Most universities in USA have become very sensitive to protecting their intellectual prperty and have built strong departments to make sure that enough faculty members are sensitive to applying for intellectual property protection and then trying to license this to make money. As usually happens, any thing that starts — good or bad — somehow gets copied in most of the rest of the world. So because US universities started doing this many countries are trying to do the same.

In my research area — computer science and information technology — most patents are good for defensive reasons and hence it makes sense for companies to patent their ideas. But it is well known that it is not easy to build companies or products based on your patents or even sue some established company based on that. This is because software — or algorithms — are easily modified and changed and presented as a different idea. Interestingly, even our own technology transfer department told me that they are now being cautious about patenting algorithmic ideas due to cost/reward structure.

Interesting enough the legal people at most universities reviewing contracts and grants to faculty have not realized — though they work under the same office and maybe under the same management — this thing and they still want to argue who will own intellectual property and commercialization rights till researchers get tired and ready to cancel their research projects.

I don’t know how this culture started in USA. Based on my readings — Universities are in the business of knowledge creation, distribution, and dissmination; not in the business of building businesses. I hope some enlightened education administrators see the light and make university’s primary mission of ‘knowledge’ once again primary leaving ‘money’ business as primary to those who are suppose to be in that.

General Updates | No Comments »

Twitter introduced Lists — called TwitterLists – and they are already being used for different applications.
These lists are proving that you give a simple tool to people and they use lots of creativity and come up with all kind of interesting applications.

One of the most novel application that I read about is the list for countries. They want to create list for countries and have already started the process. That means in one list you could address all people on Twitter from a country. Interesting idea — a sure broadcast mechanism to cover all the people. Once you have such lists, you could put it for different uses, including for things like reverse 911 — say to inform everybody about an emergency situation.

Entrepreneurism | 1 Comment »

One of the agenda items during the Workshop on Connected Multimedia in Hangzhou was to take participants to an area where they tried to recreate Song Dynasty experience by creating architecture, clothing and other activities from that area. This is a good example of Experience Economy.

But the most important activity there was a show. This Las Vegas style show had amazing stage setting for performing plays and musicals of various kinds – even International dances – including a piece from India on the theme of a dance from Devdas. This is one of the most impressive shows I ever attended – if I had time, I would go there multiple time.

The most impressive aspect of the show was true combination of some of the most modern technology. In many performances stage would have screens at multiple levels with videos presented on those from different levels to create a kind of 3-dimension effect. This whole thing was part of the stage and the video was very well choreographed with what the actors or dancers were doing on the stage. The whole effect was a very immersive experience. To make this effect even more immersive they even simulate rain experience for audiences and at one point for showing ‘tea’ from the local region, dancers brought and distributed real tea in audiences. This whole thing was spectacular because of technology and otherwise. I felt like the concept of Karaoke was being taken to video Karaoke where all actors were performing to the background videos.

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A drunken scientist loses the keys to his house and is looking for them under a lamppost. Another scientist comes over and asks what he’s doing.

“I’m looking for my keys” he says. “I lost them over there”.

The new scientist looks puzzled. “Then why are you looking for them all the way over here?

“Because the light is so much better here. We can formulate and solve the search problem much better here”.

Finding the explanation reasonable, the second scientist starts looking for the keys under the lamppost.

The third scientist comes and . . . Joins the search under the lamppost.
Soon there are hundreds of scientists looking for the keys under the lamppost where the problem can be defined better.

After long rigorous and exhaustive efforts they conclude that the problem of finding lost keys is an unsolvable problem.

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Today was the workshop day at ACM MM 2009. I felt that we had too many workshops. I gave keynote at one and presented a paper at another. So whole day was shuttling between the two workshops. I did enjoy preparing for my Social Media workshop Keynote talk. Good news was that Vivek Singh, my student, won the best paper award in that workshop (I and Mohan Kankanhalli are co-authors, but full credit to Vivek). Vivek also won earlier this week the best student paper award (of course I am co-author -and there I can take partial credit) at conference on Situation awareness in Washington DC. So he is really doing well.

Tomorrow morning I will leave for Hangzhou for another workshop and will leave from Shanghai.

Beijing trip is more or less over. It has been a good trip. Met many people and felt good that event-based thinking is catching on and so is the use of context. I feel that for the progress in Multimedia, these two things are very important.

Technical Thoughts | No Comments »