FXPAL Blog

Recently I joined the editorial board (web site) for Communications of the ACM (CACM), ACM’s flagship magazine. While ACM members are certainly familiar with the glossy, printed copies delivered through the mail, some of you might not know that issues (and their individual articles) are also available digitally in several different formats.

In the list that follows, I link to the resource home pages when those are available, and to exemplar articles when that’s more convenient.

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Traces of Gold, by Chris Culy

Chris Culy, who worked on discourse parsing at FXPAL a number of years ago, is now in Italy working as a Senior Researcher and the Language Technologies Technical Officer at the Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism. He oversees language-related software development and leads a research project on linguistic data visualization. But the real excitement is that he has a solo art show, Revisualizing the visual, opening today.  His work combines his  interest in photography with his  interest in how information is structured and perceived. The software he has written to support his work transforms colors into shapes or uses color information to create rambling colorful paths based on the image. To create effective artworks, Chris carefully chooses the original photograph and tunes the algorithms to it. Don’t miss the video that shows some of this process in action!

Sorry for being AWOP (away without posts).   We upgraded the underlying OS on this server, and in the process we made the machine non-bootable.  It was booting from a logical volume, which is illogical.  And after the upgrade, not a valid drive.   And since this isn’t “mission critical”, we didn’t have a hot spare.   So, this is now the backup of Wordpress restored to a wiped-clean and re-installed machine.   I think it is close to back-to-normal.  Never upgrade a machine if you don’t remember exactly how and why it was set up the way it was (random chance or old poor decisions?).  Thanks to my anonymous colleagues for fixing it.

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People have been trying to harness wave energy for decades, and of course more traditional – and more destructive – hydroelectric projects like dams provide power to hundreds of millions of people. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan are creating a system for fish-friendly power generation from slow-moving water currents in rivers or oceans – and it’s not that expensive; about a third the cost of cheap solar. Here’s the story:

Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.

The machine is called VIVACE. A paper on it is published in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering.

VIVACE is the first known device that could harness energy from most of the water currents around the globe because it works in flows moving slower than 2 knots (about 2 miles per hour.) Most of the Earth’s currents are slower than 3 knots. Turbines and water mills need an average of 5 or 6 knots to operate efficiently.

Click through for more details. Visit the story online for video (Flash or QuickTime).
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Volker Roth left FXPAL last year to become a professor at Freie Universität Berlin. There he leads the Secure Identity Research Group, which takes a user centered approach to addressing security and privacy issues related to mobile devices, cloud computing, and the internet.

He and his group have gotten press recently due to a well-publicized celebration of the opening of their new building. There are some great photos of Volker at this opening on the  Bundesdruckerei web site (Bundesdruckerei endowed the position Volker filled and provides other support for the group).  On the same site is a picture of Volker hobnobbing with Horst Köhler, the president of Germany, and his wife! It is great to see Volker thriving.

The 2009 winner of the prestigious ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement is our own Dr. Lawrence Rowe.    I have seen this award referred in a number of different ways (even on the ACM SIGMM website), but the above, and “Outstanding Technical Contributions to Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications” seem to be the most common.  It is only the second year of the award, so we have to wait a while before a cute nickname arises.  (The Mummy award?)

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Well, almost.  JoDI, the Journal of Digital Information, founded by Wendy Hall and Gary Marchionini, has been publishing papers online since 1997 with Cliff McKnight as the Editor-in-Chief.  JoDI is a peer-reviewed online journal organized into several themes, including digital libraries, hypermedia systems, hypertext criticism, information discovery, information management, social issues of digital information, and usability of digital information.

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The USE SIG of ASIS&T is celebrating its 10th anniversary at the annual ASIS&T conference in Vancouver, BC this year with a symposium on collaborative information seeking, followed by a plenary reception. (more…)

Google claims to want to organize all the world’s information, a role that at least in some part has traditionally been filled by Libraries. Thus it was with some interest that I saw an announcement that there will be a panel  discussion at JCDL 2009, “Google as Library – Redux,” featuring Michael Lesk, Clifford Lynch, and Gretchen Hoffman.

This is surely likely to be a contentious topic, and one that would benefit from contributions of those who may not be able to make it to the conference. Thus the organizers have created a form to collect questions and comments to pose to the panelists.

Please post your questions! Alternatively, please feel free to add them as comments on this post, and I will forward them to the organizers (with or without attribution — your choice!). After the conference, I will summarize the discussion and highlight the interesting bits.

Heads-up: we’ll be at SIGGRAPH 2009, giving both a long talk and a poster on our Virtual Factory project. SIGGRAPH is in New Orleans this coming August 3 – 7. This work is a result of a research collaboration between FXPAL and TCHO Inc., a chocolate maker in San Francisco.

Virtual Factory in Multiverse