FXPAL Blog

Star Trek: the Next Generation featured the widespread use of small touchscreen devices known as PADDs. These were often depicted as being used in place of laptops or other portable computers. Even when aboard the Enterprise, characters were shown clicking or swiping at the little devices. The PADD was an evolution of an earlier prop that was used in the first iteration of Star Trek way back in the 1960’s. As is often the case, life has begun to imitate art.

Astronaut Leroy Chiao, who has flown into space four times and was the Commander of Expedition 10 on the International Space Station, wants to take PADDs into space for real. (more…)

I noticed a recent uptick in e-mail spam that looks like Linked-In invitations. When I received the first such message I actually opened it and looked to see if I recognized the person soliciting the connection. When that message was followed by the flood of variations characteristic of other spam campaigns, I stopped reading them. While I am sure that my spam filter will eventually learn to remove such messages, there is, in fact, a better way to handle such situations. In fact, there’s app for that.

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Greg Linden wrote on the CACM Blog about a model of research that strives to integrate researchers into product teams with the goal of helping work out thorny problems and building up social networks in the process. He also advocated that researchers should have time (something like 20%) that they can devote to non-product pursuits. This is certainly a workable model for research, but perhaps not the only viable one.

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We have a little spam problem on the blog. Not the kind that you can filter out, however. (We had that too, but we filtered it.) Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a lot of traffic pointing to a spam comment (which we had removed) on a post from last year. Whereas the post received  fewer than 30 views in the previous year, it was now getting several hundred hits a day. What happened?

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I suppose I’m a Mac. I have an iPhone, a MacBook and an active iTunes account. Even though I’m not a PC, I do want Windows Phone 7 to be every bit as good as Microsoft claims it will be.

Since the launch of the iPhone, the iOS has really defined what a smartphone UI is. This leaves Apple in a unique position to dictate the evolution of a new class of consumer electronics. Apple does many things well, and those things tend to get refined over time. Like any company, they also tend to ignore or gloss over their weaknesses. Android phones have forced Apple to address various hardware deficiencies by introducing models with desirable features. Thus far, there have been very few challenges to the iOS itself. I suppose multi-tasking would be an obvious exception. But even then, the basic premise of an application centric UI remained unchanged. After all, “There’s an App for that”.

Windows Phone 7 might be just the competition that the iOS needs.

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Early last year, Daniel Tunkelang proposed a way to measure people’s influence on Twitter; this metric was dubbed TunkRank, and Jason Adams put up an implementation of it that people could use to calculate their (and others’) scores. The site has been evolving, and getting slicker. It even has an API for incorporating these scores into other applications.

The basic premise of the algorithm is that its not how many followers you have, but how influential they are. Your influence flows from them. For those interested in more details and rationale about algorithm, Daniel’s slides from a recent talk offer a nice overview. What’s also interesting, as pointed out in the comments on his post, is that this model, proposed on the blog and never published in a peer-reviewed forum, has become quite influential.

Working on parsing and indexing the patent collection that Google made available has been an interesting education in just how noisy allegedly clean data really is, and in the scale of the collection. I am by no means done; in fact, I’ve had to start over a couple of times. I have learned a few things so far, in addition to my earlier observations.

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This post was co-authored with Jeremy Pickens

The RescueTime blog, in a piece titled Google is eating Microsoft’s lunch, one tasty bite at a time, showed a comparative usage analysis between Microsoft Office tools and various Google tools such as Gmail, Google Docs, etc. Based on an analysis of their several hundred thousand users, they claim that the use of Microsoft tools had declined whereas the use of Google tools increased.

There are a bunch of problems with this analysis.

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I read newspapers (seriously, print newspapers) as they pile up around my house.  A nice thing about such piles is they don’t admit order, producing serendipitous juxtapositions (I should credit my children at this point). The data-driven life is an article by a Wired writer that looks into wearable computing and how the ability to outfit oneself with sensors might better inform decisions and behavioral strategies. By my reading, it was a basically positive take on the application of technology to help people live better lives on their own terms, whatever they might be.

Next I came across Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price which took a fairly negative slant, ranging somewhere between blaming technology for diminishing our quality of life and attributing to it irreversible neurological damage. (more…)

Today is FXPAL’s 15th anniversary. While we’re young by the standards of research labs (IBM Watson was founded in 1945, (Xerox) PARC in 1970,  IBM Almaden in 1986, and MSR in 1991), we’ve managed to accumulate a pretty good record for our size. With an annual staff of 20-25 PhD-level researchers and a bunch of summer interns, we’ve consistently produced about 30 research publications a year on a variety of research topics ranging from multimedia to HCI to information retrieval. While no single post can do justice to the great work of so many people, here are some highlights.

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