Congrats! – an amazing mention for a pre-release service… Looks like the buzz campaign is working well for Adam and Joyce, and a tip of the hat to the whole Renkoo team for making such a polished impression on no less than Mike Langberg.
InternetNews also covered the demo, with a zinger from Esthr at the end.
… Of the several start-ups presenting at When 2.0, my favorite was Renkoo.
The Palo Alto company plans to launch an online service early next year that will provide a shared space for small groups to plan events.
If you want to invite a list of friends to a party with a fixed time and place, it’s easy to use the existing Evite service. But Evite doesn’t work well when you’re not sure what you want to do, or what your friends prefer.
With Renkoo, you can send a query by e-mail, instant message or cell-phone text message, perhaps asking, “Who wants to go for a hike this weekend? What’s the best time for you, and where do you want go?”
Your friends then reply with their preferences, and the group goes back and forth — with the dialogue recorded on a single Web page — until there’s a consensus.
Renkoo, named for a form of Japanese poetry called renku or renga where people take turns writing verses, will be free to users and hopes to make money through ads and sponsorships.
Adam Rifkin, Renkoo’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said he aims to solve a basic problem: “You can never get enough information on what your friends are doing.”
While it’s much too soon to know whether Renkoo or any of the other bold proposals at When 2.0 will succeed, the vision at least is clear.
In a few years, we’ll effortlessly manage our time by entering appointments on whatever Internet-connected electronic device is at hand — a computer or a cell phone or a personal digital assistant — and those appointments will instantly appear on the calendars of others we designate.
If we change the time of an appointment, it will instantly update the calendars of others.
Public and group events we want to track, from upcoming rock concerts and professional hockey games to our children’s soccer team schedules, will automatically pop into our calendars.
There are lots of technical, security and privacy issues yet to resolve, but the benefits are big enough that families may ultimately be freed from running their lives through scraps of paper stuck to refrigerator doors.
Rather than manage events already planned, Renkoo focuses on making events happen. “We bring friends together in the process,” CEO Adam Rifkin told internetnews.com.
He said services like Evite are for larger group functions that already have a fixed time and place. With Renkoo there is, among other features, a real-time voting mechanism, so people can decide on a time for lunch, movie or other gathering. The original planner can decide when to rein in the votes and chatter in order to set the details of where and when. Renkoo also accepts SMS text messaging, and it’s experimenting with links to instant messaging services as part of the site.
While many of the vendors were optimistic that they could break new ground on the consumer side, at least one attendee was skeptical.
“These things are great if you’re an extrovert,” said Chris Nesladek, a user interface designer for Intuit. “But you’re only organized if you have responsibility. For a lot of 18- to 24-year-olds, having a calendar or updating your schedule doesn’t matter.
For young and old alike, Dyson had this comment worth considering in a recent edition of her Release 1.0 newsletter: “You can’t create time. You can only steal it, reallocate it, use it or waste it.”
The dramatic saga of Commerce One’s fundamental Web Services patents has apparently concluded with a happy-enough ending. Based on pioneering work by Robert Glushko and Marty Tenenbaum, among many others, this patent portfolio began with work spun out of CommerceNet (the nonprofit consortium) as Veo Systems, Inc.
Last year, there was a court-ordered auction of the bankrupt company’s patents to a then-unidentified high bidder who some feared would begin to use the patents to shake down the nascent Web Services industry. In time, it appeared that Novell acquired those rights, and this week, a new consortium “of five technology and consumer electronics companies – I.B.M., Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony – who share an interest in promoting the spread and adoption of the free Linux operating system” named Open Invention Network made them available under royalty-free licenses.
A new patent-holding company, the Open Invention Network, is expected to begin operations today with the unusual business plan of buying certain patents and licensing them without charge.
The company has the financial backing of five technology and consumer electronics companies – I.B.M., Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony – who share an interest in promoting the spread and adoption of the free Linux operating system.
