Not many people would have read the SIGGRAPH 2007 paper on "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing" (pdf). So I love how the researchers used YouTube to present their ideas. As this post (original source of the story) indicates, Dr. Shamir was immediately hired by Adobe. Cool algorithm and great delivery. Definitely part of the future on how scholarly/research works should be shared with the rest of the community.

(YouTube video)

As my sweet friend Colette says, it was a beautiful day.

Here's a poem to finish it :-) (by lemn sissay)

My very good friend Colette is visiting from Vancouver for few days. Last night we agreed to wake up at 3.30am to see the lunar eclipse from my balcony. The sky was clear (amazing for Seattle :-) and the view was fantastic; something like this...

(credit: Astronomy for Beginners)

The last few days have been great. Most of people in Microsoft and in my group are away, so it's a good time to relax and catch up with email (NO MEETINGS... wooo hooo:-) My good pal Chris Smith was also around on Sunday night. It was really great to see him!

After posting my last entry on the ThinkWeek paper, it occurred to me that I haven't mentioned the fact that my team, Technical Computing @ Microsoft, is part of Microsoft Research now. Yes, exciting times even though not part of my plan when I joined Microsoft. You see, two years ago I opted to join a product group and declined an offer I had to join Microsoft Research. Now, here I am :-) Oh well.

The reason we are part of Microsoft Research is because the role of Tony Hey, our Corporate Vice President, has been greatly expanded and he is now responsible for the 'External Research' organization within Microsoft Research (we don't yet have a dedicated web page but that's coming soon I guess). Our Technical Computing @ Microsoft team is just one of the teams reporting to him now. The vision and our interactions with scientists/researchers all around the world remains induct and we have a clear mandate from him to execute, execute, execute on that vision :-)

I now have Microsoft Research web page (it's a placeholder for the moment... will try to update it soon).

Today Roger Barga* and I submitted a ThinkWeek** paper. It's my first since I joined Microsoft and I am really excited about it. Roger of course has submitted a number in his long and successful career in Microsoft Research.

I thought that my first ThinkWeek paper would be on 'data networking' and 'knowledge mashups', since I've been writing that paper for months now; it's better this way though since I got to work closely with Roger and learn a lot about how ThinkWeek papers should be written. I seriously enjoy working with Roger. We are now executing towards implementing a common vision, and we are starting to produce some truly amazing stuff (at least I am excited about our plans:-).

Let's hope that our paper will reach Bill Gates or that our senior executives will agree with our vision.

* Roger is the senior architect in my team and he's an extremely clever guy (don't trust his MSR web page... he just hasn't updated his title/role since he joined the Technical Computing @ Microsoft team).

** Bill Gates allocates a week of his time (twice or three times in a year, I think) to read papers that anyone in the company can write. The papers do go through filtering and a review process (with the comments published for anyone to read). The subject can be anything really... new ideas, business opportunities, evaluation/review of a technical space, etc.

We first met on October 1st, 1996, when we ended up sharing an office in Newcastle while starting our PhDs (we started on the same date and we finished 4 years later with only few hours difference... he finished ahead of me by few hours but I got through the viva first :-). 11 years have passed and he still can't pronounce my last name but, I must admit, he does a much better job than most non-Greek native speakers :-) (just joking mate)

He's still ugly but even so does a great job at giving a high-level overview of MEST, SSDL, and messaging in a service-oriented world. Ah... good memories... the endless discussions on how to build scalable, service-oriented systems, how much WSDL 2.0 sucks, all-things REST, etc. I miss those days but I am trying to move on :-) I am not sure I agree with all of his explanations but I don't think I would have done a better job. Really great to see him online. I am probably seeing him live in a couple of weeks when I visit London.

Anyway... go watch.

It's done!

It's been like this for 2 days now :-( and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. WHERE IS THE SUMMER???

HPTS is not going to be the same with Jim still missing. However, I am looking forward to attending and contributing, through my participation, to this excellent meeting that my Microsoft mentor had been organizing all these years. I just received the official invitation from Pat, who took over as the General Chair. See you there!

I read the article on "Red Shift" today. "Red-shift" is Greg Papadopoulos' attempt to put a name to what we are all seeing happening with "cloud/utility computing". While the article contains some nice examples of companies actually making use of cloud infrastructure services, I find the attempt to use scientific language to characterize the trend amusing.

Yes, we are moving in an era where monolithic middleware platforms for distributed computing are going to be a thing of the past, where the Web and the services offered through it are the 'components', the building blocks for our application needs. IT infrastructure is indeed moving to the cloud and there are only very few companies (i.e. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, perhaps Sun) that can build and support the fabric to support this upcoming outsourcing.

I have been talking about this trend for some time with people and I am really lucky to be in a team and a manager who believe in it and is actually investing in ways to revolutionize the way research is done on the cloud. Interesting times.

