I updated the People page on my web site. Basically, somebody finally got a web site. I was forbidden, under pain of death, to link directly to the new web site directly from my blog, but this seems like a neat little loophole. Anyway, make sure you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the People page to find the new link. :-)
Below is a draft e-mail that I wrote a few weeks ago, intending to send it to the Level 7 mailing list at DSTC. Note the word draft. It is obviously miles too long and far too, well, preachy to be coming from a mere Ph.D. student. All the same, it does contain the sentiments I wanted to get across, albeit in a long winded fashion. It didn’t get sent for a number of reasons, but mainly because I was hoping to have submitted the final version of my thesis before saying farewell to the DSTC. With the recent news about the closure of the DSTC, I figured I’m probably about the last person to be sending farewell e-mails to Level 7, so I’ve relegated my farewell to this blog entry. Anyway, here it is…
Dear all,
It has come time for me to say goodbye to the DSTC after five years. I began as an honours student affiliated with the M3 project, which doesn’t get mentioned much these days, largely due to the direction it began to take after a large German corporation became involved. But hey, I learned a lot during that year, and the experiences I had convinced me to come back and do a Ph.D. Since that time, I’ve been affiliated with the PACE project as a Ph.D. student. It’s been great.
First of all, I’d like to thank Ted McFadden for being my "DSTC Contact person" and for just being plain cool. Thanks to the other DSTC Ph.D. students past and present (Suzanne Little, James Cole, Brett Campbell, Karen Henricksen, David Hearnden, Ryan Wishart and others) for sharing your experiences and allowing me to share mine. I am grateful to the sys admins for doing the often thankless job that they do (especially for helping to clear up my desk which had gathered five years of my own junk and who knows how many years of Andry’s junk). Thanks to everybody at the DSTC I’ve ever had the pleasure of having lunch with (because those were some of the best moments). Lastly, thank you all for helping to create an atmosphere conducive to research and learning. Thanks for helping me when I needed help and knowing when I needed to be challenged. You all should know the tremendous difference you make to the life of a young (I hope I am still numbered among the young :-) researcher, and it is really appreciated. I have truly been made to feel a part of the DSTC, despite my lowly status as a Ph.D. student.
The DSTC is a lot of things to a lot of people. For me, firstly as an honours student back in 2000 and then as a Ph.D student since that time, it’s been the perfect place to learn and grow as a researcher and as a person. One would be hard pressed to find another IT organisation in Australia with such a distinguished array of intelligent, knowledgeable and friendly staff (and that includes admin/business staff like Liz, Doug and Naomi). Off the top of my head I can think of DSTC staff/students (past and present) who are graduates of MIT, INRIA and other educational institutions that have come to be considered world class in our general field, who have been awarded Honorary/Adjunct Professorships, who have written books with some of the household names in our industry (e.g. James Gosling), who have received university medals, who have been named the University Graduate of the Year, who have been awarded internships/residencies at the Sun Microsystems and IBMs of this world, and who the media regularly interviews for their expert opinions. But that’s just the honour roll I’ve been able to think of in 30 seconds, and doesn’t even begin to touch upon the real work, the real research that has been and is still being conducted in this place. To have been part of that, if only for five years or so, has been an honour and an experience I won’t forget. It would be a shame if we ever forgot about these wonderful achievements and the accomplishments to which you’ve all contributed over the years.
I wish you all the very best in the future wherever you might be, and hope that you continue to conduct world class research, and afford the same opportunities to the next generation of Ph.D. students as you have afforded me.
Although I’m sending this farewell e-mail, you might still run into me from time to time when (if?) my thesis examiners send back their reports and I have to address their comments. In the meantime I’ve taken employment at a small business in Toowong, as those of you who read Planet DSTC would already know.
Regards,
Ricky
Why is it that if you search, on Google, for the term university
with the pages from Australia
option selected, The University of Queensland appears as the second hit (after Monash), yet if you search for the term university australia
with or without the pages from Australia
option selected, UQ does not even make the first page of results (in fact, it is the last hit on page 7 of the results!!!), even though the word Australia
appears on the home page? I even checked the version of the home page that Google has cached to make sure the word Australia
appears in it: it does. What am I missing here? These days I, rightly or wrongly, use Google as a fast reputation check, whereby I suppose I’m using the logic if it’s high on Google‘s list of results for a particular query, then at least the brand/institution/shop/etc is well known
, and this might imply that it has a good reputation (it might not, but at least it’s a good starting point). If international students, corporations, other universities and so on are compiling a quick list of Australian universities for whatever purpose by using Google and UQ isn’t showing up, surely this is a Bad Thing (for UQ). Perhaps this is why UQ isn’t in Google’s list of universities.
I always wondered why Tony Blair supported the US in the War in Iraq. Could it be that Britain supported the war in Iraq on the condition that the US would later back Blair’s debt relief agenda? I’m not saying this is what I think, but it is an interesting possibility. I know I’m not the only one who thought Blair’s support for the Iraq war was out of character and not entirely in keeping with Labour policy. I’ve written on this topic before, saying that before Blair can pursue the noble causes of third world debt relief and climate change, two conditions would have to be met. Firstly Labour would need to be re-elected and secondly Blair would have to win over the other members of the G8, notably the Americans. Well, the first condition has certainly been met, and it looks increasingly likely that the second has also been met. I await the G8 meeting in Scotland next month with interest.