The chief executive of the Open Invention Network, Gerald Rosenthal, is a lawyer and a former director of I.B.M.’s intellectual property licensing program.
At I.B.M., Mr. Rosenthal led the lucrative technology-licensing program, which has routinely earned $1 billion or more in recent years. He will be pursuing a different strategy at the new company.
“By itself, this is not a money-making enterprise,” he said. “Our goal is to enable the Linux ecosystem to grow.”
As users or distributors of the free operating system, the five corporate supporters of the Open Invention Network all have a vested interest in fending off threats to Linux.
Legal challenges to Linux users have already surfaced, but none have slowed the adoption of Linux, which is used everywhere from corporate data centers to consumer devices like digital music players. Yet the legal risk, analysts say, is an uncertainty in the outlook for Linux.
In March 2003, I.B.M. was sued by the SCO Group, a Utah company, which said that I.B.M. had illegally contributed code to Linux from the Unix operating system. SCO had obtained the licensing rights to the Unix software and contends that Linux, a variant of Unix, violates its rights. SCO is seeking $1 billion in damages. I.B.M. denies the charges in the case, which is pending.
Another worry for Linux users is the rise of specialized intellectual property firms that acquire software patents, and then make money by licensing the patents as widely as possible.
That concern arose when the patents of a bankrupt dot-com company, Commerce One, were auctioned in December for $15.6 million.
Computing specialists worried that the patents dealt with technology that was broadly used in Internet commerce, and, if aggressively enforced, could result in many companies having to pay license fees. The winning bidder, however, was later identified as a lawyer representing JGR, a subsidiary of Novell.
Novell, a Linux distributor, is placing those patents in the new portfolio of the Open Invention Network, based in Pound Ridge, N.Y.
Patents owned by the Open Invention Network will be available free to any company, organization or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against others who have signed a license with the new patent-holding company. The Open Invention Network will continue to identify and acquire patents related to Linux.
Mr. Rosenthal sees the new company as a guardian of innovation in an environment for technology development.
“If you look at the Internet and Linux,” he said, “a lot of it has been the result of collaborative work without anyone really owning the intellectual property.”
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2005-11-11 21:24:032016-12-11 03:07:27Commerce One Web Services Patents Made Freely Available
The Z Lab is the research Centre of Z Productions. Since its move from Marseille to Cardiff (UK) in September 1995, the research and development programme focused on the co-evolution of humans and machines.
The machines are presented in art exhibitions, live performances and videos.
That’s right — these two robots are doing just what you think they’re doing. And I’m showing it! To the children! This is Venice, where some robots fuck and others simply weep. Didn’t somebody say that in Death in Venice? No, well, as the Venice Biennale proves, perhaps someone should have. Specifically, the Welsh pavilion at the biennale features an installation by artist Paul Granjon called “Robotarium.” In the exhibit, two ‘sexed’ robots wander around until they go into ‘heat,’ at which point they attempt to locate each other and engage in what passes for lusty intercourse among the Roomba set: The male then starts moving his penis while the female adjusts her position to facilitate the operation. The robots emit various sounds during the mating cycle.
“The Interplanetary Internet”
IEEE Spectrum (08/05) Vol. 42, No. 8, P. 30; Jackson, Joab
Ambitious plans for future space exploration cannot be realized without an effective communications network to link Earth with its far-flung explorers, and all of NASA is in agreement that the ideal scheme would be an Internet that spans between planets. But the space agency is split over how this can be achieved: One research group supports the use of existing Internet software and Internet protocols, while the other says wirelessly communicating across vast distances with such tools is a practical impossibility. Both groups looked for ways to address the two biggest obstacles of interplanetary communications–delays caused by distance and the handing-off problems associated with the need to go through multiple ground stations. The first group engineered a demo of the space IP network concept on the ill-fated Columbia’s last flight, in which a file was transferred between the Goddard Space Flight Center and the shuttle across a distance of about 600 kilometers. But a team of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) also worked on the problem, only to find that TCP could not be successfully modified for space travel. Their alternative solution is Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), an architecture that moves data across networks by using routers that retain a copy of every packet of data sent at least until the next node in the network acknowledges receipt, thus guaranteeing that no data is lost even if a node is offline. This scheme not only ensures that data reaches its destination, but it can improve robot explorers’ efficiency by requiring them to hang onto data only until it is received by the first node. The Goddard group’s concern is that a DTN model would be more costly and less capable because it eschews reusable, commercially developed Internet hardware and software.
