In organizing photos, grotagging is slowly moving towards center — it is becoming a key organizing mechanism for organizing photos. I recently bought a real serious camera with built in GPS — the Nikon Coolpix P6000 — and it is well known that most phone cameras soon will have geotags — latitude and logitudes — available. Since time was already available on photos, this makes photos relate to ‘events’ very easy. Combine this with inverse mapping feature — ‘What’s here?’ — of Google maps and you now have a potent mechanism to organize your photos.

Flickr mobile uses geortagging to show you pictures taken at newby places — a real nice feature for many tourists.

General Updates, Experiential Computing | No Comments »

Google maps have introducesd a nice feature on their maps. You can rightclick at any point and then select ‘What’s here?’ to get information at that point. This feature uses the resolution of the map that you are viewing. As their blog says:

This feature takes into account the zoom level you’re looking at, and gives you the most appropriate geographical entity at that point.

I found names or restaurants in a bldg to just lat-long in the middle of the ocean.
This combined with the gps systems becoming available on many devices, will make location of events very easy and possible. I see many interesting possibilities using this feature for creating EventWeb.

Experiential Computing | 1 Comment »

Technology Review reports on progress in Named Entity extraction research that will make search engines more powerful and closer to answering questions.

What is really interesting is that search engines started with only ’string matching’ or key words but are slowly becoming more ’semantically rich’ allowing people to start getting answers rather than just simple pointers to sources containing keywords.

Prospecting Information | No Comments »

In the passage of your life, you meet some people who make a lasting impression on you and you want them to be always part of your life. Dave Lehman was one such individual. A very creative and entrepreneurial individual, full of ideas and optimism, with a strong ‘can do’ attitude. He was a person who was equally at home at IBM or Kodak as well as at Praja. Though I got a distinct feel that he liked start-up environment better than a big corporation.

He had a long bout with cancer. Cancer of many kinds, ranging from simple skin to liver. Finally in the company of all his family members he closed his eyes for the last time a few days ago at his residence in Florida.

I will miss yourr counsel, friendly telephone calls, and warm concerns about our family, Dave. I am happy that you had a very rich and rewarding life. But I will miss you.

Technical Thoughts, Personal | No Comments »

The reaction of many people to real time search is: what is new in this. Google already does it very fast so why can it not make its search faster? Another common reaction, particularly from my academic researcher friends — many are accomplished researchers in multimedia, databases, and related areas — is so what is really new in this? There is nothing new. This is a variation of a publish-subscribe paradigm that is old and can be scaled to do real time search. Interestingly enough, many of my these friends who are used to citing old research had not seen Twitter while discussing with me that there is nothing new in it. Really surprising — how people used to citing research could fail even to look at the site before forming opinions about it.

This surprised me a lot and I started thinking about it. Why does this happen? What was particularly surprising was the strong (negative) opinion by my two close friends who are very bright and thorough in their work. That forced me to think about it.

It appears that many top researchers really like, as argued by Thomas Kuhn in his book, to believe in the existing paradigm. So when a new idea appears, researchers are reluctant to accept it — so in place of thinking what could be done with it going forward, they like to see how this idea is like some of the old ideas. It is always easy to consider that a new idea is a variation of something that already existed, because in some aspects it will always be like that. But more useful exercise is to look forward and see how this idea could lead to new things, new ideas, or solution of new problems. By thinking that this is nothing but a variation of old ideas, we really miss on exciting aspects of what could be done.

The famous quote by Albert Einstein captured this quite well — but we always forget that:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Experiential Computing | 1 Comment »