Tag: inside nicta

What happens Inside NICTA? Well, here you might find out.

Categories
Innovation

Jeffrey Ullman on the National Benefit

Once a year, NICTA’s external advisory boards, called ISAG/IBAG (International {Scientific, Business} Advisory Group), hold a meeting. There are some well known people on this panel, including Jeffrey D. Ullman, who is one of, if not the, most cited computer scientists. At the most recent ISAG/IBAG, the NICTA executive sought some advice on the potential for conflict between the objectives of national benefit and commercialisation. Ullman’s answer was succinct, cutting and delivered with a dry wit that I have come to appreciate over the years since I’ve been at NICTA:

National benefit versus private benefit… Hey, that’s what capitalism is designed to do, is to guarantee that there is no contradiction.

The line got a delayed laugh, because it took the audience a few moments to realise that was all Professor Ullman had to say on the topic, and that he’d moved on to the next topic. People laughed, but he was serious, and more right than many would be willing to accept.

Categories
Innovation

Thanks for your help

To those who responded to my plea for help by leaving a comment or responding out-of-band, thank you very much. We’ve settled on a name for our application, purchased the corresponding domain names and filed a trade mark application.

Will keep you posted as things evolve further. But just to give you an idea, we’ve already iterated through several “alpha” versions and expect to have a public beta ready by the end of February. Stay tuned for an explanation of what the service actually does.

Categories
Random observations

The SVNMate plugin for Textmate

For anyone who’s using Subversion through Textmate, you might be interest in Ciarán Walsh’s SVNMate plugin. It changes the icons for files and folders in the project drawer depending upon their SVN status. Very handy.

Categories
Innovation

I need your help

Valued readers, would you be so kind as to lend 15 seconds of your time completing the following task for me, your humble host. I ask that, from among the five names below (which, for various reasons, all begin with the word “cite”), you choose the one name that you believe sounds the best. The one that rolls off your tongue most easily. The one that you think is, well, coolest. Please do not bother yourself with trying to guess the meaning of the name, or the purpose of this exercise (though many of you will no doubt have a good idea). I am after your immediate gut feeling response. Please leave your response as a comment on this post.

  • Citemind
  • Citecloud
  • Citefish
  • Citecrowd
  • Citemarket

I would be more than grateful if you could point your friends and colleagues at this blog entry, particularly if they are involved in writing research manuscripts.

Thank you!

Categories
Innovation

NICTA Queensland gets more funding

In another piece of NICTA news, on Thursday Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announced that the state government will invest $10.05 million in NICTA’s Queensland Research Laboratory over the next four years. Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Australian IT news article:

Technologies developed by NICTA’s Queensland facility are widely used by the state government. One example is software to authenticate and protect digital evidence currently deployed by the state’s police force.

To be honest, “widely used” might be a bit of a stretch at this point, but it’s true that the state’s police force are using the mentioned piece of software and they’re very keen on it. I’d be willing to bet that the next four years of the lab will be pretty successful in terms of spin-outs, licenses and other outcomes.

NICTA has a very different atmosphere to DSTC (which I can’t imagine will ever be surpassed in my career in terms of outright coolness) and Sun Labs, two places I’ve worked before and which I give credit to for inspiring me along the path to a career in research, so it took a while to get used to. I guess it’s still trying to find its own culture, really. The Queensland lab may be helped on in that respect by the cozy confines of our new quarters at UQ (at the very least, we’ll all get to know each other very well!). NICTA as a whole has set pretty high standards for itself, particularly in terms of research project approvals, and to its credit, recent evidence tells me that it’s going to do its best to keep to those standards. I hope it does.

Categories
Random observations

New work address

As of Monday, NICTA’s Queensland Research Lab will be located at UQ. Here’s the address:

Queensland Research Laboratory
Level 5, Axon Building (47),
Staff House Road,
St Lucia  Qld  4072

PO Box 6020,
St Lucia  QLD  4067

Categories
Innovation

Startup: an explanation

It’s probably time to come clean about my recent spate of posts on startups, Ruby, Python and so on. Well, there are a few things about peer review and publishing in the realm of academia that I think could be better, so I tried to figure out an alternative process that retains the benefits and overcomes some of the problems of the current system. We think we’ve done that, and it turns out that I wasn’t the only one who thought that things could be a lot better.

NICTA has provided pre-seed funding in the form of a couple of commercialisation grants to implement this new way of doing things. I’ve hired a top notch graduate software engineer (who’s been working with me as a student for the past year and a half on unrelated things) to help me deliver alpha and beta versions of this system over the next six months or so. For this project, we’ll be working in startup mode; I’ll be making every effort to provide a small company atmosphere for the engineer and others who join the project.

It turns out the solution to the problem can also be applied to (web) search, since it is essentially a nice way of ranking documents within communities. I can’t go into the details of the solution here, but I can list some of the things that I (and other researchers, as it happens) think could be better.