CNET News.com http://www.news.com/
Academia’s quest for the ultimate search tool
By Stefanie Olsen
http://news.com.com/Academias quest for the ultimate search tool/2100-1038_3-5831050.html
Story last modified Mon Aug 15 04:00:00 PDT 2005
The University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies and is in talks with search giants including Google to join the project, CNET News.com has learned.
The project is one of many efforts at U.S. universities designed to address the explosive growth of Internet search and the complex issues that have arisen in the field.
U.C. Berkeley, birthplace of early search highflier Inktomi and the school where Google CEO Eric Schmidt got his computer science doctoral degree, is bringing together roughly 20 faculty members from various departments to cross-pollinate work on search technology, said Robert Wilensky, the center’s director. The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization.
News.context
What’s new:
Continuing a long tradition of academic exploration in Net technology, U.C. Berkeley will soon open an interdisciplinary center for developing new search technologies. The school is talking to a number of search companies, including Google, about participating.
Bottom line:
Drawing on the expertise of faculty from various departments, Berkeley’s center will focus on privacy, fraud, multimedia and personalization as these topics relate to the increasingly diverse and in-depth information available on the Internet.
More stories on this topic
“We want to solve the problems that have been engendered by the success of search,” Wilensky said in an interview. Wilensky is a professor of computer science and information management at Berkeley.
Plans are still being worked out for the center’s physical space, but Wilensky said he hopes designs will be completed within the next few months and the center opened early next year. He also said he’s talking to Google and other search players about membership.
“If you have 20 researchers interested in search, then getting them together where they are cross-fertilizing ideas, you make something bigger than its parts. You can create a nuclear reaction,” he said.
Google declined to comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)
The success of the $5 billion-a-year search-advertising business is fueling Internet research and development in many ways. The business has not only bolstered the likes of Yahoo and Google with billion-dollar annual revenues to be spent in new areas but it’s also revived hundreds of smaller dot-coms and inspired leagues of upstarts to venture into areas of specialty search.
Looking for the next generation to be born? There’s no better place to visit than academia, where today’s most successful search companies got their start. “A big source of new ideas comes out of universities,” said Geoff Yang, a venture capitalist at Redpoint Ventures, which has backed such companies as AskJeeves and TiVo.
Google and Yahoo were practically hatched in the same dorm room at Stanford University by two pairs of graduate students roughly six years apart. Lycos, a one-time search leader, came out of Carnegie Mellon University. Newer projects include Vivisimo, a clustering search tool from CMU professor Raul Valdes-Perez.
The search problems of today are different from those of five years ago. With books, scholarly papers and television programs being digitized and put online, the technology necessary to search through the material needs to be that much better. People need a way to trust the information they find and to ask more-complex questions with search tools so they can extract knowledge or ideas.
Jaime Carbonell, director of CMU’s Language Technologies Institute, said his research team is perfecting a technology for personalized search that would solve some of the privacy concerns surrounding the wide-scale collection of sensitive data, such as names and query histories. CMU’s project takes an auxiliary approach to software already being tested by commercial players like Yahoo and Google, which are collecting and storing search histories on their own networks.
CMU developed an add-on application that people download to a PC. It allows users to maintain and modify personal information, such as query history, preferences and favored sites, within a search profile. A search engine would be able to query the profile, along with the user’s search term, to deliver a set of tailored results each time, thereby keeping personal information off the network and on the client’s desktop.
Carbonell said the technology will be ready within a year, and CMU could either offer it as open-source software or license it to industry players.
