research:log

This conference covers broad topics from algorithms to e-commerce applications. I presented my work with a demo of ContextVisualiser. As the concept of "generating stories out of existing information" and its applications are quite obvious (I was surprised that many people could imagine the applications, though), people from various fields seemed interested in my work and talk, as those in SIGGRAPH 2007 were. Goooood:-)

The most exciting presentation was the keynote speech by Mario Gerla from University of California, Los Angeles, USA, entitled "Probing and mining the urban environment using the vehicular sensor network". Vehicles as an ad-hoc network is GREAT. I think I am interested in real-world communication networks.:-) Here is the abstract:

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Abstract:

There has been growing interest in urban surveillance using vehicles that monitor the environment, classify the events, e.g., license plate readings, and exchange metadata with neighbours in a peer-to-peer fashion. The idea is to create a totally distributed index of all the events, which can be accessed by authorized users. For instance, the Department of Transportation extracts traffic congestion statistics; the Department of Health monitors pollutants, and; the Police carries out forensic crime investigations.

In this talk we describe different techniques that can be used to maintain such a distributed index within a mobile structure like the vehicle grid. We then focus on MobEyes, a Peer to Peer middleware solution that diffuses data summaries via epidemic dissemination to create a distributed index of the massive sensor data base. We discuss the search performance of this index in different motion, density and diffusion conditions. We review the design challenges, from information dissemination to harvesting, routing and security.

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The downside of this conference is that topics are too broad to cover as many interdisciplinary conferences tend to be so. It's good for streching your brain, but sometimes I would like to deepen my main interest, support human creative activities, in terms of human-computer interaction, knowledge management / creation, etc., besides algorithms or hey-this-system-can-do-this type research. I need to find and concentrate on conferences where to fight / contribute to. Perhaps:

- Creativity & Cognition
- Intelligent User Interfaces
- CHI
- SIGGRAPH
- Knowledge-Based Systems (Journal)

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