X. Comtesse pushed today these two concepts on the role of people in the new economy:

1. TransformActors: people who by using new algorithm are able to transform what has been previously done by machines or organizations. Example. Marc Bürki who started a bank after his engineering degree at EPFL but had never worked in a bank. The same goes for Amazon: Jeff Bezos had never worked in a book shop.
2. ConsumActors: as said earlier, it’s when the users are empowered by the company/platforms and clients have to do part of the job, as with low-cost airline companies such as easyjet.

I like this idea of being able of transform old practices into new digital/practices. Now what I am not sure is whether this belongs only to people professionally involved with this. I am pretty sure that this revolution pertains to the people. So actually people that transform will be the same people that will consume. What I think, is that the whole consumer model is getting questioned here.

Tags: lift06

lift06 – Lift06 – LIFT06

LIFT is about teaming talented observers, explorers, and builders with people whose work depends on understanding current challenges and creative solutions presented by emerging technologies. Attendees will face cutting edge business models, bold predictions, radical thinking — ideas to inject into their own part of the planet.

LIFT has a simple goal: connect people who are passionate about new applications of technology and propel their conversations into the broader world to improve life and work.

These are my running notes of Day 1. Enjoy!

Tags: blogs, citizen journalism, collaboration tools, context, education, environment, information visualization, interaction design, mobile learning, p2p, pedagogy, politics, lift06, search engine, society, tagging, tangible interface, usability, wierd

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This is just a short note with which I want to summarize some interesting facts about Italian economics that are quite shocking to me, as a native Italian. This post was prompted by two amazing articles about the Italian economical situation: the first, is a report of The Economist on Italy, titled in Italian “Addio, Dolce Vita” (26th November, 2005). The second is an article on Time titled “Twilight in Italy” (5th of December, 2005). We can say that the two articles describe the Italian from a macro view to a micro focus.

1st fact: Italy weak point is the huge number of SMEs that compose almost the totality of the economic system.

For ages the internal political campaign was the motto: “small is beautiful!” And at some point this was also working (cfr. the gold age of ‘il sorpasso’ of 1987). But nowadays that the european barriers are down, most of the SMEs have not the scale, the founding, or the commercial know-how to become global players. What these small companies produce is beautiful but not so technological sophisticated that can prevent an industrial replication. Therefore, the economic structure of Italy is almost perfectly shaped for an attach by China.

2nd fact: the Italian share market is too small for the dimension of the national economy.

The number of companies that have shares on the market is less that 300. This reflects on how the companies understand the current trends of globalization and international markets. It is clear that to be competitive in this new era, a company has to grow to a certain size that allows exports in every part of the world and to be able to produce the products away from Italy (where the production costs are prohibitive).

3rd fact: entering in the euro zone was a complete disaster for the Italian economy.

It is clear that in the past with the devaluation of the currency we could stay competitive against the neighbors. Now that we cannot do the trick any more we are suffering. It is also clear to me that if we were to continue like that for the next 10 years, we could have found ourselves in the same conditions of Argentina.

Tags: Italy, politics

HyperSuper is an ‘intelligent’ news aggregator. There is no clear explanation on the site of the inner clustering mechanisms. However, Mikkom, the author, wrote me that he is going to use CNG (Context Network Graph) to cluster the news. Supa Cool!

Tags: clustering, google, information retrieval, spreading activation, text data mining

This is a simple list-like visualization that present the user a map of related keywords for one given keyword. On the site there is no description of how the map is constructed.

(via)

Tags: google, information visualization, spatial clustering

They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations.

We should have something like this for Italian politics. It would be fun to see everything around Mr. B.

Tags: information visualization, Italy, learning technology, maps, politics, social network analysis

MontyLingua is a free, commonsense-enriched, end-to-end natural language understander for English. Feed raw English text into MontyLingua, and the output will be a semantic interpretation of that text. Perfect for information retrieval and extraction, request processing, and question answering. From English sentences, it extracts subject/verb/object tuples, extracts adjectives, noun phrases and verb phrases, and extracts people’s names, places, events, dates and times, and other semantic information.

Tags: Python, tagging, text data mining

E. Morse and M. Lewis. Testing visual information retrieval methodologies case study: Comparative analysis of textual, icon, graphical, and “spring” displays. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53(1):28–40, 2002. [pdf]

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Although many different visual information retrieval systems have been proposed, few have been tested, and where testing has been performed, results were often inconclusive. Further, there is very little evidence of benchmarking systems against a common standard. An approach for testing novel interfaces is proposed that uses bottom-up, stepwise testing to allow evaluation of a visualization, itself, rather than restricting evaluation to the system instantiating it. This approach not only makes it easier to control variables, but the tests are also easier to perform. The methodology will be presented through a case study, where a new visualization technique is compared to more traditional ways of presenting data.

Tags: clustering, graphical user interface, information retrieval, information visualization

These days I am pretty busy working with Lorenzo on our super secret project on Context Network Graphs. On our work schedule we had a delay due to the fact that we were trying to find a decent way to show a document collection on a two-dimensional map. We started with an ordered list of documents with ranking values.

From this one-dimensional situation we had to develop a second dimension of information and I can now swear that was not easy. We choose to use triangulation and the biggest problem we fought was that some triangle did not close properly. This document demonstrate how to compute if three documents can be placed in a triangle.

To verify that I did a quick hack in Python that was showing some gaps in the circles formed between each couple of points (see picture below). This was fun. To find how to fix this was not fun at all. But finally …

Tags: clustering, hack, information retrieval, map algorithms, maps, Python

meX-Search is a meta search engine that automatically categorizes search results into thematic groups and displays them by intuitive and interactive maps.

meX-search is an experimental, non commercial meta search engine built up from april to july 2004 by Karsten Knorr during his diploma thesis in computer and media science [University of Applied Science Berlin]. The main idea of the thesis was the implementation of an intuitive and simple user interface for web clustering search engines.

Users of conventional Web search engines are often forced to sift through a long list of off-topic documents to find relevant results… Especially when the search query is general, it is often hard to find relevant resources among thousands of irrelevant ones. Search result clustering is a approach to handle such problems by grouping similar documents among search results into thematic groups.

meX is a meta search engine. Currently meX is getting the search results completely from the Yahoo-API.

The clustering of the result-snippets from Yahoo is based on Carrot2, an open source java framework for clustering textual data. Within the Carrot2 framework meX uses the Lingo Algorithm. The Authors of the Carrot2 framework and components: Dawid Weiss, Jerzy Stefanowski, Stanislaw Osinski.

Tags: clustering, google, graphical user interface, information retrieval, information visualization, maps, search engine