CMU is also working under a government grant on a longer-term project called Javelin, focused on question-and-answer search technology. Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves and others already help people find quick answers for word definitions or encyclopedia facts like “What is the population of Los Angeles?” But for complex queries like “What is the cheapest flight from San Francisco to London?” or “Which university has the largest computer science department?” finding answers is still like doing long division.
“This is dynamic information,” Carbonell said. “You must parse the question, look for answers in multiple places and do a comparison. There are multiple steps, and we’re looking at how to do it in one step and provide a trace for the user.”
He said it will likely take another four of five years to build such functionality that can scale computationally for wide consumer usage and deliver the kind of efficiencies the government and Internet users expect. The universities of Texas and Pennsylvania are also exploring different approaches to the same problem.
Stanford continues in its role as a breeding ground for search projects. Since 2003, Google has purchased at least two projects hatched at Stanford–personalization search tool Kaltix and a project from Anna Patterson, a Stanford computer science research associate. Stanford associate professor Andrew Ng, among others, is working on artificial-intelligence techniques for extracting knowledge from text in a search index.
Other projects have turned into young businesses. SearchFox is a Web upstart co-founded in December by James Gibbons, a longtime Stanford professor and former dean of its School of Engineering. The privately held company has created a collaborative search engine that lets people share favorite links and create personalized search indices.
Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other universities are working to solve problems presented by the library of tomorrow, which will be largely digitized. Sifting through and organizing billions of digital documents will require new search technology.
MIT, for example, has teamed with the World Wide Web Consortium to create next-generation search technology using the Semantic Web, in an overarching project called Simile.
Under that umbrella, an MIT graduate student has developed a tool called Piggybank, software that plugs in to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser. Piggybank lets people surf the Web, tag visited sites with keywords and build a local, annotated collection that can then be published to a site called the bank. Therefore, it turns into a “Semantic Web browser” so users can expand the scope of understanding around existing information on the Web.
“A generalized data archive lets you make data work together in ways you couldn’t before,” said MacKenzie Smith, associate director for technology in the MIT libraries.
In a demonstration of what the tool could do, Piggybank integrated data from Boston.com, a movie site and Google maps to show where coffee shops are located relative to restaurants and movie theaters. The tool also lets users save such information to a “database” record (rather than a bookmark) so that it can later be searched by its attributes or designated keywords.
MIT hopes to deploy the technology and other advances from Simile for use by faculty and students.
Indie studio takes wing
Graphical plans for Microsoft
Sensors, sensors, everywhere
Studying Linux in Microsoft lab
Big search on campus
Previous Next
At Berkeley’s center, Wilensky has ambitious plans to solve problems within a broader definition of search. That means analyzing and organizing diverse forms of information–anything from images and video to e-commerce–and helping people synthesize it and extract knowledge.
One major area of development will be in trust and privacy. For example, how believable is the content dug up on Google or how do you know an eBay seller is truly trustworthy?
Wilensky said his group has proved that on average, eBay seller ratings are skewed based on what’s called retaliatory ratings in which people slam those who slam them. Others with black marks will disappear only to re-emerge later with a clean slate. As a result, Wilensky said, his team has built an algorithm called “EM trust” (for expectation maximization) using a statistical model for rating how honest an online seller may or may not be. That development might be applied to Web sites as well.
The center will be modeled after Berkeley’s Wireless Research Center in downtown Berkeley, which enjoys the backing of big mobile companies. It will include such faculty as Jitendra Malik, professor and chair of U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering, and David Forsyth, professor of computer sciences, who are both working on computer-vision research.
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2005-10-18 01:25:312016-12-11 03:09:07Yahoo/UC Berkeley tie up to form new ‘lablet’
CN Alumni startup Renkoo praised in SJ Merc
Event Driven Architectures, The Now EconomyCongrats! – an amazing mention for a pre-release service… Looks like the buzz campaign is working well for Adam and Joyce, and a tip of the hat to the whole Renkoo team for making such a polished impression on no less than Mike Langberg.
