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.