  • Traditional peer review requires that authors trust reviewers to act in good faith – reviewers are not required to “put their money where their mouth is”, so to speak;
  • Related to the above, traditional peer review gives no real incentive to support the good work of a group competing scientists;
  • Related to the above, traditional peer review provides no real incentive not to support the poor work of a colleague or friend;
  • Traditional peer review gives no tangible recognition to the many hours of reviewing that scientists do – reviewing is just something you’re expected to do for the good of the scientific community;
  • Traditional peer review gives no incentive to authors to self-review their work before submission, meaning reviewers get burdened with too many bad and mediocre papers;
  • Metrics such as H-index and G-index are somewhat arbitrary, do not give a direct indication of the esteem with which scientists are held by their peers, and are not indicative of the current capacity of a scientist to produce good work;
  • Citation collusion is too easy to accomplish, but difficult to filter out when calculating the above metrics;
  • Not enough cross-fertilisation between fields, largely because closed communities are too common; and
  • The publication process is too slow, often taking years for a journal paper and months for a conference paper.

These are some of the problems that researchers say they can see with the current way of doing things. We think we can claim that our idea solves many of these problems. For example, under our system, which we are calling PubRes for the moment, citation collusion is futile. Under PubRes, you’d also be silly to lend support to a paper that you know isn’t very good (even if it is written by a colleague), and you’d be silly not to lend support to a good paper (even if it is written by a competing group of scientists or your worst enemy). There are some things we haven’t solved, like honorary authorship and ghost authorship, but these are problems I’d like to investigate in the future. Although I can’t reveal the details here, I can say that the underlying mechanics of PubRes are no more complicated than traditional peer review procedures (and probably much less complicated), but it is a major departure from how things are done now. I can also say that the feedback we’ve got from people we’ve explained it to has been overwhelmingly positive, which is the main reason I’m still pursuing this.

NICTA are making sure we do this properly, so some of the grant money is being spent on figuring out the structure of the academic publishing market. We already know that the top three academic publishers had combined 2007 revenues in excess of $US3 billion, but that doesn’t say much. We’re currently doing some much deeper market research to get a better understanding of the domain.

It’s important to note that what we’re doing is completely different to all known attempts to bring science to the web. PubRes is not another CiteULike or Connotea. It’s not another arXiv.org. It’s not like PLoS One or PubMed Central. It’s different to ResearchGATE and Science Commons. While our implementation may contain elements of these existing tools, PubRes is a fundamentally new way of getting your research published, and it’s a new, much fairer (we think), more direct way of rating scientists and the papers that they write. One of our aims is also to make the whole reviewing, publishing and reading cycle a lot more fun.

With any luck, a public beta will be available early next year. Oh, we think we’ve settled on Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the web tier, and no doubt there’ll be some AJAX stuff in there to pull off a few nifty browser side features we have in mind. Stay tuned.

Categories
Innovation

Finding a human need

I’ve been reading over old ubicomp papers in preparation for a new project at NICTA. So it was that I found myself reading “Charting Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing“, by Gregory Abowd and Elizabeth Mynatt (whom, incidentally, should surely be listed among those ubiquitous computing researchers who inspire me – particularly Abowd, whose work I’ve followed since my Honours year in 2000, and whose books were often referenced in the HCI course I took a couple of years before that). One of the most important passages in that paper, to my mind, was tucked away in section 6.1.1, Finding a Human Need (the emphasis is mine):

It is important in doing ubicomp research that a researcher build a compelling story, from the end-user’s perspective, on how any system or infrastructure to be built will be used. The technology must serve a real or perceived human need, because, as Weiser [1993] noted, the whole purpose of ubicomp is to provide applications that serve the humans. The purpose of the compelling story is not simply to provide a demonstration vehicle for research results. It is to provide the basis for evaluating the impact of a system on the everyday life of its intended population. The best situation is to build the compelling story around activities that you are exposed to on a continuous basis. In this way, you can create a living laboratory for your work that continually motivates you to “support the story” and provides constant feedback that leads to better understanding of the use.

Designers of a system are not perfect, and mistakes will be made. Since it is already a difficult challenge to build robust ubicomp systems, you should not pay the price of building a sophisticated infrastructure only to find that it falls far short of addressing the goals set forth in the compelling story. You must do some sort of feasibility study of cutting-edge applications before sinking substantial effort into engineering a robust system that can be scrutinized with deeper evaluation. However, these feasibility evaluations must still be driven from an informed, user-centric perspective—the goal is to determine how a system is being used, what kinds of activities users are engaging in with the system, and whether the overall reactions are positive or negative. Answers to these questions will both inform future design as well as future evaluation plans. It is important to understand how a new system is used by its intended population before performing more quantitative studies on its impact.

It strikes me that too few ubicomp research groups heed this, seemingly obvious, advice, including our own. Though we might occasionally attempt to build a story, it is not often compelling, and I’ve read far too many papers that suffer from the same problem (caveat: I specifically exclude Karen‘s work from this blunt introspective analysis because her work is typically very well motivated, and compelling; and she read the paper I’ve just quoted early on in her Ph.D. and took note of it). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful ubiquitous computing researchers have taken this advice to heart. I want to make sure that the new project at NICTA does do these things properly.

Categories
Random observations

Meeting of the minds

Enough politics. Back to a more wholesome topic…

Here’s a photo of a dinner we held for Anind Dey at the Brasserie on the River a couple of weeks ago. The photo contains two of my previously mentioned ubiquitous computing inspirators.

Dinner for Anind

Clockwise from the top right we have Jaga Indulska, Anind Dey, Karen Henricksen (Robinson), Ricky’s camera case, Pei Hu, Ryan Wishart, Myilone Anandarajah, Andry Rakotonirainy and Bob Hardian. The food was great and the conversation stimulating. A good night was had by all.

Categories
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.