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Innovation

MapReduce

Last week I read a 2004 paper called MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. It was written by a couple of Google researchers, and details a simple programming model and library for processing large datasets in parallel. MapReduce is used by Google under the hood for lots of different things, from indexing to machine learning to graph computation. Very handy indeed.

So imagine my surprise to find in last Friday’s edition of ACM TechNews that this paper has been republished in Communications of the ACM this month, albeit in a slightly shorter form. Aside from a few cosmetic changes (updated figure and table), the content of the papers is the same. That is, you don’t gain any knowledge from reading one of the papers that you wouldn’t gain from reading the other. There is no indication in the more recent publication that so much content has been duplicated from an earlier paper, though there is a citation to the older paper. In short, this is not new material, having been first published more than three years ago. Communications of the ACM seems to be trialling a new model, whereby the best articles from conferences are modified and republished for the ACM audience. But seriously, the modifications in the republished MapReduce article are negligible. What gives?

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Innovation

Android – the open platform for mobile apps

So Android has been released. As I suspected, Google has not actually released a phone of their own. Could be an interesting platform for researchers in the mobile/ubiquitous computing space who want to develop prototypes quickly. One of the creators of the platform hopes that someone develops an application that can help interpret his wife’s thoughts…

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Innovation

Own a share of a football club, and help pick the team

I’m fascinated by the idea of ordinary football fans being able to own a football club and collaborating to decide on which players to buy and sell. This idea is very close to reality as MyFootballClub has agreed terms with Ebbsfleet United FC to buy a controlling share of that club. MyFootballClub members get a say in the running of the club, including picking the team from week to week. This takes Fantasy Football to a whole new level! At £35, it’s very tempting to buy my own share of the club…

One might imagine the idea of letting the fans pick the team could drive the manager crazy, but here’s the reaction from Ebbsfleet United’s manager, former Ireland international Liam Daish:

Everyone has worked wonders to get this club into the top half of the Conference. We all agree the club needs something extra to take it to the next step. As a football fan, I think the MyFootballClub idea is fantastic. And as the coach, I look forward to the challenge of working with thousands of members to produce a winning team. Alan Kimble and myself are 100% committed to making this work.

I think “challenge” is the key word in that quote.

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Innovation

The Hipster Shuffle

Just in case you missed it the first time I blogged it, here’s the Hipster Shuffle video. Equally funny the second time around!

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Innovation

Ubiquitous Computing: People who inspire me

A few weeks ago, I discovered that IEEE Distributed Systems Online maintains a list of the key people in the field of mobile and pervasive computing. Here’s a much shorter list of people in pervasive computing whose work has inspired me. The list might be biased towards the sub-areas of ubiquitous computing with which I am more familiar, and in all cases, I acknowledge the involvement of Ph.D. supervisors and colleagues without explicitly mentioning them.

Mark Weiser

Often called the father of pervasive computing, he wrote the seminal paper on the topic (I know some people have their own views about this, but history will always see it this way).

Most important, ubiquitous computers will help overcome the problem of information overload. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods than in any computer system, yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods. (The Computer for the 21st Century, 1991)

Anind Dey

Dey provided the first useful (i.e., operational) definition of context in this field, and one of the first non-monolithic approaches to developing context-aware applications by way of the Context Toolkit (Schilit was perhaps the pioneer in that respect).

Context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves. (Understanding and Using Context, 2001)

Karen Henricksen

While Dey provided the often-quoted definition of what context is, Henricksen filled in the details about the nature of context information in ubiquitous computing environments, and made one of the first real attempts to formally model it. Henricksen, in conjunction with her colleagues, also developed one of the most sophisticated approaches to engineering context-aware applications, beginning with modelling and ending with a set of programming abstractions. Henricksen and Indulska authored the Elsevier Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing‘s most downloaded article of the year from May 2006 to April 2007.

