"Get a Mac" Ads updated

I love the ads and the PC guy.

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

My recommendation is "PR Lady"

Wikipedia and AI

An impressive international workshop about Wikipedia will be held conjunction with AAAI.

http://www.aaai.org/Workshops/ws08.php

I think AAAI comunity already realized the importance of Wikipedia in AI research area. In fact, totally three papers on Wikipedia analysis are accepted in the conference last year.

iPhone from Microsoft

Steve Jobs praised the innovative mobile phone.

IEEE Symposium on MAW in Okinawa

Totally 3 research papers about Web semantics are accepted in IEEE symposium on MAW (Mining and Web 2008) held in Okinawa. First one is about Wikipedia Thesaurus Japanese version. Second one is about Wikipedia Ontology related research. Last one is about semantic web resource categorization.

Paris to Nancy

4 PM: Arrived to Charles-de-Gaulle airport. In a train to Paris, I met very kind couple from Moscow and enjoyed conversation with them. They told me how to go to Champs-Elysees.
5 PM: Arrived to Parris.
6 PM: Arrived to an edge of Champs-Elysees. I was heading to Arc de triomphe. Charles-de-Gaulle is quite long, more than I thought.
7 PM: Arrived to the arc. I coincidentally met Dr. Nakamura, Kyoto university. Small world, huh?
8:30 PM: Arrived to the station for Nancy.
9 PM: Leaving Paris to go to Nancy by TGV Est.
10:30 PM: Arrived to Nancy. It was raining but I had to wait 30 min. to get taxi outside. Cold.
11 PM: Arrived to the Hotel. Phew, tired.

DASFAA 2008 in India

Our new research paper on Wikipedia Mining is accepted as a full paper for DASFAA 2008, one of the A rank conferences in DB research area. It was quite competitive. I heard that the acceptance rate was less than 20% and approximately 1/6 papers are accepted as full papers. Phew.

Wikipedia Thesaurus Japanese support

We are proud to announce the release of Japanese version of Wikipedia thesaurus.

http://wikipedia-lab.org:8080/WikipediaThesaurusV2/

The result is quite interesting.
Try it and have fun.

iPhone & iPod touch SDK

Steve announced about the SDK in the hot news page.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/

Phew, in that case, I don't need to sell my iPod touch to eBay.

iPod touch arrived

The keyboard interface was not so bad more than I thought.
I'm a Sharp's Zaurus 860 user, so I thought that software keyboard seems too narrow key-pitch and leads miss-types. However, surprisingly, it was no problem for me.

BTW, I didn't know that iPod touch has no PDA functions on iPhone such as e-mail client, scheduler, memo and camera. Goole Maps too.

Anyway, still I can use it as my alarm clock.

One more thing, iPod touch's Safari was not supporting contentEditable property on JavaScript. This is one of things what I want to check by purchasing iPod touch. This means that it is impossible to edit HTML in WYSIWYG environment.
The reason seems that the iPhone's Safari is a branch from version 2.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/07/03/iphone-safari-isnt-safari-3-0-and-other-development-surprises

But I think, it will be based on version 3 soon by updating. I hope.

Innovation Japan 2007 in Yurakucho, Tokyo

We will have a booth and give a presentation in the event.

http://expo.nikkeibp.co.jp/innovation/

I'll talk about Wikipedia Mining and release one of the latest products in the event. Have fun.

By the way, our research is selected as an innovation award academic category and one of the candidates for best research award.

http://expo.nikkeibp.co.jp/innovation/special_award/index.html

It will be exciting experience because other candidates, such as Tanaka lab. in Kyoto-Univ. and Igarashi lab. in Tokyo-Univ., are quite famous as top research labs in computer science area.

Best poster award in SPA2007

I demonstrated my latest version of Wikipedia Thesaurus Visualizer in SPA2007, a domestic conference for Systems for Programming and Applications, and my research poster is selected as the best poster from totally 22 entries.

It was a good opportunity for getting advices and suggestions for my research because the chairs are quite high quality.

After all, I need to support Japanese in the thesaurus. Maybe it is good timing to do that because recently Japanese Wikipedia has become one of the largest scale encyclopedia comparing with other languages.

Wikipedia: A New Frontier for AI Research

My article about Wikipedia Mining is published in the JSAI (The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence) magazine.

I summarized the characteristics of Wikipedia as a corpus for knowledge extraction, related work, research direction and future vision.

I hope it will be interesting information for other researchers.

Paper review and ball pens

Recently, I was judging some papers for some international conferences.

I usually use a multi-color pen to write comments down on the paper. A multi-color pen is quite helpful for me while reviewing because we can use various colors to write different types of comments like follows:

Red: Translation,
Blue: Objections,
Green: Questions.

I used to use ordinary multi-color ball pens, but the problem was the wide thickness of drawing. It is usually too wide and due to the lack of space, I could not write much information on it.

Thus I was looking for some solution and I found it last week.

HI-TEC-C 0.3 mm, an ultra thin ball pen, enables me to write detailed information on the paper. The point is that the HI-TEC-C's refill kit have a compatibility to other ordinary multi-color pens. This means that we can integrate our multi-color pens with the refills.

http://www.arghyle.com/2007/03/02/the-new-hi-tec-c-coleto/

All about Japan shows an interesting hack for making original mutli-pens by using the refill.

After this experience, I realized that tools are quite important to increse the productivity of our work and reduce frustration.

Yamashita Research Prize

I received the "Yamashita Research Prize" from IPSJ. The prize is given for our Wikipedia Mining research.

I'm so happy because it is a remarkable honor for young researchers. Moreover, I'm feeling that the direction of our research is correct.

We have to continue to prove the effectiveness of this research.

A workshop in Beijing

I'm going to participate an international workshop held in Beijing this week.
The workshop will be held at Tsinghua university and I'll give a demonstration.

This will be a good opportunity to show my latest product named "Wikipedia Thesaurus Visualizer."

I used XAML/WPF, thus the looks became good. Actually, this is not first time for me to use this tech. I was using XAML/WPF last year to develop a product for Imagine Cup 2006. The object structure of XAML/WPF is interesting, really. XML based syntax for representation and C# object hierarchy are compatible. This means that we programmers and designers share one XML file and operate it from both applications and authoring tools.

I hope that this application runs on Silverlight also.

WISE2007 in France

Our paper about Wikipedia Thesaurus construction is accepted by WISE2007, one of the top conferences for WWW researchers. Only less than 20% of papers are accepted thus it was competitive.
However, I believe that acceptance rate is not effective to know the grade of conferences sometimes. There are some conferences which are very competitive but not high quality.

How can we know the "real grade" is a difficult issue for us researchers, right?

I found several interesting Web site for ranking journals and conferences in computer science area.

1) 2007 Ranking of ICT Conferences
2) Computer Science Conference Rankings (guofei)
3) Computer Science Conference Rankings (zaiane)

They are subjective sometimes. #1 and #3 are saying that WISE is good conference but #2 is not.

Hummm, how can we know the quality after all?

#1 is interesting, by the way. They have rules and processes to rank conferences (The rules and processes).

After all, from above rankings, I concluded that WISE is a high quality conference and the point is, I'm gonna go to France anyway. Yay.

Jobs and Gates dating game

The Prologue part is funny.

http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-together-part-1-of-7/

Who designs such funny presentation style?

Web site renewal

I finally finished to update my web site.
It was really hard work. I spent almost whole day.

Have a look. >> http://www-nishio.ist.osaka-u.ac.jp/~k-nakayama