CLAM

CLAM has moved to a new home: clam-project.org ....

CLAM has moved to a new home: clam-project.org ....

CLAM has moved to a new home: clam-project.org ....

CLAM has moved to a new home: clam-project.org We also changed the wiki URL scheme. Home: http://clam-project.org/ Planet: http://clam-project.org/planet Wiki: http://clam-project.org/wiki Testfarm: http://clam-project.org/testfarm And last but not ... [More] least we moved the subversion server to the new domain and we changed some repository names. You can easily migrate existing subversion sandboxes by using the following command: ’svn switch –relocate [old-svn-root] [new-svn-root] [sandbox] You can get the svn-root with ’svn info [sandbox]‘ and the new locations for the repositories are: clam: http://clam-project.org/clam clam-test-data: http://clam-project.org/clam_data clam-oldapps: http://clam-project.org/clam_oldapps clam-web: http://clam-project.org/clam_web efficiencyguardian: http://clam-project.org/efficiencyguardian Thousands thanks to the MTG and the IUA for hosting CLAM resources for so long after not being an official MTG project. And special thanks to Jordi Funollet, the MTG sysop, who has helped us to do the migration and responded to all our weird support petitions during those three years The CLAM Team. [Less]

Leyendo el diario: EE.UU. dice que veinte países darán más contribución civil o militar en Afganistán Gates asegura que varios aliados de la OTAN le han asegurado que “están dispuesto a incrementar su contribución militar, civil o de entrenamiento” ... [More] Eh???? Cracovia (Polonia). (EFE).- El secretario de Defensa estadounidense, Robert Gates, aseguró… Ahhh! [Less]

Para aquellos interesados, e intentando contribuir al indexado de los buscadores… El sitio de CLAM se ha mudado a http://clam-project.org

For some time now, Barcelona is trying to present itself as the "European Sylicon Valley". But, to contradict Techcrunch, there are many more nice things to Barcelona than its climate. First, there is an large population of very talented techies. ... [More] Surely, this is in part due to the good level of the local universities (what can I say... I teach in one of them :-). Second, local people are known for being creative and open-minded, and you can breath some of that in the Barcelona air. And finally, because of its "charm", Barcelona attracts many talented and creative people from abroad. Given a choice, they'd rather work on their laptop from the sunny Barcelona beach than from a rainy place in northern Europe, I guess (so, yes... it's about the weather).Local government agencies try to support start-up through different programs. However, life is not easy for new tech companies in Barcelona. The main issue is the almost non-existent local venture capital. As Mario Nemirovsky put it in a recent conversation I had with him: there is capital, but not venture. On top of that, being a Spanish-based start-up does not make things easy to get to foreign VC money (especially US). Not to mention the excessive bureocratic burden put on new companies here in Spain.However, there are many people that are definitely putting their share to change this and make of Barcelona the real European Sylicon Valley. I will review some of them in the next paragraphs. I admit the following review is biased towards people I personally know, many of whom are actually friends. So if you feel you should be here, let your voice be heard!Mario Nemirovsky, whom I mentioned before, is one of these. Mario has founded several companies, such as ConSentry, in the US. He is considered one of the most influential latinos in Sylicon Valley. He is currently in Barcelona on a grant but his main interest is in briging the Barcelona startup scene to the next level. As a first initiative, he helped found Miraveo. Miraveo offers a really interesting and revolutionary approach to create spontaneous adhoc wireless networks.Also based in Barcelona, Terry Jones (@terrycojones) and Esteve Fernandez are about to release the first beta of FluidDB in their Fluidinfo mind-blowing startup. Fluidinfo has been named as "the next Google" or "world-changind" by people such as Robert Scoble or Tim O'Reily. It is hard to describe Fluidinfo in a few words so I will use their "Database meets the Wiki" lema. But if you really want to understand what they do, check the four videos in this Scobleizer post.3Scale is another Barcelona startup that I know pretty well. Actually, it is the only one of the ones I mention in this post where I have put some (very little) money. 3Scale provides a solution to manage all issues related to a web service. Their product is already fully functional and they have a great business model. They were selected for Techcrunch 50 and Le Web Paris this year. Need I say more? :-)BMAT (Barcelona Music and Audio Technologies) is a spin-off from the MTG Research group where I did my PhD. And therefore, I have many friends in there. They have a number of B2B products related to audio and music such as music search and recommendation, voice processing and games, or broadcasting monitoring.Strands also started being a music-oriented company but is now much more than that. Apart from their public product, they build custom solutions for recommendation and social networks. Curiously enought, the startup was originally started in Corvalis (OR) by Francisco and Marc, from Barcelona. But now that the company has grown, they have moved much of their activity to Barcelona (although they are still active in Corvalis and several other locations around the world).I should also highlight Fluendo and Flumotion , companies that started out of the great GStreamer open source project (which, by the way, is closely related to our own CLAM project).I will finish by mentioning a couple of the startups from serial-enterpreneur (and friend) Otto Wust. After founding Sclipo and getting it to win the European 2.0 startup in 2007 and making it to the RedHerring top 100 list in 2008, Otto is now focusing in a new venture. NicepeopleAtWork is offering a complete solution for video production suite for publishing web videos. Although the company is very young, they already have interesting results and important clients.Ok, and I know I am missing many more so I might be doing a Part II of this post. In any case, let your voice be heard through the comments. [Less]