InternetNews also covered the demo, with a zinger from Esthr at the end.
Online software, services taking new look at how we manage time
By Mike Langberg, Mercury News
Wed, Dec. 07, 2005
… Of the several start-ups presenting at When 2.0, my favorite was Renkoo.
The Palo Alto company plans to launch an online service early next year that will provide a shared space for small groups to plan events.
If you want to invite a list of friends to a party with a fixed time and place, it’s easy to use the existing Evite service. But Evite doesn’t work well when you’re not sure what you want to do, or what your friends prefer.
With Renkoo, you can send a query by e-mail, instant message or cell-phone text message, perhaps asking, “Who wants to go for a hike this weekend? What’s the best time for you, and where do you want go?”
Your friends then reply with their preferences, and the group goes back and forth — with the dialogue recorded on a single Web page — until there’s a consensus.
Renkoo, named for a form of Japanese poetry called renku or renga where people take turns writing verses, will be free to users and hopes to make money through ads and sponsorships.
Adam Rifkin, Renkoo’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said he aims to solve a basic problem: “You can never get enough information on what your friends are doing.”
While it’s much too soon to know whether Renkoo or any of the other bold proposals at When 2.0 will succeed, the vision at least is clear.
In a few years, we’ll effortlessly manage our time by entering appointments on whatever Internet-connected electronic device is at hand — a computer or a cell phone or a personal digital assistant — and those appointments will instantly appear on the calendars of others we designate.
If we change the time of an appointment, it will instantly update the calendars of others.
Public and group events we want to track, from upcoming rock concerts and professional hockey games to our children’s soccer team schedules, will automatically pop into our calendars.
There are lots of technical, security and privacy issues yet to resolve, but the benefits are big enough that families may ultimately be freed from running their lives through scraps of paper stuck to refrigerator doors.
Has Time’s Time Come?
By David Needle
Rather than manage events already planned, Renkoo focuses on making events happen. “We bring friends together in the process,” CEO Adam Rifkin told internetnews.com.
He said services like Evite are for larger group functions that already have a fixed time and place. With Renkoo there is, among other features, a real-time voting mechanism, so people can decide on a time for lunch, movie or other gathering. The original planner can decide when to rein in the votes and chatter in order to set the details of where and when. Renkoo also accepts SMS text messaging, and it’s experimenting with links to instant messaging services as part of the site.
While many of the vendors were optimistic that they could break new ground on the consumer side, at least one attendee was skeptical.
“These things are great if you’re an extrovert,” said Chris Nesladek, a user interface designer for Intuit. “But you’re only organized if you have responsibility. For a lot of 18- to 24-year-olds, having a calendar or updating your schedule doesn’t matter.
For young and old alike, Dyson had this comment worth considering in a recent edition of her Release 1.0 newsletter: “You can’t create time. You can only steal it, reallocate it, use it or waste it.”
Commerce One Web Services Patents Made Freely Available
Commerce, InnovationThe dramatic saga of Commerce One’s fundamental Web Services patents has apparently concluded with a happy-enough ending. Based on pioneering work by Robert Glushko and Marty Tenenbaum, among many others, this patent portfolio began with work spun out of CommerceNet (the nonprofit consortium) as Veo Systems, Inc.
Last year, there was a court-ordered auction of the bankrupt company’s patents to a then-unidentified high bidder who some feared would begin to use the patents to shake down the nascent Web Services industry. In time, it appeared that Novell acquired those rights, and this week, a new consortium “of five technology and consumer electronics companies – I.B.M., Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony – who share an interest in promoting the spread and adoption of the free Linux operating system” named Open Invention Network made them available under royalty-free licenses.
Company to Start Offering Free Use of Patents It Holds
November 10, 2005
By STEVE LOHR
A new patent-holding company, the Open Invention Network, is expected to begin operations today with the unusual business plan of buying certain patents and licensing them without charge.
