Internet Search in which Stan pictiorally shows the 3 phases: Naive trust –> PageRank and inferred quality –> Social networks to determine subjective quality
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GreaseMonkey on Trenitalia.com

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Trenitalia.com (Italy’s public railways) has some links that works only on IExploder. Few weeks ago you could do nothing but sending tons of email asking Trenitalia.com to support standard (you can also sign a petition for Making Internet Explorer Standards Compliant and hope).
BUT NOW you can GreaseMonkey it! [you need the great Firefox browser] Install the Trenitalia Link Fixer script that fixes wrong links in Trenitalia website.
(via blackbirdblog)

GreaseMonkey is the real Semantic Web (and now works on HospitalityClub)

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GreaseMonkey is an extension for Firefox that allows you to totally (and easily) change the layout of any received web page. Don’t like the color of the banner of that_site.com? You can change it! Do you prefer to have the login link on the_other_site.org on the right? You can place it wherever you want! While visiting the page of a certain book on Amazon.com, do you want to see the prices other sites ask for the same book (with this information embedded on “original” Amazon page)? You can do it (with BookBurro extension)! Want to hide forever every Google AdSense ad? You can do it! You find hundreds of scripts (for hundreds of different sites) over at GreaseMonkey UserScripts wiki or you can easily create yours (as I did, see the end of this post).
Oh yes, this will blow up your business model and “any kid with a bright idea and a knack for DHTML can create a new interface for your site, and it will probably be better than yours.”
And yes, this is much much more real (and useful) than all the Semantic Web you listen about at conferences (with tons of papers and tons of highly funded programs that, at least at the moment, produces almost nothing you can use and play with; if I’m wrong, use the comment to point out interesting stuff).
Anyway, I played a bit with GreaseMonkey. I recommend you diveintogreasemonkey by Mark Pilgrim and I suggest you to follow it step by step (this is faster than trying to jump to what you need because you will jump back to understand that what you skipped was important).
And eventually, I created 2 GreaseMonkey scripts for HospitalityClub, that I think can save me a lot of time in using the site. I used HospitalityClub for finding hospitality in Trieste when I was attending the School on Networks (thanks truesmile and inquis), I used it in order to find hospitality in Pittsburgh where I’ll be for the AAAI conference (thanks roder) and yesterday I wanted to use it for finding hospitality for my (short) holidays in Italy [not going to tell where]. The problem with HospitalityClub is that the interface is not too usable. My usual use case is the following: I search all the people offering hospitality in the place where I want to go, and I send to all of them the same request. This requires visiting the list of users, clicking on every username to go to her userpage and, on the userpage, click on “send message to this user” that leads to a new page, then copying my name in a field, my passport number in another field, the request text in a text area and push Submit. All these steps must be done for all the users!
So I created a GreaseMonkey extension that add a link near every username: the link allows to go directly to the “send message” page.
      [ script: hospitalityclub_addSendMsgLink.user.js ]
And I created another extension that prefill the values in the “send message” page with the default ones (my username, my passport number, the request message).
      [ script: hospitalityclub_defaultValuesInMsg.user.js ]
In this way you just have to push Submit. It would be possible to push Submit automatically with the extension but I wanted to keep some control … interestingly GreaseMonkey gives you so much power that then your small brain is no more able to manage it. I mean, for example, I have at least 4 extensions that modify google.com pages and I’m no more able to tell which extension inserts what in which cases… this is something I need to think a little bit more about.
Anyway the 2 extensions are released under GPL (software that gives you freedom) so you are free to play with them, free to study them and free to modify them. Enjoy!

Contribute to”The Politics of Open Source Adoption”

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The Politics of Open Source Adoption. It is very interesting and so present. It is on a wiki so you can edit it (and the 2 best new contributions will receive prizes of $250)
Some chapters: The European Politics of F/OSS Adoption, LiMux—Free Software for Munich, Source vs. Force: Open Source Meets Intergovernmental Politics, FOSSFA in Africa: Opening the Door to State ICT Development Agendas – A Kenya Case Study, NGO’s in the Developing Worlds, Legal Uncertainty in Free and Open Source Software and the Political Response, F/OSS Opportunities in the Health Care Sector.
This wiki is an invitation to collaborate on a real-time history and analysis of the politics of open source software adoption. The Social Science Research Council is pleased to offer a first version of this account—POSA 1.0. For our purposes, understanding the ‘politics of adoption’ means stepping back from the task of explaining or justifying Free and/or Open Source Software (F/OSS) in order to ask how increasingly canonical explanations and justifications are mobilized in different political contexts. POSA 1.0 tries to map the different kinds of political and institutional venues in which F/OSS adoption is at stake. It tries to understand important institutional actors within those venues, and the ways in which arguments for and against F/OSS are framed and advanced. It seeks to clarify the different opportunities and constraints facing F/OSS adoption in different sectors and parts of the world. It is an inevitably partial account that–we hope–can be extended and deepened by other participants in these processes. We would like your help in preparing POSA 2.0.
(via BoingBoing)
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AAAI-05 Technical Program Schedule

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I’ve just received the Program of the AAAI 2005 Conference (by email) and I post it below for your convenience. I’ll present a paper there “Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community” (pdf). If you are interested or you’ll be in Pittsburgh for the conference and want to discuss, please contact me at massa AT itc DOT it.
[ keywords for being indexed: , AAAI 05, AAAI2005 , AAAI 2005 ]
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Gladwell’s talk at SXSW2005

