Nicolas and Richard write about the start of our project about Blogs for Computer Science Tutors. We are still at the very beginning. In the first phase, Nicolas will be investigating which blog engine is best for this particular use. In the second phase, we’ll need to setup tools for information analysis and aggregation to support the community.

While this is a small, local initiative, we are doing something to push eLearning forward! If we can help tutors with blogging, then this will be a good step toward giving UQAM students blogs… (warning: this is blue sky thinking)

On a related topic, Nicolas (in French) talks about how he intends to learn about RSS even though he is not a computer scientist.

This tells me something: RSS is to Semantic Web (for lack of a better term) what HTML is to the Web. HTML was a technical format never meant for non-technical people, yet, designers all over the world have learned HTML and learned it well. HTML was simple and limited, but it was enough. RSS is the same: it was meant for a few Netscape engineers and now, everyone from the average lawyer to the sociologist is studying the RSS formats. RSS is simple and limited, but it is powerful enough for separating content from presentation on the Web.

I noticed a few weeks ago a feature in Word that allows you to request that important sentences be outlined. As it turns out, there is a free tool to do this called the Open Text Summarizer. My ex-colleague Peter Turney did related work and has a patent on such a technique.

I really like Yuhong Yan. She’s one of my favorite collaborator of all times. It is quite strange too because we were colleagues for a long time and never collaborated much at all. Then, I left my NRC job, I went to live something like 700 km away and since then, we’ve never been closer. Maybe this says something about how efficient technology has become.

In any case, if you are a graduate student or are thinking about becoming one, you should read Yuhong Yan’s Tips to Graduate Students. The mere fact that she put this page together is enough to make me like her! I find that very few schools care enough about their student to put together similar advice. It seems to be enough for many professors to just throw students into research and see who swims and who sinks. My advice to graduate students would be to seek supervisors who will give you such advice. I think Yuhong is probably a good supervisor.

She also posted a copy of an unpublished paper we wrote together. Myself, I tend to keep unpublished papers private, but at the same time, I keep arguing that researchers should promote their papers more agressively, so I’m not going to complain about what Yuhong did.

Those who have been reading this blog know about inDiscover. This is a collaborative filtering/recommender system project I did with Sean McGrath. This is a projet part of a larger initiative with Harold Boley and his Semantic Web Lab.

In any case, this was a little project out in a corner of the web. Then Bell Canada contacted us and now, there is a prominent link to inDiscover on msn.ca (sympatico high speed) front-page.

Just in case it ever goes away, here’s a snapshot:

(Usual disclaimers apply: I didn’t ask permission before taking the snapshot… blablabla…)

7th IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology (IEEE CEC’05)
July 19-22, 2005, TU München, Munich, Germany

http://cec05.in.tum.de

IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology (CEC’05) is the 7th annual event (formerly WECWIS) and the flagship annual conference of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on E-Commerce. CEC is a primary forum for the exchange of information regarding advancements in the state of the art of theory and practice in E-Commerce and Web-based Information Systems, as well as to identify emerging research topics and define the future of E-Commerce technology, applications and service-oriented computing. The conference focuses on IT infrastructures and new technologies to facilitate dynamic e-business and Web-based information systems.