Blame it on the Software?

Software fail. Sometimes at very critical times. But can you make it the 'default' excuse even in cases where the process is supposed to be under a lot of human supervision?

I experienced a small incident where people seem to depend on software too much that when something goes wrong, they blame it on the the software entirely. Although, clearly it was their mistake in the first place and they were supposed to verify the outcome of the software anyways.

So here's the story... I am planning to attend a conference in Spain in April, and since Sri Lankans need visas to enter almost any country in the world, I had to apply for a Schengen Visa at the Spanish Consulate in Boston. They took 2 weeks to process the visa application, and when I got my passport back, I noticed that they have issued the visa from 18-04-00 to 10-05-09. This is absurd because I only asked the visa for 7 days and they had given it for more than 9 years! Had they given the visa for 9 years forward from now, I would've been extremely happy as I could have avoided any future paperwork messes and the ridiculous amounts of money they require to process the applications. But clearly, this was a mistake. So I reported it to avoid any confusion (and with the recent luck I have been having with travel visas, it was definitely better to be safe than sorry!).

Their explanation was very simple: it was a mistake in their software. Now, tell me, do they have some very complicated OCR software to automatically figure out the date I want to go to Spain by processing all the paperwork I submitted? Even if that was the case, shouldn't they at least check the dates of the visa manually before issuing it? If a software was doing all the processing, why did it take them 2 weeks to process the application? My guess is that, it was a small typo and they failed to spot it. One thing that surprises me most is the lack of a software based control to ensure the 'visa issued date' to be less than the 'visa valid from date'. Anyway, after my complaint, I got the visa for the correct time period. But it made me wonder about the correctness of the software that are used by Government agencies. If they can't do a simple date check like this, I fear what other pieces of controls these software might be missing! Even more worryingly, it is sad to imagine they might be using the data collected through such buggy systems for making decisions that might affect somebody's entire future!

Buddha Lounge

This is the name of a bar/night club I see on a day-to-day basis these days (because it's very close to where I am staying right now). Every time I see it, I keep on thinking why the club owners thought having the name 'Buddha' would be a nice fit for the club. Does it sound trendy to have a religious icon from the east? I think not!



Also, here's what my friend Simon has to say about this same bar.

IMHO, I think people should be much more respectful towards other religions.

Do you have a digital identity?

Last week I was in London at a workshop on "Digital Identities". The workshop was really interesting, and it made me wonder whether people really need to adopt digital identities to protect themselves online.

The work at the research group I am affiliated with at MIT, revolves around having transparent and accountable data on the web. This "data", I believe, includes the "online identities" of people as well. So, I am trained to think that you should be held accountable for whatever you say on the web! However, if the things you say are highly controversial, even unlawful in certain jurisdictions, and can have an adverse effect on your career, it seems reasonable to go under a pseudonym and write whatever you have to say, abdicating all the responsibilities and even the subsequent credit to yourself as a person in the real world.

Another point that was brought up in the discussion was that whether going under a pseudonym is at all better than writing something anonymously. To me, it doesn't appear to have much of a difference though. However, unlike an anonymous author, an author operating under a pseudonym will have a social circle who would promote the writings to a greater community under their own guises. There were so many interesting stories that came up in the discussion out of their own experiences!
If you are interested in these case stories and the "patterns" that emerged, have a look here.

Anyways, I still think that if you want to write about something you should fully disclose who you are. Coming from an open culture, where full disclosure means more visibility and hence more recognition to you and your work, it seemed a bit bizarre that you'd want to hide away under some name if you really want to say something on the web.

I wonder if someone would ever come up with a technical or a legal solution to this problem? If you have any thoughts on this issue, please do comment!

I am back!

I have been away from blogging for way too long! For some time, I was using this blog only to experiment my summer '08 project at the University of Southampton, UK on "Detecting Creative Commons License Violations on Flickr Images on the web". In fact, if you visited this blog between now and last summer you might have seen weird images embedded in the blog, and might have wondered what the heck I was doing :)

Anyways, I made a new year resolution to blog more often. I've always experienced that thinking aloud is extremely beneficial in several ways. Imparting knowledge (or maybe sometimes nonsense) to others is really good, and in my case it really helps to structure my ideas much clearly. Since I really need to be in the writing mood soon (SM thesis due by the end of the Spring semester :( ), I believe this would give me good practice!

So stay tuned :)

Summer Doctoral Program

This post is long overdue. But it is better late than never, right? :)

So the Summer Doctoral Program or the "SDP" as we called it, is finally over. It was two weeks of intense seminars and discussions all in an attempt to shape and define what Web Science is. Key themes were how to ensure privacy, information accountability and transparency, how to research and predict web based social behavior on a large scale, several intros to the Semantic Web and very interesting student presentations on our own Ph.D topics ranging from porn to  e-governments! 

