Say Anything

Standing drinking a Diet Coke I gazed at an advertisement for the Guardian outside the Spar on the campus of Dublin City University.

The advertisement stated, "Owned by no one, free to say anything." I paused. My paper of choice is associated with the motto "All the news that's fit to print." Never worried about it before, but in comparison, it suddenly seemed a bit dated.

It's relatively uncontroversial to consider source when assessing the credibility of media. In our work on the PodCred Framework we cite Rubin and Liddy (2006) as a source for the notion that user generated media builds credibility by avoiding hidden bias. I smiled at the idea of The Guardian as a huge blog; and then again at myself for finding that funny.

The PodCred Framework includes an indicator meant to capture the source of the income of the podcaster: stores, sponsors, advertisers. The idea that transparency of funding does indeed impact listener satisfaction with podcasts hasn't been test driven yet, too my knowledge. But seeing the Guardian sign made my thoughts return to consideration of its potential.

Then I finished my break and went back inside to continue working on VideoCLEF assessment management tasks, which is why I am currently in Dublin, and my mind turned to other things.

I've found the image to accompany this post at http://www.scaryideas.com/ If this is indeed a scary idea, I wonder if it indeed sells papers. But if it's really owned by no one, perhaps they need to make the link up to who is actually doing the writing. (Note to self: I do, too.)

Preferential Attachment at SIGIR 2009

Waiting for my plane yesterday at Boston Logan airport I found myself starting out the window and reflecting on scale-free networks rather than attending to my e-mail as I should have been. The reflections were, of course, inspired by the keynote of Albert László Barabási entitled "From Networks to Human Behavior" and consisted mostly of wondering why the properties of scale-free structure are perceived as unintuitive or unnatural. A conspiracy is improbable, but can it be that we are subtly taught to expect behaviors characteristic of random connections? Barabási used the word "democratic" in describing random networks and one of the audience questions afterwards dealt with how to overcome potential isolation between nodes in scale free configurations. Yes, they are out there, but how do we fix them? The answer was, to paraphrase, know it's there and work with it. I'd been standing in line with an audience question of my own, but I resumed my seat, deciding that it was basically covering the same ground: "Are the scale-free networks in and around us inherently irreconcilable with our notions of democratic forms of organization?"

Later that evening, in a semi-conscious effort not to always hang with exactly the same crowd, I fell in with group of bloggers for an interval that would, unknown to me as it was happening, later be referred to as Day 2 post banquet. Face-to-face discussion with bloggers seems to have helped to counter my conviction that I am almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a blogger myself. Except for my apparently innate repugnance for preferential attachment. Work with it.

The Netbook Effect

"Give a laptop. Change the world." are the welcoming words of the website of One Laptop Per Child. A Wired article entitled "The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time" (Wired, March 2009) tells the story of how the low cost no-frills netbook evolved from the One Laptop Per Child initiative and predicts that netbooks will constitute 12% of the laptop market in 2010.
It sort of takes my breath away that I might actually live to see One Laptop Per Child happen. It gives me hope that we might eventually move not only as individuals, communities and countries, but as an entire species beyond subsistence level concerns.
At the same time, another part of my brain is formulating questions about what happens as an increasing proportion of personal machines are "thin" in the sense that they have low processing power and low storage capacity. The vision of democratizing the supply of services with high computational loads by distributing them over private citizens with unused processing capacity may have to be abandoned. Do we want to encourage a future in which we must rely on a distant center to store and swap our video content? Do we want to close the door on the possibility of internet content search that is supported by a million modest contributions of storage space and cpu cycles? Are we ready to give up our private capacities and allow resource rich hands to further accumulate a power monopoly removed beyond influence of the individual?

CHORUS Conference in Brussels

CHORUS, the European Coordinated Action on search technology for audio visual content held its Final Conference in Brussels. PetaMedia and VideoCLEF were presented.



FP7 project PETAMEDIA
Alan Hanjalic



VideoCLEF: Video Analysis and Retrieval Benchmark
Martha Larson, Gareth Jones

WIAMIS 2009 in London

Attended the International Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services a.k.a. WIAMIS 2009. The PetaMedia task force organized a special session to showcase topics related to combining multimedia content analysis with user contributed information and social network structure. We presented some initial work on combining speech-based indexing features with low level visual information for improved video retrieval.

ECIR 2009 in Toulouse

I've never attended the European Conference on Information Retireval before, but this year I flew to Toulouse for ECIR 2009. My continued reflection on the larger implications of the properties of the error produced by speech recognition systems finally yielded some fruit...but it is still only a small window on a larger story.

Larson M., Tsagkias E., He J., de Rijke M., Exploring the Global Semantic Impact of Speech Recognition Errors on Spoken Content Retrieval, 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval Conference (ECIR 2009).

Tsagkias E., Larson M., de Rijke M., Exploiting Surface Features for the Prediction of Podcast Preference, 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval Conference (ECIR 2009).

Kill your blog?

A "rant" I sent to Wired in reaction to "Kill your Blog" (Wired Nov 2008 p. 27). It didn't get published there--it seemed only fitting that it should land here in the blogosphere:

"How did we come to so completely repress our dissatisfaction with mainstream search engines? You point a finger at blogging and bloggers, but the issues you raise could also be laid at the doorstep of Google. Dare to imagine a search engine that lets our voices be heard within the intimate internet communities important to us, a search engine that distills for us the pith of our posts, keeping pace with publication. My rant passed your magic 140 character Twitter limit in my second sentence--shouldn't internet search technology be addressing the challenge of making my opinion heard anyway?"