I noticed a few weeks ago a feature in Word that allows you to request that important sentences be outlined. As it turns out, there is a free tool to do this called the Open Text Summarizer. My ex-colleague Peter Turney did related work and has a patent on such a technique.

I really like Yuhong Yan. She’s one of my favorite collaborator of all times. It is quite strange too because we were colleagues for a long time and never collaborated much at all. Then, I left my NRC job, I went to live something like 700 km away and since then, we’ve never been closer. Maybe this says something about how efficient technology has become.

In any case, if you are a graduate student or are thinking about becoming one, you should read Yuhong Yan’s Tips to Graduate Students. The mere fact that she put this page together is enough to make me like her! I find that very few schools care enough about their student to put together similar advice. It seems to be enough for many professors to just throw students into research and see who swims and who sinks. My advice to graduate students would be to seek supervisors who will give you such advice. I think Yuhong is probably a good supervisor.

She also posted a copy of an unpublished paper we wrote together. Myself, I tend to keep unpublished papers private, but at the same time, I keep arguing that researchers should promote their papers more agressively, so I’m not going to complain about what Yuhong did.

Those who have been reading this blog know about inDiscover. This is a collaborative filtering/recommender system project I did with Sean McGrath. This is a projet part of a larger initiative with Harold Boley and his Semantic Web Lab.

In any case, this was a little project out in a corner of the web. Then Bell Canada contacted us and now, there is a prominent link to inDiscover on msn.ca (sympatico high speed) front-page.

Just in case it ever goes away, here’s a snapshot:

(Usual disclaimers apply: I didn’t ask permission before taking the snapshot… blablabla…)

7th IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology (IEEE CEC’05)
July 19-22, 2005, TU München, Munich, Germany
http://cec05.in.tum.de

IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology (CEC’05) is the 7th annual event (formerly WECWIS) and the flagship annual conference of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on E-Commerce. CEC is a primary forum for the exchange of information regarding advancements in the state of the art of theory and practice in E-Commerce and Web-based Information Systems, as well as to identify emerging research topics and define the future of E-Commerce technology, applications and service-oriented computing. The conference focuses on IT infrastructures and new technologies to facilitate dynamic e-business and Web-based information systems.

Those of you who have broadband and are interested in having more details about the SCTIC-CREPUQ Meeting I described earlier, you can get Stephen Downes’ slides and audio stream on Object Oriented Learning Objects:

Slides and the MP3 audio (English and French, 7 megabytes) of my presentation in Monteal are now available (the audio also includes the
presentations from other panelists, used with permission). In it, I present again the idea of “e-learning as dynamic, unstructured stream of learning resources obtained and organized by learners.” In this talk I extend the idea bit by elaborating on the community aspect of learning resources and outlining how the learning objects should be designed in order to facilitate this. More - much more - on this in the future.

By Stephen Downes, Stephen’s Web,
November 26, 2004

6th International Conference on
Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies

E C - W e b 2005

August 23 - August 26, 2005
Copenhagen, Denmark

http://www.dexa.org

A large number of organizations are exploiting the opportunities offered by Internet-based technologies for electronic commerce and electronic business. Companies sell and purchase via the Internet, search engines and directories allow electronic market participants around the globe to locate potential trading partners, and a set of protocols and standards has been established to exchange goods and services via the Internet. The Internet is changing the way how companies and organizations are working, and the amount of innovation and change seems to accelerate. However, numerous technical issues need still to be resolved. The main objective of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners from different disciplines, all
interested in electronic commerce and Web technologies and to assess current methodologies and new research directions. Although a natural focus will be on computer science issues, we welcome research contributions from economics, business administration, law, and other disciplines. EC-Web 2005 is organized by the DEXA Association in parallel with DEXA 2005 (16th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications).

———————
Suggested Topics
———————
The major topics of interest include but are not limited to:

* Auction and Negotiation Technology
* Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce
* Business Process Integration
* Business Process Modeling
* Customer Relationship Management
* Decision Support and Optimization in EC
* Digital Goods and Products
* Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
* Enterprise Application Integration
* Electronic Contracting
* Formation of Supply Chains, Coalitions, and Virtual Enterprises
* Grid Computing for EC
* Intellectual Property Licensing
* Interorganizational Systems
* IPR, Legal and Privacy Issues
* Knowledge Discovery in Web-based IS and EC
* Languages and Ontologies for Describing Goods, Services, and Contracts
* Mobile Commerce
* P2P-Computing
* Pricing and Metering of On-Demand Services
* Quality of Service (Performance, Security, Reliabilty, etc.)
* Recommender Systems
* Rule Languages and Rule-based Systems
* Security and Trust in EC
* Semantic Web
* Supply Chain Management and Supplier Relationship Management
* Ubiquitous and Pervasive Technologies for EC
* Usability Issues for EC
* User Behavior, Web Usage Mining
* Web Data Quality Aspects
* Web Data Visualization
* Web Services Computing
* Web Site Monitoring
* XML-based Standards
* Applications and Case Studies in EC

Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS)
WADS 2005

August 15 - August 17, 2005
Univ. of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

Call for Papers

* Submission deadline: Feb. 21, 2005
* Notification: April 25, 2005
* Final version due: May 12, 2005

The Workshop on Algorithms And Data Structures, which alternates with the Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, is intended as a forum for researchers in the area of design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. The workshop includes papers presenting original research on algorithms and data structures in all areas, including combinatorics, computational geometry, databases, graphics, and parallel and distributed computing.