If you are interested in finding out what kind of things were discussed, have a look at the wiki. I have also summed up my thoughts on Web Science in this essay in case you are interested.

The SDP participants were from very diverse fields, and it was really interesting to interact and learn from each other. I think we all made some very good friends at the SDP. 

There was also an IRC back channel, and I simply loved the discussions happening there. It was the place to ask stupid questions and even throw witty remarks at others!

We also managed to design a T-shirt for the SDP. Many kudos to Matthew Weber for the design. Harry Halpin and I made sure that the RDF syntax in N3 is well-formed. After all, I don't think I would be able to wear a T-shirt with invalid syntax, especially when TimBL is around, now would I?  :)

There is a Café Press shop where you can purchase a t-shirt, a long-sleeve t-shirt or a mug if you like!

The front design looks like this:

What's the deal with the dingo you ask? Well, it's all thanks to Jonathan Zittrain. As Tobias Escher said in his blog post - "while a dingo has nothing to do whatsover with Internet research it is a very useful way of keeping the attention of your audience focused on your presentation" :). I apologize for the inside joke, but the dingo really kept us going!

And the back of the T-shirt looks like this: 

These are some of the things heard during the SDP. A more complete list is available in Sonny's blog post. Watch out for the small phrase by me :). This photo is a proof for me saying what I said(photo credit: Puneet Kishore). I even got the award "Best Swimmer" for my feat!!

Next year the SDP will take place in Brisbane, Australia. So, if you are a doctoral student working on web related studies, you might want to apply for the program. I am sure it will help your theses as well as be very enjoyable. It sure was for me!

Getting Ready

Yes, that's right.. I am getting ready! I am getting ready to attend Summer Doctoral Program at Oxford Internet Institute, UK. This will be a two-week long program on "Web Science"! So, what is this web science I hear you ask... Well, from what I understand (from a lot of reading during the last couple of weeks) this specific field will be the starting point to understand the web we have today, it's implications on the society and what this web as we know today will become in the future.

If you are interested, here are some resources you could read to learn more:

• Web Science: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding the World Wide Web by James Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee, and Danny Weitzner
  


• The Semantic Web Revisited Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee


• Creating a Science of the Web Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Daniel J. Weitzner


• The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, Zittrain, J


• Trust in the Internet as an experience technology. Information communication and society, Dutton, W., & Shepherd, A. (2006)


• Trust and Nuanced Profile Similarity in Online Social Networks, Jennifer Golbeck


• Ontology Development 101: A guide to Creating Your First Ontology, N. Noy and D. McGuinness


• The Dark Side of the Semantic Web, James Hendler


• The Semantic Web as the apotheosis of annotation, but what are its semantics?, Yorick Wilks

Great intro to OpenID

I stumbled upon this great tutorial on OpenID. It explains the basics and then dives down to the details in a very nice and easy-to-learn way. 

| View | Upload your own

Women Don't Ask

I just came from a talk by Sara Laschever, who is the co-author of the book "Women Don't Ask". This talk was very interesting, and it was mostly about how women fall behind men when it comes to negotiating. She argued that social stereotypes of men and women play a big role in this. I personally agree with most of her arguments, as I have witnessed those myself.

I should try and get hold of this book and read it!

When will you get married?

I have been on Facebook for about 6 months now, and although it has helped me a lot to keep in touch with some of my long lost friends, I have to admit that I've come across the most ridiculous applications ever imaginable! First there was a host of vampire invitations that really irritated me, then there were zombies, hugs, roses, angels, you name it.

Very recently one of my closest friends sent me an invitation to this "When will you get married" application. Here is a screenshot of that:


Notice that it says "Patented Wedding Algorithm A.I" :).
Anybody with even a teeny bit of common sense should be able to see that this is an attempt to get your personal information, and popularize this application by asking you to send this out to at least X number of your friends . But still, people try this out
! I find this fact (i.e. how psychologically we are tempted to try out these kind of silly applications even though we have a feeling that there might be an adverse consequence for us at the very end) really interesting. Don't you?

My debut with sushi

Well, I have never in my life ever tried to make sushi.. Actually to let you know a little secret I am even very clumsy with the chopsticks! However, last Friday I was part of a team which made sushi for 80 people (this was for CSAIL GSL). Isn't that cool or what?? :)

The team was Paul, Jen, Thomas and Yoong-Keok. Paul was the master chef, and out of all 5, I guess I was the one who was most alien to the sushi preparation :). However, I now know how to do it, and I'd soon try it on my own. And I think I'd even become a huge sushi fan!!

Sushi preparation is not that hard. However, it is bit time consuming and requires a bit of patience. We spent about 8 hours on Thursday evening cooking rice and wrapping up the sushi. We made California Roll, Shrimp Inari Sushi, Eel roll, Sweet Egg roll and Cucumber and Avocado roll along with the Miso soup. I was a lot of work, but it was loads of fun too!!