The company has the financial backing of five technology and consumer electronics companies – I.B.M., Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony – who share an interest in promoting the spread and adoption of the free Linux operating system.
The chief executive of the Open Invention Network, Gerald Rosenthal, is a lawyer and a former director of I.B.M.’s intellectual property licensing program.
At I.B.M., Mr. Rosenthal led the lucrative technology-licensing program, which has routinely earned $1 billion or more in recent years. He will be pursuing a different strategy at the new company.
“By itself, this is not a money-making enterprise,” he said. “Our goal is to enable the Linux ecosystem to grow.”
As users or distributors of the free operating system, the five corporate supporters of the Open Invention Network all have a vested interest in fending off threats to Linux.
Legal challenges to Linux users have already surfaced, but none have slowed the adoption of Linux, which is used everywhere from corporate data centers to consumer devices like digital music players. Yet the legal risk, analysts say, is an uncertainty in the outlook for Linux.
In March 2003, I.B.M. was sued by the SCO Group, a Utah company, which said that I.B.M. had illegally contributed code to Linux from the Unix operating system. SCO had obtained the licensing rights to the Unix software and contends that Linux, a variant of Unix, violates its rights. SCO is seeking $1 billion in damages. I.B.M. denies the charges in the case, which is pending.
Another worry for Linux users is the rise of specialized intellectual property firms that acquire software patents, and then make money by licensing the patents as widely as possible.
That concern arose when the patents of a bankrupt dot-com company, Commerce One, were auctioned in December for $15.6 million.
Computing specialists worried that the patents dealt with technology that was broadly used in Internet commerce, and, if aggressively enforced, could result in many companies having to pay license fees. The winning bidder, however, was later identified as a lawyer representing JGR, a subsidiary of Novell.
Novell, a Linux distributor, is placing those patents in the new portfolio of the Open Invention Network, based in Pound Ridge, N.Y.
Patents owned by the Open Invention Network will be available free to any company, organization or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against others who have signed a license with the new patent-holding company. The Open Invention Network will continue to identify and acquire patents related to Linux.
Mr. Rosenthal sees the new company as a guardian of innovation in an environment for technology development.
“If you look at the Internet and Linux,” he said, “a lot of it has been the result of collaborative work without anyone really owning the intellectual property.”
The *Other* zLab…
InnovationZ Lab
The Z Lab is the research Centre of Z Productions. Since its move from Marseille to Cardiff (UK) in September 1995, the research and development programme focused on the co-evolution of humans and machines.
The machines are presented in art exhibitions, live performances and videos.
Sexy Robots in Venice | Gridskipper
That’s right — these two robots are doing just what you think they’re doing. And I’m showing it! To the children! This is Venice, where some robots fuck and others simply weep. Didn’t somebody say that in Death in Venice? No, well, as the Venice Biennale proves, perhaps someone should have. Specifically, the Welsh pavilion at the biennale features an installation by artist Paul Granjon called “Robotarium.” In the exhibit, two ‘sexed’ robots wander around until they go into ‘heat,’ at which point they attempt to locate each other and engage in what passes for lusty intercourse among the Roomba set: The male then starts moving his penis while the female adjusts her position to facilitate the operation. The robots emit various sounds during the mating cycle.
Interplanetary Internetworking report in IEEE Spectrum
DecentralizationI wonder if Google wil be more involved with Vint Cerf’s recent decision to join them…
ACM News Service
“The Interplanetary Internet”
IEEE Spectrum (08/05) Vol. 42, No. 8, P. 30; Jackson, Joab
Ambitious plans for future space exploration cannot be realized without an effective communications network to link Earth with its far-flung explorers, and all of NASA is in agreement that the ideal scheme would be an Internet that spans between planets. But the space agency is split over how this can be achieved: One research group supports the use of existing Internet software and Internet protocols, while the other says wirelessly communicating across vast distances with such tools is a practical impossibility. Both groups looked for ways to address the two biggest obstacles of interplanetary communications–delays caused by distance and the handing-off problems associated with the need to go through multiple ground stations. The first group engineered a demo of the space IP network concept on the ill-fated Columbia’s last flight, in which a file was transferred between the Goddard Space Flight Center and the shuttle across a distance of about 600 kilometers. But a team of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) also worked on the problem, only to find that TCP could not be successfully modified for space travel. Their alternative solution is Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), an architecture that moves data across networks by using routers that retain a copy of every packet of data sent at least until the next node in the network acknowledges receipt, thus guaranteeing that no data is lost even if a node is offline. This scheme not only ensures that data reaches its destination, but it can improve robot explorers’ efficiency by requiring them to hang onto data only until it is received by the first node. The Goddard group’s concern is that a DTN model would be more costly and less capable because it eschews reusable, commercially developed Internet hardware and software.