[Our] system will allow abstract models described in our notation to be mapped with little effort to corresponding implementation models that can be populated with context information and queried by applications. It will be responsible for a range of management tasks, such as integration of context information from a variety of sources, management of sensors and derived context, detection of conflicting information and so on. (Modeling context information in pervasive computing systems, 2002)

Guanling Chen

Chen and Kotz developed a novel platform, called Solar, for building context-aware applications. I found their approach particularly inspiring for what I would call its bottom-up approach. What excited me about their idea is the same thing that excited me about the DSTC’s Elvin protocol: the ability to quickly build an application by mashing up various sources of information.

A fundamental challenge in pervasive computing, then, is to collect raw data from thousands of diverse sensors, process the data into context information, and disseminate the information to hundreds of diverse applications running on thousands of devices, while scaling to large numbers of sources, applications, and users, securing context information from unauthorized uses, and respecting individuals’ privacy. (Solar: A pervasive-computing infrastructure for context-aware mobile applications, 2002)

The Cambridge Contingent

Andys Hopper and Harter, Roy Want and others gave the world Active Badges, which were initially used to divert incoming phone calls to the nearest phone to the user. Active Badges soon gained a following in ubiquitous computing research centres around the world, with installations at MIT, Xerox PARC, EuroPARC and elsewhere. These researchers also showed remarkable awareness of the social impact their technology could have in the world. The honesty and openness with which they wrote their papers is something that ought to be replicated in more of the papers of the current generation. I’m sure this project has inspired many a ubiquitous computing researcher.

The most important result of this work is not, “Can we build a location system?”, but, “Do we want to be a part of a location system?” There is a danger that in the future this technology will be abused by unscrupulous employers. (The Active Badge Location System, 1992)

The Lancaster League

Nigel Davies, Adrian Friday, Gordon Blair, Keith Cheverst and maybe a few others have made a large contribution to the field. I remember reading their stuff – about mobility, adaptation, service discovery and more – around the year 2000 and thought it was fantastic. Their papers often disclosed important findings.

Interaction with a context-aware/location-aware system is not affected by the design of the user interface alone. In fact, interaction with GUIDE is, to a large extent, governed by the design of the infrastructure, i.e. the strategic placement of cells in order to provide appropriate areas of location resolution and network connectivity. (Developing a context-aware electronic tourist guide: some issues and experiences, 2000)

Jack Schulze and Matt Webb

Although these guys aren’t strictly ubiquitous computing researchers, I find their work inspiring on a number of levels.

Tangible interactions can be more immediately familiar than ones we regularly use with our computers. (The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Interaction Design, 2007)

So, that’s my list. It’s short and sweet. As I said at the beginning of this year, I’d like to move my work more towards the HCI side of things, which means that if I were to rewrite this list in a year’s time, it might feature a different bunch of people (like Paul Dourish, perhaps).

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Innovation

Steve Jobs: the second most powerful man on Earth

According to Vanity Fair’s 2007 ranking of the most powerful people on Earth, Steve Jobs comes in at number two, just behind Rupert Murdoch. That’s a big call, but not too far off the mark, I think. Apple has always been the company to beat in terms of style and innovation. The difference now is that their style and innovation is being converted into bigger bucks than before. The Google-meisters, Brin and Page, rank a joint third. I agree with Vanity Fair’s prediction that Apple will make the gadgets while Google processes the data; this partnership will blossom over the coming months and years.

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Innovation

Innovation in a vacuum

Brisbane (and Australia, for that matter) needs more crazy rich people willing to invest in technology startups. Probably mindbogglingly obvious, but that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after reading another of Paul Graham‘s insightful essays. Brisbane does not have nearly enough venture capitalists to create a critical mass of technology companies. This means that despite the existence of places like UniQuest and inQbator, any innovative ideas produced by universities, CRCs, NICTA and CSIRO (and I’ve seen a few of them) are released into a near vacuum, with the fruits of this labour dissipating according to the second law of thermodynamics. Only a critical mass of startups will have enough gravity to prevent this research fizzling away to nothing or leaping across the Pacific Ocean to the US, where the capital market is far more accommodating of crazy ideas. A critical mass of venture capitalists is required to gain a critical mass of startups, and once this is in place, a chain reaction is started whereby startups beget more startups. When this chain reaction gets going, that’s when we’ve created a sustainable, innovative technology industry.