However, it is not without concerns that I work towards a vision of "research on the cloud". The concentration of power to very few companies at a global scale troubles me. What will happen when the most important companies in the world have transitioned their IT operations to the cloud? The hosting companies will have tremendous power and responsibility. Their infrastructure will be powering the world's economy. What will happen if that power is abused? What will happen if one of those utility computing companies is mismanaged or collapses? What will happen when they decide to pull the plug on some services because they are just not economical anymore?

I think there is a danger that very few companies (mine included) are going to accumulate too much power because the world's computing infrastructure will depend on them. Can we handle that as a society? As I said, interesting times... but troubling at the same time.

Lee did an excellent job in putting this together! It looks extremely interesting. You can download the entire issue (in PDF).

Introduction

Lee Dirks, Microsoft Corporation
Tony Hey, Microsoft Corporation

The Shape of the Scientific Article in The Developing Cyberinfrastructure

Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

Next-Generation Implications of Open Access

Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University

Web 2.0 in Science

Timo Hannay, Nature Publishing

Reinventing Scholarly Communication for the Electronic Age

J. Lynn Fink, University of California, San Diego
Philip E. Bourne, University of California, San Diego

Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication

Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Carl Lagoze, Cornell University

Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web

Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics

Tim Brody, University of Southampton, UK
Les Carr, University of Southampton, UK
Yves Gingras, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Chawki Hajjem, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, UK; Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Alma Swan, University of Southampton, UK; Key Perspectives

The Law as Cyberinfrastructure

Brian Fitzgerald, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Kylie Pappalardo, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Perspectives

Cyberinfrastructure For Knowledge Sharing

John Wilbanks, Scientific Commons

Perspectives

Trends Favoring Open Access

Peter Suber, Earlham College

Yes, it was about time it happened to me :-( I guess I should be happy that Microsoft decided to set aside $1B!!! to help consumers like me with this problem. But... $1B!!! Although my console is out of warranty, they are fixing it at no cost. However, no one said that I won't have a console for more than a month, which means no access to my Media Center server and all my videos, music, photographs from my living room :-( Not a big problem, since I am never around anyway :-)

This is just very cool. Now, if we had interoperability between all online ID providers (including Open ID)! That'd be just fab.

My team has been interacting with OCLC over the last few months. Great group of folks. Lee Dirks (himself a great guy), our Director of Scholarly Communications, has been putting us in touch with various publishing companies (hence my recent interactions with Nature Publishing*), repository providers (we'll have more to say about this space soon), libraries (Lee's great passion and domain of expertise). It's a truly fascinating space and a great application area for many modern technologies (e.g. large-scale data mining, social- and data-networking, collaboration over the Web, sharing, interoperability between repositories, etc. etc.).

I am really glad that the OCLC folks also found their interactions with us interesting :-)

* This reminds me that I promised to do something with Connotea and Word 07. Will work on it soon.

I have been bad at following blogs recently. Today, I revisited some of my favorite ones and saw the reference to Amazon's upcoming 'Dynamo' service in Werner's blog. This is very very interesting. I guess it's going to be a service on the cloud for application state management. I wonder whether they are going to have some synchronization/versioning story so as to enable offline access.

And then, the Flexible Payment Service.

We knew already that Amazon was becoming a Web platform company so I am not surprised with these services. Very cool.

Update: For those not following the comments on my blog, Werner updated his blog entry to clarify that it's just a write up of an internal service. It'd been cool to offer distributed application state management (not just data storage like S3) as a service, though :-) I am looking forward to the paper.

I am sorry but that's just stupid. I like the iPhone as much as the next guy, but com'on...

(also note Dr. Fox's goal of "improving workplace efficiency" :-|)

Surgically alters thumbs to better use iPhone

Written by James Benfly

Wednesday, 08 August 2007

Thomas Martel, 28, of Bonnie Brae is a big guy. So he has a hard time using the features on ever-shrinking user interfaces on devices like his new iPhone. At least, he did, until he had his thumbs surgically altered in a revolutionary new surgical technique known as "whittling."

"From my old Treo, to my Blackberry, to this new iPhone, I had a hard time hitting the right buttons, and I always lost those little styluses," explains Martel. "Sure, the procedure was expensive, but when I think of all the time I save by being able to use modern handhelds so much faster, I really think the surgery will pay for itself in ten to fifteen years. And what it's saving me in frustration - that's priceless."

"This is really, on the edge sort of stuff," explains Dr. Robert Fox Spars, who worked on developing the procedure. "We're turning plastic surgery from something that people use in service of vanity, to a real tool for improving workplace efficiency."

The procedure involved making a small incision into both thumbs and shaving down the bones, followed by careful muscular alteration and modification of the fingernails. While Martel's new thumbs now appear small and effeminate in comparison to his otherwise very large hands, he says he can still lift "pretty much anything I could lift before the surgery - though opening spaghetti sauce jars has been a problem. That was a big surprise."

Source: North Denver News

I am scheduled to do my first tattoo tomorrow. It's going to be three characters at the inside of my left arm. I've decided on the characters but not on the typeface yet. I know this is very short notice, but let's see what you all think...