I find the use of big words when little ones will do quite pretentious, too, and I steer clear of them where possible. :) Unfortunately, in this instance we had little choice, because we were discussing two points of view that, for better or worse (I say worse), have been labelled with those big words by other researchers. I’m flattered that someone (other than Ben) actually took the time to read that diatribe (if "read" is too strong a word for what took place, then please replace with something more appropriate).
Ben’s rebuttal in our debate on context can be found here. I’ll be following this up offline with Ben, because there are definitely fundamental divergences in our views on this matter. In fact I’ve written a small thesis in response, but I’ll spare the general public from it. The gist of my reply is this:
These days I am invariably at odds with Ben’s take on ubiquitous computing and related issues, and the trend seems likely to continue.
In On Context, Ben argues that we still don’t have a clear understanding of what context, among other terms, means. Come off it, really. We’ve known what context means for centuries, and what it means within computer science for decades (which, when one looks at it, is not substantially different from what it means in the ordinary world). John McCarthy, helped to formalize context over a decade ago – a remarkable feat, and one that would be all the more remarkable if the meaning of context was still unclear at that time. McCarthy has also looked at formalizing common sense, a term that I believe is much harder to define than context. The problem is no longer figuring out what context is or what it means, it is understanding how to monitor (sense) it, model it, derive it, and use it to do something sensible even in the face of imperfect information. These are hard problems, and it strikes me as a distinct possibility that people are still talking about what context is because they are avoiding the difficult problems involved with utilising it. Not only do we already know what context is, we know what it is useful for; all you have to do is observe the way in which a typical conversation proceeds between two people and see how they fill in the blanks in the absence of explicit information. Or, the next time you see a person standing in the middle of an intersection wearing a blue uniform and waving their hands about in various ways, observe the way in which you and other motorists respond. It is unlikely that any motorist would make a call to the nearest hospital for the mentally ill. But if you saw a similarly dressed person making those gestures in the middle of a football field, that phone call might be made. Why? Context is the element that allows us to differentiate between these two scenarios or situations. In the words of Dey:
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.
So how does an application decide what is relevant, without being pre-configured with a static set of entities that the programmer/administrator/user has deemed to be relevant to the scenarios in which the application will be used? Now there’s a real research problem. I think this is the gist of what the IFTF article to which Ben refers was getting at – that context is mutable and hard to track, not that the term itself is hard to define.
The meaning of context, I think, is well understood, and the fact that there are many slightly different definitions of context floating around in computer science does not imply otherwise, just as there are many ways of describing the term "light-bulb". So I have no hesitation in adding another definition to the mix. This definition approaches context from a more functional point of view:
Context is the implicit environmental parameter that can be used to disambiguate a statement or an action.
That goes for statements made in natural languages and programming languages. For instance, in an application, we may wish to send a message to somebody. Perhaps the only formal parameter provided by the user is the contents of the message. It is then up to the application to figure out who the message is supposed to be sent to and how that message is supposed to be sent. As mentioned above, knowing what information is relevant to the decision making process, and then actually utilising this information is the tricky part.
Context has been defined to death, and just in case it wasn’t dead already, I made sure by throwing another definition at it. The last thing we need is more papers purporting to confer a better understanding of context unto the computer science community. What is needed are solutions to the problems of modelling, incomplete information, filtering, scaling and the derivation of context information from existing context information. Basically we need to figure out how to remove the current limiting factors so that it can be applied more generally and with predictable results that make sense to the user.
So, it’s finally happened: Rhys has started a blog, although, in a move likely to put a hex on the whole damn thing before it gets off the ground, it isn’t called Shoes With Zippers, as Ben has already pointed out. So, Rhys, are you going to accept the music meme baton that I passed you a while back? Likely answer: "er, no."
Last night’s State of Origin match was a classic. Queensland won it in extra time on the Golden Point rule. Great match. I thought this morning’s Champions League final between Liverpool and AC Milan would be hard pressed to top last night in terms of excitement. Boy was I wrong, and I’m glad I made the effort to get up at 4:45am to watch it. At half time, AC Milan were absolutely cruising. They were up three nil at the break. Then the unbelievable happened. Liverpool scored three goals within the space of seven or eight minutes to level the scores. This is unheard of in Champions League history, and to have it occur against an Italian team, who are reknowned for their ability to defend the most slender of leads, is simply miraculous. It stayed that way until penalties, though Andriy Shevchenko had what looked like a certain goal saved by Jerzy Dudek in extra time. Liverpool won the penalty shoot out 3-2, with Jerzy Dudek again the hero, saving two penalties and watching one sail over the bar. Justice be done, in my opinion, because Milan didn’t deserve to progress past PSV Eindhoven at the semi-final stage. I’ll remember this final for a long time to come. "Never say die" has been given new meaning.