Fade to Play

When I found out that I had to submit my thesis research to an ethics review board, I was a little upset. I didn’t see the rational for it. My research wasn’t going to hurt anyone, I wasn’t using children, and I wasn’t using animals. My supervisor said that it would help me understand what my thesis was about by writing down the purpose, objectives, methodology & metrics I plan to use. I now see the benefits of this process and I feel much more focused and ready for next term’s studies.

When I submitted my form for my thesis at the end of November, I didn’t know what to expect from the ethics review board. However, I am happy to report that they only suggested some minor changes which I re-submitted today. My two supervisors were extremely helpful in providing tips and suggestions for my ethics form and I know this thesis will rock.

Next term I will be studying the tagging behaviour of students focusing on del.icio.us and citeulike. It should be fun.

I will be submitting another ethics form later today for a ubicomp game group project I am a part of.

Relevance: Getting ethics approval is an important part of research here at UBC.

Technorati tags:tagging, thesis, ethics, citeulike, del.icio.us,

In today’s National Post by Siri Agrell, there is an article about how students and youth are willing to document aspects of their life through blogs, pictures, and video online. They are described as a web-friendly generation and don’t feel they are being exploited or taken advantage of. The article also address some of the negative implications of these actions.

Mechthild Maczewski, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Victoria, said this sort of digital experimentation by young people can be as healthy as it is hazardous.

“When you talk to them about it, the first thing that comes up is that it’s fun,” said Ms. Maczewski, who is studying the benefits of Internet connectedness. “They love writing, they love expressing themselves in a creative way.”

The Internet, she says, functions as a 21st-century Room of One’s Own, the mythical place Virginia Woolf longed for where she could work and explore her own identity.

“They feel like it’s a space of their own, where they can do and say what they like,” she said. “I think you can gain validation through expressing yourself. You can find people who appreciate and understand you for what you do.”

Relevance: I live online myself. I am studying the internet for my thesis (tagging spaces such as del.icio.us), I blog, I post pictures of myself on flickr, and I am in facebook. I enjoy sharing aspects of my life with others and I am interested in ethnographic studies that explore who these people are within this digital culture and the rational behind creating online personas. Is this just another form of creative expression?

This article ties into another article on this digital generation entitled The MySpace Generation from BusinessWeek magazine that discusses how teens and youth are living online via social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

technorati tags:
culture, web, blogs, students, privacy, research, identity, youth, digital, canada,

Sacha Chua, a student at the University of Toronto is doing her MS thesis on tagging (like me). I recommend following her site.

On yesterday’s blog, she provide the code and application for a cool tool to find out by month your top 10 del.icio.us tags. She coverted mine for me below.

relevance: another example of a really useful del.icio.us tool/application to help understand your tagging behaviour. This has motivated me to learn ruby on rails.

technorati tags: tagging, del.icio.us, rubyonrails

del.icio.us is down

Originally uploaded by tyfn.

Today at 10:55pm PST I tried to log into del.icio.us receiving this error. This screen is actualy from last night when I tried unsuccessfully for a period of time around the same time to access my personal library.

I have never had this happen two consecutive days in a row before. I wonder whether this has anything to do with the Yahoo! buyout.

update: It’s looks like there was a power failure which affected the servers.

Relevance: I am very dependent on del.icio.us and feel a sense of loss in not being able to access and add to my del.icio.us library right now. However, it looks like flock has come to the rescue. I can add to my favourite which are my del.icio.us links and I can access my existing favourites. I am starting to see the benefits of using flock, more each day as its stability increases. This is not a slight on firefox. I absolutely love using firefox, I also enjoy flock.

technorati tags: yahoo, del.icio.us, flock

In today’s Arts & Leisure section of the nytimes.com, the article discusses rocketboom which stars Amanda Congdon and is produced by Andrew Baron. I enjoy rocketboom, it is an entertaining 3 minute broadcast of the news in a format labelled vlog or video blog. The article discusses the recent emergence of rocketboom and the potential financial opportunites for rocketboom that lay ahead, especially after the deal with TiVo.

They have no background in business, but Jeff Jarvis, who tracks developments in technology and culture on his blog, BuzzMachine.com (and who has served as a consultant to The New York Times on Web matters), pointed out to them that they might be able to charge $8,000 for an interactive ad at the end of the show, which would bring in about $2 million annually.

Relevance:
I think this is pretty cool and I hope that the creativity and fun of the site will remain, regardless of the financial rewards that come their way. Many people have interesting and creative ways to express themselves. It used to be that these ideas remained mostly local — shared with friends and friends. Now, we all can be motivated to “be different” and to have fun using interactive technology that broadcast on a global scale (e.g. the comments section on their website). This is what I like about the Web — it connects ideas, bridges thoughts, and shares personal expressions via words, pictures, or video.

technorati tags: rocketboom, vlogs, business, apple, ipod

Wow. I woke up this morning to read the news that del.icio.us, my favourite tagging site that I cannot live without, is part of the yahoo family which includes flickr.com.

I think this is an excellent move for Joshua. I have been on del.icio.us for nearly 2 years now and I have seen alot of changes that have helped how I used del.icio.us to organise information and serendipitously find interesting content that others have tagged.

I would if there will be any tie-ins between flickr and del.icio.us. In addition, will the next step for yahoo be to add technorati?

Relevance: del.icio.us has joined the mainstream. Yahoo is creating a diverse tagging community. How will google react? I am really looking forward to the next tagcamp now. What does this mean for the other web2.0 tagging applications?

Technorati tags: technorati, tagging, yahoo, del.icio.us, web2.0

DATE: 4pm Monday December 5th

LOCATION: 7th Floor Computer Science Boardroom, X736 ICICS Building

SPEAKER: Vinod Nair – Machine Learning Group, University of Toronto

TITLE: Learning To Do Vision by Inverting a Graphics Model

ABSTRACT: In this talk I’ll describe a new way of learning a generative representation for an image class of interest given a graphics model that can generate any instance from this class. Our approach is to learn a mapping from an image to the inputs of the graphics model that would generate that image. The key difficulty is that in a typical application we only have the images available for learning, and not the graphics inputs that generated them, so supervised learning is not possible. I’ll present a new unsupervised learning algorithm that gets around this problem. The algorithm is demonstrated on the task of modelling images of handwritten digits. Using a graphics program that can generate realistic digit images, a neural network is trained for each digit class to infer the graphics inputs from images. Such a representation can then be used in many ways. Digit classification can be done by seeing how well the representation extracted by each class-specific network reconstructs a test image. It can also be used to create new synthetic training examples for improving the classification performance of other, discriminative, learning algorithms. The basic idea behind this work is more generally applicable to other types of images, such as faces, and even other types of data, such as speech.

Joint work with Geoff Hinton.

BIO:
Vinod Nair is currently a Ph.D. student with the Machine Learning group at the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science. He received his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the Dept. of ECE at McGill University in 2004 and 2002, respectively. His main research interests are in machine learning and computer vision.

Hosted by Dr. Sidney Fels.

Relevance: Although this is not my research area, it is being hosted by the director of my lab. It should be a good talk.

Technorati Tags: vision, research, machine, computer