So, what do we do to get the ball rolling? How do we get rich people to invest in our work? The first step might be to make them aware of what we do, which means inviting them to our workplaces, networking with them at dinner functions (hell, we the researchers should be organising these functions and not simply waiting for someone to do it for us) and marketing ourselves. While some of us might be doing this to some extent, we aren’t doing it nearly enough. It’s important to note that I’m not talking about targeting existing VCs – they’re already doing a fair enough job. I’m talking about attracting those rich people around Brisbane who aren’t currently part of the VC and angel investment scene. Think about all that cash hulled up in Hamilton, Ascot, Fig Tree Pocket and other leafy suburbs. It’s probably going into resource stocks, property and superannuation. The challenge is to convince these people to do something more exciting and potentially much more rewarding with their dollars. The goal is to enlarge the pool of funds available for investment in technology startups. Why will this work? Well, there’s a good chance it won’t. But I’m convinced the way to get more rich people involved in funding startups is not by trying to demonstrate the merits of any particular new idea, but by holding a conversation with them over the long term and getting them to buy into the big picture. Maybe this has been tried on numerous occasions before, but because it failed then doesn’t mean we should cease the conversation. Let’s organise a few functions with the help of organisations such as the AIC, scrape together the dosh to fly the Paul Graham’s and Guy Kawasaki‘s of the world to Brisbane and have them speak at the functions. These are small steps for sure, but they are steps that need to be taken if the Australian technology industry is to improve its position in the world. The other thing that might have to change is rates of taxation, but let’s do one thing at once!

I say it can be done.

Note: This article is covered by the standard disclaimer.

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Innovation

Uncalculated threat: the stay-at-home generation

The excellent Paul Graham observes that the cost of getting a web startup off the ground is very low, and getting lower. Hence the proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 companies. He, like me, believes there’s still a lot of room for more web startups. Facebook, YouTube and company are only the beginning. Innovative minds will find ways to bring many more interesting things to the web. Some of them will be game-changing the way Google was. Some of them will change the web altogether.

What implications might this have for NICTA and other such places? It might just mean that these organisations shouldn’t be surprised if the next big web thing comes out of the suburban bedroom of a twenty-something year old rather than one of the universities or CRCs. Whether this turns out to be a threat or an opportunity partially depends on the way it is perceived by the general public, who might be inclined to ask “If a billion dollar technology company can emerge from some person’s bedroom, why do we need publicly funded ICT institutions again?” Of course, there are at least a few good reasons, like trying to ensure that the brightest computer scientists contribute to Australia’s GDP rather than that of another nation’s. And besides, one web startup, even a tremendously successful one, does not a Silicon Valley make. These institutions have an important part to play in spawning an innovative, self-perpetuating IT industry in this country, and from my point of view, it would be great if the hub of this industry was Brisbane. How to be Silicon Valley is the subject of another of Graham’s essays, and my next article.

Note: This article is covered by the standard disclaimer.

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Innovation

Poor old Ballmer

Here’s Scoble ratting out on Ballmer. This time it’s about Ballmer’s lack of understanding of social networks. Microsoft’s CEO seems like he’s from a different company to the one that could produce something as cool as Microsoft Surface.

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Innovation

Ballmer on Vista

We made an upfront decision that was incredibly strategic – but not implementable. We tried to incubate too many new innovations and integrate them simultaneously, instead of letting them bake and then integrating them. (Source: Virgin Blue Voyeur Magazine)

Having “upgraded” my home PC to Vista several months ago, I’m left wondering exactly what these new innovations are. Vista so disappoints me, firstly because it doesn’t really work that well, and secondly because it feels so far behind Mac OS X which I use day in, day out. I’ve found I’m actually trying to avoid my PC as much as possible these days, which is sad, because the Dell hardware is nice enough.