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I’m working on my thesis (trying to start actually) and listening in background at Malcolm Gladwell’s talk at SXSW Interactive 2005 (hosted at itconversations.com). I undestand 30% (also because I’m not paying attention) but I guess this is useful anyway for my English (get new words, listen to correct accent). People often laugh and this probably means that Gladwell’s talk is also funny (and profound).
He is speaking about “how we make decisions and, more importatly, about how we don’t realize how many biases are behind our daily decisions”. I got news of this podcast (mp3 of a talk) via a post on Corante that is very interesting, since it is a short description of what Malcom is speaking about. [UPDATE: a complete (?) description by Nancy White] In particular there is an interesting point. At a point in time, only 5% of musicians in orchestras were women (and there were many theories explaining the reasons). Then, Orchestra unions decided to force all auditions to be behind a screen to reduce favoritism.Guess what happened? The percentage of women musicians in orchestras raised quickly from 5% to 50%. Read the following and the entire article on corante and listen Malcolm Gladwell’s talk at SXSW Interactive 2005 (hosted at itconversations.com).
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Google boosts Open Source (and students can get $4500)

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The Summer of Code is Google’s program designed to introduce students to the world of Open Source Software Development.
This Summer, don’t let your programming skills lie fallow…Use them for the greater good of Open Source Software and computer science! Google will provide a $4500 award to each student who successfully completes an open source project by the end of the Summer. (payment details can be found in FAQ). By pairing applicants up with the proven wisdom and experience of established prominent open source organizations (listed below), we hope to make great software happen. If you can’t come up with a great idea to submit, a number of our organizations have made idea lists available.

I’m wondering what “OUR organizations” means … Did they already buy all of them? Yep, even If I was inteding to write a joke, the puzzling/scaring part is that this could actually be true …

Participating Organizations:
The Apache Software Foundation (ideas)
Asterisk
Blender (ideas)
Bricolage (ideas)
Codehaus (ideas)
Drupal (ideas)
Fedora Code
FreeBSD (ideas)
Gaim (ideas)
Gallery (ideas)
The Gnome Foundation (ideas)
Handhelds.org (ideas)
Horde (ideas)
Inkscape (ideas)
Internet2 (ideas)
Jabber
JXTA (ideas)
KDE
Project Looking Glass
LispNYC (ideas)
Live Journal
Mambo (ideas)
The Mono Project (ideas)
Monotone (ideas)
NetBSD (ideas)
NMap (ideas)
OhioLink
OpenOffice (ideas)
OSCAR (ideas)
The Perl Foundation (submission guidelines & ideas)
Portland State University (ideas)
The Python Software Foundation (ideas)
Samba (ideas)
Semedia (ideas)
The Subversion Project (ideas)
Ubuntu Linux (ideas)
The Wine Project (ideas)
WinLibre (ideas)
XWiki (ideas)
Google

Nokia 770 and the power of grassroot development (read GNU/Linux)

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Nokia presented Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and (behold!) it is powered by Linux. Is this a clever move? From my point of view, yes. I’m thinking to buy one, even if I dislike buying gadgets that are not totally useful to me and at the moment I can totally live without a tablet pc. The presentation by Nokia titled “Give and Take: Open Source play for a major telecom manufacturer” presents pros and cons, risks and potentials. I think Nokia was very clever, they are giving a tool to all the GNU/Linux hackers community. The community will play with it happily hacking and (as a by-product) will give back to Nokia (mostly for free) a bunch of incredibly clever applications and ideas that Nokia can embed on its Tablet PC and sell it even more. In fact Nokia is also trying to guide the process, since it has created maemo.org, a development platform to create applications for Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and other maemo compliant handheld devices in the future. Very clever! Will all the Tablet PCs move to GNU/Linux? I hope so but we will see.

Read the books people you dislike dislike

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I know the title is hard to parse. Let use some parenthesis: Read [the books [people [you dislike] dislike]].
That is, there are people you dislike, they dislike some books, you possibly will like these books.
Pietro Speroni reports that A right winged newspaper: Human Events online, asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th centuries. (here the list) and how “The list have it all, it�s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in”. The rationale behind is: if neocons believe these books are harmful and since I think neocons are harmful, I should read these books. While this is ok on real world, this reasoning does not work in Trust-aware Recommender Systems, topic in which I’m phding. In online communities (in which it is easy to create fake identities) this is subject to a simple attack and anyone could easily game the system. The idea: since I get recommended the items disliked by people I dislike, the user I dislike could pretend to “dislike” the item she wants I get recommended. Ex: a neocon identity could pretend to dislike the book “why bush is right” (hopefully this does not exist and it is just an example) and I get recommended it. For this reason, in algorithms I designed, I decided that the opinions of people you dislike should not influence your recommendations at all, they are simply discarded because otherwise they are able to influence your recommendations and hence game the system. Well, not sure, I’m good in explaining it (English is hard…). Maybe you want to check some papers of mine in which hopefully I was helped in writing in a clearer way. Since we are speaking of books, maybe you want to check the list of books I’ve read (actually it is not at all complete or updated, I was trying to keep it with allconsuming.net and to decentralized publish it also in semantic web formats (RSS | XML) but in fact I created it once and never updated … maybe in a short future there will be a tool that will allow me to keep a list of read books, with comments and to automatically publish it on my blog, in that case I’ll probably try again to keep it updated. Or such a tool is already there? If so, please let me know).
The list of books that neocons think are harmful is
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