Yahoo/UC Berkeley tie up to form new ‘lablet’
Innovation[print version] Academia’s quest for the ultimate search tool | CNET News.com
CNET News.com http://www.news.com/
Academia’s quest for the ultimate search tool
By Stefanie Olsen
http://news.com.com/Academias quest for the ultimate search tool/2100-1038_3-5831050.html
Story last modified Mon Aug 15 04:00:00 PDT 2005
The University of California at Berkeley is creating an interdisciplinary center for advanced search technologies and is in talks with search giants including Google to join the project, CNET News.com has learned.
The project is one of many efforts at U.S. universities designed to address the explosive growth of Internet search and the complex issues that have arisen in the field.
U.C. Berkeley, birthplace of early search highflier Inktomi and the school where Google CEO Eric Schmidt got his computer science doctoral degree, is bringing together roughly 20 faculty members from various departments to cross-pollinate work on search technology, said Robert Wilensky, the center’s director. The principal areas of focus: privacy, fraud, multimedia search and personalization.
News.context
What’s new:
Continuing a long tradition of academic exploration in Net technology, U.C. Berkeley will soon open an interdisciplinary center for developing new search technologies. The school is talking to a number of search companies, including Google, about participating.
Bottom line:
Drawing on the expertise of faculty from various departments, Berkeley’s center will focus on privacy, fraud, multimedia and personalization as these topics relate to the increasingly diverse and in-depth information available on the Internet.
More stories on this topic
“We want to solve the problems that have been engendered by the success of search,” Wilensky said in an interview. Wilensky is a professor of computer science and information management at Berkeley.
Plans are still being worked out for the center’s physical space, but Wilensky said he hopes designs will be completed within the next few months and the center opened early next year. He also said he’s talking to Google and other search players about membership.
“If you have 20 researchers interested in search, then getting them together where they are cross-fertilizing ideas, you make something bigger than its parts. You can create a nuclear reaction,” he said.
Google declined to comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)
The success of the $5 billion-a-year search-advertising business is fueling Internet research and development in many ways. The business has not only bolstered the likes of Yahoo and Google with billion-dollar annual revenues to be spent in new areas but it’s also revived hundreds of smaller dot-coms and inspired leagues of upstarts to venture into areas of specialty search.
Looking for the next generation to be born? There’s no better place to visit than academia, where today’s most successful search companies got their start. “A big source of new ideas comes out of universities,” said Geoff Yang, a venture capitalist at Redpoint Ventures, which has backed such companies as AskJeeves and TiVo.
Google and Yahoo were practically hatched in the same dorm room at Stanford University by two pairs of graduate students roughly six years apart. Lycos, a one-time search leader, came out of Carnegie Mellon University. Newer projects include Vivisimo, a clustering search tool from CMU professor Raul Valdes-Perez.
The search problems of today are different from those of five years ago. With books, scholarly papers and television programs being digitized and put online, the technology necessary to search through the material needs to be that much better. People need a way to trust the information they find and to ask more-complex questions with search tools so they can extract knowledge or ideas.
Jaime Carbonell, director of CMU’s Language Technologies Institute, said his research team is perfecting a technology for personalized search that would solve some of the privacy concerns surrounding the wide-scale collection of sensitive data, such as names and query histories. CMU’s project takes an auxiliary approach to software already being tested by commercial players like Yahoo and Google, which are collecting and storing search histories on their own networks.
