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.