During these past few months I have had pretty bad experiences with peer reviews at conferences: unfair reviews, others that were plain wrong,papers considered off-topic because I did not respect what would be expected by the "community", poor or ... [More] non-existent intervention of the track or PC-chair... I guess this will all sound familiar if you are in the research business. Being on the other side (the reviewer's) does not help to see things much better.There are many people now thinking that the system we have nowadays is flawed in many ways and probably things are going to change (hopefully for the better) soon.Along these lines, Michael Nielsen had an interesting post in his blog. He talks about the three myths of scientific peer review: (1) Scientists have always used peer review; (2) peer review is reliable; and (3) Peer review is the way we determine what?s right and wrong in science.Jon Crowcroft, S. Keshav, and Nick McKeown also write an interesting article in the past issue of Communications of the ACM. The article, entitled "Scaling the academic publication process to internet scale", proposes a way to use Web 2.0 paradigms, and in particular crowdsourcing, as a way to overcome the flaws of the current system. The goals of their proposed process are stated as: (A1) Authors should not submit poor papers; (A2) Authors should become reviewers; (R1) Reviewers should submit well-substained reviews; (R2) Reviewers should not favor their friends; and (3) Reviewers should not denigrate competing papers. Although many things are still left out of their analysis, it does seem like an interesting and promising step forward.It is really interesting that just as I was reading this article I found out about Google's gPeerreview. According to Google, they "intend (...) to do for scientific publishing what the world wide web has done for media publishing".Again, it is clear many of us think things are not working the way they are. Therefore I can only applaud any initiative that brings us closer to a more fair and sustainable system. [Less]

Last week I attended the Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM '09) conference in Barcelona. The conference was organized by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and the people at Yahoo Research Barcelona, and it is always nice to attend a top research conference without ... [More] having to take the plane.If you ever wondered what researchers at the big internet players do, this is your conference. As a matter of fact, 66% of the accepted papers had an author from Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. Given that the acceptance rate was pretty low (16%) this might come as a surprise. However, not if you think about how much research in the area of Web Search this companies have (probably more than 66% of the researchers in the area work in these three companies, especially if you count research internships).If you look at the program, you can see that the hottest topics seem to be, arguably: personalization, tagging, and link and click analysis. The best paper went to Fernando Diaz (Yahoo Labs Montreal) for an interesting work in integrating news content into search results. Here, you can read his paper (btw, all papers will be available for free download, it seems).The highlight of the conference, however, were for me two of the keynotes. First , Google's Jeff Dean, of Map Reduce and Big Table fame, gave an amazing talk about the evolution of Google's systems and architecture in response to ever growing demand. After his talk I was wondering what percentage of Google's success could be directly linked to their systems development strategy (versus algorithms, interface, and business model).On the last day there was a keynote shared with the colocated WAW conference. Ravi Kumar, from Yahoo, gave an interesting overview of his research in Social Networks. I enjoyed his talk. However I was a bit annoyed by how lightly the idea of "causality" is used in some of these analysis works. "If you have an obese friend you have 25% more chances of being obese", said Kumar refering to an earlier work by sociologists. This confussion between co-occurrence (or homophily) and causality is a bit scary, especially coming from someone like him that has actually worked on the issue. His attempt to model causality was later described. Using the so-called (random shuffling test) he interpreted temporal precedence as causality. Yet another arguable interpretation.Finally, I have to say that I felt most talks were rather on the "boring" side. This is probably nothing to blame WSDM for. It is rather my feeling that talk-based conferences are challenging my short and volatile attention span, especially if I have a laptop on me. I will post more on this soon. [Less]

The Allosphere, the project I was coordinating a UCSB, was presented last week at the TED talks. In case you are not aware, the TED talks is something worth knowing about. TED stands for Technology, Enterntainment and Design but, since it started in ... [More] 1984 its scope has become even broader. In short, TED talks aim to bring together visionary people to discuss the future. Talks verse about many different things, and every year there are a few that make headlines. This year, for instance, Bill Gates threw some mosquitoes at the audience to make his point on Malaria in the third world.JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, director of the Allosphere, was able to give a short 3 minute talk about the project. And, although 3 minutes may seem a really short time, doing this in such a setting has really brought a lot of buzz around the Allosphere in the media.Some interesting posts related to the Allosphere at TED:At the Wired blogThe Allosphere at CNETGreyNYC talking about the AllospherePost about the Allosphere at the Art of ScienceThe Allosphere mentioned at the Harvard Business BlogA post in "In my copious free time"An interview with JoAnn before the TED talk at NowPublicEven a post in Spanish by Diego Leal Hopefully all this buzz will help the project get the funding necessary to finalize such a visionary and amazing idea. [Less]