CMU developed an add-on application that people download to a PC. It allows users to maintain and modify personal information, such as query history, preferences and favored sites, within a search profile. A search engine would be able to query the profile, along with the user’s search term, to deliver a set of tailored results each time, thereby keeping personal information off the network and on the client’s desktop.
Carbonell said the technology will be ready within a year, and CMU could either offer it as open-source software or license it to industry players.
CMU is also working under a government grant on a longer-term project called Javelin, focused on question-and-answer search technology. Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves and others already help people find quick answers for word definitions or encyclopedia facts like “What is the population of Los Angeles?” But for complex queries like “What is the cheapest flight from San Francisco to London?” or “Which university has the largest computer science department?” finding answers is still like doing long division.
“This is dynamic information,” Carbonell said. “You must parse the question, look for answers in multiple places and do a comparison. There are multiple steps, and we’re looking at how to do it in one step and provide a trace for the user.”
He said it will likely take another four of five years to build such functionality that can scale computationally for wide consumer usage and deliver the kind of efficiencies the government and Internet users expect. The universities of Texas and Pennsylvania are also exploring different approaches to the same problem.
Stanford continues in its role as a breeding ground for search projects. Since 2003, Google has purchased at least two projects hatched at Stanford–personalization search tool Kaltix and a project from Anna Patterson, a Stanford computer science research associate. Stanford associate professor Andrew Ng, among others, is working on artificial-intelligence techniques for extracting knowledge from text in a search index.
Other projects have turned into young businesses. SearchFox is a Web upstart co-founded in December by James Gibbons, a longtime Stanford professor and former dean of its School of Engineering. The privately held company has created a collaborative search engine that lets people share favorite links and create personalized search indices.
Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other universities are working to solve problems presented by the library of tomorrow, which will be largely digitized. Sifting through and organizing billions of digital documents will require new search technology.
MIT, for example, has teamed with the World Wide Web Consortium to create next-generation search technology using the Semantic Web, in an overarching project called Simile.
Under that umbrella, an MIT graduate student has developed a tool called Piggybank, software that plugs in to the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox Web browser. Piggybank lets people surf the Web, tag visited sites with keywords and build a local, annotated collection that can then be published to a site called the bank. Therefore, it turns into a “Semantic Web browser” so users can expand the scope of understanding around existing information on the Web.
“A generalized data archive lets you make data work together in ways you couldn’t before,” said MacKenzie Smith, associate director for technology in the MIT libraries.
In a demonstration of what the tool could do, Piggybank integrated data from Boston.com, a movie site and Google maps to show where coffee shops are located relative to restaurants and movie theaters. The tool also lets users save such information to a “database” record (rather than a bookmark) so that it can later be searched by its attributes or designated keywords.
MIT hopes to deploy the technology and other advances from Simile for use by faculty and students.
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At Berkeley’s center, Wilensky has ambitious plans to solve problems within a broader definition of search. That means analyzing and organizing diverse forms of information–anything from images and video to e-commerce–and helping people synthesize it and extract knowledge.
One major area of development will be in trust and privacy. For example, how believable is the content dug up on Google or how do you know an eBay seller is truly trustworthy?
Wilensky said his group has proved that on average, eBay seller ratings are skewed based on what’s called retaliatory ratings in which people slam those who slam them. Others with black marks will disappear only to re-emerge later with a clean slate. As a result, Wilensky said, his team has built an algorithm called “EM trust” (for expectation maximization) using a statistical model for rating how honest an online seller may or may not be. That development might be applied to Web sites as well.
The center will be modeled after Berkeley’s Wireless Research Center in downtown Berkeley, which enjoys the backing of big mobile companies. It will include such faculty as Jitendra Malik, professor and chair of U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering, and David Forsyth, professor of computer sciences, who are both working on computer-vision research.