Here are some of the pictures Paul took...

Everybody serving themselves the sushi at the GSL:

Paul did a nice job in laying out the sushi very attractively:

This is my favorite :)

We had a quite a bit more rice than we anticipated. So we thought of being very creative with the leftover rice. Thomas made the 'castle' (on the top), I made the 'face with seaweed as hair' (middle), Yoong-keok made the 'turtle' (left of the face), 'penguin' (south of the face) and a 'ginger-bread man' (right of the face). Of course we put signs asking people not to eat these!

Web 2.0 in under 5 minutes

My knowledge on the subject is also very much limited. But by far this is the most accurate, short and visually pleasing presentation I've seen on the topic:



Taken from: http://www.mediatedcultures.net/mediatedculture.htm

Holiday Adventures

I am back from a short trip to several states in the east coast. I went on this trip with two Sri Lankan friends I met here - Varuni and Radheeka, studying at Boston University and University of Southern California respectively. We went to New York, New Jersey, Washington DC and Virginia. We visited so many famous places, museums and even got to see two Broadway shows including Lion King and the Blue Man Group.

The trip was lot of fun and I had loads of experience (both good and bad). The good stuff were the amazing sights and sounds we got to experience (including the 100th anniversary of the crystal ball dropping at Times Square, getting FRONT ROW seats at the Blue Man Show, etc), having got to stay in 'real' houses which I so dearly missed, and getting to taste Sri Lankan food. Bad experiences were delayed flights and lost baggages ruining some outing plans, getting sick, and sometimes feeling that luck was never on our side when it comes to the weather and timing :(.

However, we had an awesome time, and we are determined to go on similar kind of trips in the future covering all 50 states of the United States!

Here are some of the pictures we took on this trip:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oshanis/sets/72157603681600152/show/

And here are some of the sights and sounds we got to experience.
(Fair warning though.. these are amateur videos, so you might get giddy after watching those for few seconds :)

Lights near the Rockefeller Center:



Ice Skating:
(tried and failed twice, and now scared to death to try again :)



New Year's eve at Times Square:

R-Store

R-Store is a Java library which converts RDF data into a relational database schema. Check out the R-Store project home page for more details about what it really does. But here's a sneak peak of what this software is capable of:



This project was carried out as part of the Database Systems class I took this semester . Doing this project was pretty fun! I was kinda venturing in to unknown territory, but it turned out pretty well. Of course I had 2 interesting team members... Angelique Mosciki and Sergio Hererro. And this wouldn't have been possible without all the contributions from all three of us.

Please feel free to check out the code and experiment. It is all open source, and you are more than welcome to contribute in any way to make this software any better!

Bubble : : We didn't start the fire!

The first snow fall

Just looked outside the window, and I saw this:

Man, tomorrow will be a pretty cold day :(

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Outing

You might think I'm crazy, but I spent the whole day today at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum listening to some of Beethoven's sonatas performed live!

Why would you think I'm crazy? Well, I have the DB finals on Tuesday, the final project to demo next week, and the research supervision form to hand over. So, in the midst of all this chaos, I thought I should take a small break and do something different (at least to make sure I would not go insane :). I wish I had some photos to upload from the visit, but the museum folks said that I cannot take any photos inside... too bad. The cooooold weather outside made me lazy to take the camera out and shoot.

So, being the classical music nut I am, I really enjoyed this outing. Oh BTW, this was organized by the Sid-Pac outing committee, and I got to meet some really cool people as well.

Hoping to participate in more outings like this in the future!!

New Addition to Tabulator

For those of you don't know Tabulator is a RDF data browser originally hacked up by TimBL, and developed over the years by summer interns at DIG.

For the past few weeks, I've been trying to understand and write code for the Tabulator. My task was to provide a justification trace for the annotated transaction log given out by the AIR reasoner. Here's a screen shot of how it looks like now:
If you want to try this out, install the Firefox Extenstion with this latest change, restart Firefox, and navigate to this file.

Overall, my experience with the Tabulator code amazes me as to what javascript is capable of. But however, I've had my share of nightmares debugging the code! Sometimes it was pretty painful, but nevertheless I learnt so many lessons :)

By the way, the Tabulator project is open source, so if you'd like to contribute you are more than welcome to do so.

Savants

I've always wanted to do number manipulations in my head. I am no savant, so the best I was able to get to was powering up any 2-digit numbers within my head in less than 20 seconds. It's a very simple trick where you multiply the nearest whole number with the equi-distant number from the number you are actually squaring and adding the power of the distance. For example, if you want 99^2, you do (99+1)*(99-1) + 1^2.

I came across this on Google Video and I find this man to be simply amazing...

Home Page

I finally created my home page!

I've been putting this off for weeks, and I am glad that it is over. I built the site with Apache Forrest.

So they thought I was a spammer :(

http://advogato.org/person/redi/diary/119.html