I’ll be at the Web Intelligence 2005 conference from 19 to 22 September and present a paper titled
“Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority” (pdf). The paper argues, using a real dataset, that a link is not always a vote-for and hence the most linked-to page is not necessarily the “best” page; in short, attention is different than appreciation. However, at the moment, HTML, the current language of the Web, allows to express only attention (just plain links and not the reason for the link) and hence PageRank is only able to detect the pages, people are giving attention to but not the one that are appreciated. The tipical example is a political candidate site under election times: everyone speaks about her but maybe many do it in order to criticize her (yes, think “Bush”). The paper basically recommends VoteLinks as a first step into adding some simple semantics to the “link language”. In brief, VoteLinks is one of several microformat open standards. We propose a set of three new values for the rev attribute of the <a> (hyperlink) tag in HTML. The new values are “vote-for” “vote-abstain” or “vote-against”, which are mutually exclusive, and represent agreement, abstention or indifference, and disagreement respectively.. So that, with the following HTML code, you can state that you link to a site but you do it for critizing it and search engines, aggregators and rankers should consider this.
<a rev="vote-against" href="http://georgebush.com/" title="miserable failure">Bush</a>.
Anyway I started this post because I’m just happy to say that, just as past AAAI conference, I’ll be again hosted by a HospitalityClub.org member: Jérémy, of course I don’t know now. The WI05 conference is in Compiegne, a small city close to Paris, but nevertheless there were 4 HC members, I messaged them and in fact one of them, Jeremy, offered to host me, cool! Since I’m going to finish my PhD soon, would you consider hiring a cheap researcher? Cheap in the sense that the university does not have to spend for my wandering around the world, of course ;-) See you in Compiegne if you are there or in Paris: on the 23th it is very likely I would be visiting the SonyLabs in Paris.

So my presentation of “Controversial Users demand Local Trust Metrics: an Experimental Study on Epinions.com Community” (pdf) went well enough. It was hard to condense in 16 minutes all the background knowledge (epinions.com, trust networks and (local vs global) trust metrics, controversial users) and the experiments I did and the results. I tried but I probably left too much content, this meant I had to run a bit and my English does not allow me to run too fast, I guess I made a lot of English mistakes and I wasn’t too clear. I also had another problem: in the early tests, I was not able to connect my GNU/Linux machine to the projector so I had to use the laptop of another speaker, but he didn’t have OpenOffice installed (can you imagine that?) and so I run my presentation with Acrobat Reader but all the animations were gone. Well, I guess that it is still a little price you have to pay for choosing freedom (free software as GNU/Linux and OpenOffice).
Anyway, after the presentation, I got some positive feedbacks and some proposals for collaboration so it wasn’t too bad.
And lastly, I enjoyed the example about controversial user I gave in the presentation. As you can see in the picture it was George W. Bush. I thought my American audience would have appreciated it and so it was ;-) Actually I didn’t introduce the slide with too much of a funny story or suspence but it got anyway some laughs. Would you suggest me a good/funny way of introducing this slide, for next presentation? Of course I could have used Berlusconi instead of Bush but I guess I preferred a more aggressive example. Next time, I’ll try to joke a little also about myself being a “no global” (not that I like this tag or tags in general) since I critizise global trust metrics and propose Local Trust Metric but this kind of subtle pun requires a great preparation for being effective, funny and understood and I didn’t have it. Suggestions in making entertaining presentations are welcome.
As usual the slides are released under a Creative Commons licence: slides in OpenOffice format. Enjoy.
UPDATE: the presentation is now also on Slideshare.

In the opening remarks, the chairs ask to stand up to people that were attending the first AAAI conference (25 years ago!). From 6 to 10 standed up, that was a great moment. AAAI conference seems to be like the most important since it is the case that representatives from other 16 difference conferences in AI agreed to send representatives to summarize their results.
Another clever idea is to provide everyone with a Networking Card (see photo): Students have to find 10 faculty for increasing their network and faculty have to find 10 students; the message was “Meet 10 students/faculty new to you and find a common research link”. I think this is a perfect excuse to force yourself into bothering that would-be-too-busy-to-talk-to-me professor. Also worth mentioning is the First Annual General Game Playing Competition that would be played here and whose winner will receive a $10,000 prize!

After that we had the Invited talk by Marvin Minsky, one of the founder of AI, you might have read his “Society of Minds” book (1988). He had problems with the computer for at least the first 10 minutes and was making funny remarks about Microsoft’s inability to get stuff working. He presented a sort of history of AI. One of his point was that around 1980, AI got “physics envy” and went into heavy reductionism: you subsubsubdivide the big problem of creating “intelligent” entities and you tackle those simpler problems, instead of attacking complexity (I think he called it Panalogy). Then he had problem with the screensaver and the battery of his powerbook.
The slides he created were orrible, with too many words (see an example). He just finished a new book that is available on his homepage for free, it should be The Emotion Machine. I would have preferred him releasing under a Creative Commons licence that makes clear what is legal to do with the book and what not.
Then he started into discussing about “theory of consciousness” and philosophy. I didn’t quite get if he was criticizing philosophy as a whole and from now I think he just didn’t convey any point at all. At least, later on, he enjoyed the robots.
Summarizing, I was looking for inspiration from his talk and I got none. I guess that it is hard to satisfy all the 800 people in the audience and possibly most of the people liked his talk. Actually there is a post on AAAI blog titled “Minsky disappoints” that critizices the talk (some comments to it confirm, some comments disagree) and another post is more in the middle.
What I like about blogging is that allows you to express an opinion about anything. I mean, I’m critizing Minsky’s talk and I’m a totally nobody. But I’m free to do it. Of course my talk will be ages less interesting and my contribution in Science will probably always be less that 1/1000th Minsky’s one but I’m free to tell that I didn’t like his talk.

I was volunteering as a workshops/tutorials floater (in order to get a free registration and a scholarship) and I didn’t get a chance to attend too much the workshops. There was a lot of “moving aisles around” in the early morning but then I was pretty free. I spent most of the time at the AAAI blogging platform. Later this night I’ll post about AAAI05 first day: there was the invited talk by Marvin Minsky and a terrific, terrific, terrific, terrific IAAI-05 Invited Talk by Jay M. Tenenbaum “AI Meets Web 2.0: Building The Web of Tomorrow Today“. Terrific! I almost photoed every single slide (my camera went dead so I’ll post them on Flickr later as well). Terrific talk!
And I’m writing this sitting besides Jesse Andrews, oh yes, that Jesse Andrews, the creator of Book Burro, mindblowing (and business models blowing) application of the century!

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.
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We were required to fill a feedback form, this is more or less what I wrote:
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