What's Up With Wojo?

A number of people have reminded me that I haven't posted much here in August, so it's time to write an update. For better or worse, there's not much news to report... Japan was a great trip, and Vanessa and I hung out until last the middle of last week. I'm now getting into the swing of things.


So, for those of you curious about my life, here's what I'm up to...

Research

I decided to take August and September off and work on my own projects and explore my own interests. I'm working on a number of papers with old friends from Toronto and elsewhere. Nice, fun research... No major deadlines yet! The work is both qualitative (international development and sociology) as well as quite mathematical (algorithms and statistics). I'll post here if anything major happens.

Business Ideas

Yes... I've been ranting about business for a few weeks now, and finally have taken the first step to doing something. I'm looking into revolutionizing e-mail. I won't say much more yet. But e-mail me if you want to chat about some ideas.

Revisioning FMM

FMM is still moving forward. I presented on the site in Japan, we've launched a book recently, and are now looking for more partners and volunteers. I'm exploring what we'll be up to next, and will be attempting to do that "next thing" before I leave for England.

Culture (and Comics)

Reading lots of comic books... And regular books, too! Just finished reading The Watchmen and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and am now reading The Dharma Bums. Also brought back a dozen issues of manga from Japan, which I need to start reading (in Japanese!).

While not as serious as my reading, I'm also exploring my music tastes and art galleries in Toronto. Will be writing about this soon, too.

Sports!

So Michael Phelps is doing well in the Olympics. Did you know I wanted to be an Olympic swimmer when I was 12? Well, maybe it's a good thing I didn't pursue that career option... :) But I am getting back into sports. I'm hoping to run a 10K race in the next few weeks -- definitely before I leave Toronto. I was going to start swimming today, too, but showing up at the community centre was a bit of a downer: I was the only one under 70 years of age, and well, 70 year-old swimmers are sloooow. I promptly left and bought a membership at a gym, and am going to start swimming there tomorrow.

Catching Up, Socially

Finally, I'm just hanging out in Toronto and visiting friends and family. You know, before I leave forever... Well, until December 21, anyway, which is when I'm coming home for the holidays!

So that's what I'm up to...

iCommons Summit '08

Faithful readers of my blog are likely aware that I am currently in Japan. I spent last week in Sapporo at the iCommons Summit '08. Like every year, the summit attracted lots of entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers.

It was a fun time -- I won't go into details on Japan until I return, but if anyone is interested in the conference, there was a summit blog. Just for archival purposes (I like to keep all my work on one site), two articles: one on multilingualism online and another on open government.

Update: more material, this time as a final overview.

Why I Love Linux

... ever since I got my Macbook and have been using OS X, my life feels a little different. Just last week, I had to pay for software, and this made me feel a bit uncomfortable. No, I don't steal software licenses -- I've been using Linux for the past two years and got used to just downloading free and open source software.

I won't try and convince you that Linux is something you should try. I've had many of these discussions and the fact that we promote it through Five Minutes to Midnight is enough for me.

Instead, I'll just say this: setting up an FTP server on Ubuntu is so easy it makes me smile. In fact, I set up two today, just for kicks. Thank you, ProFTPd, for making my file transferring easier today.

Linux Journal - August 2008

For the past year, I've been subscribing to the Linux Journal, and the August 2008 issue is one of the best I've seen for any magazine. This issue is devoted to "cool projects" (on Linux).

This is a pretty big deal to me, someone who isn't very focused on hardware development but loves programming. Why? First, this issue provides information on how to use the Wiimote as an input device. This isn't anything majorly new, but it's nice to have a step-by-step guide.


Secondly, there's an overview of Bug Labs' Linux computer, which is a basic cellphone-sized computer which you can attach other modules to, allowing you to build new gadgets and even swap them as the software is running. If you have a few hundred dollars to spend, this is a great way to start fooling around with gadgets -- or so I read.

A more familiar face in the magazine is gumstix, which provides very small computers with various components, such as Bluetooth, wifi, USB connections, and so on. This is very similar to Bug Labs, and in fact the costs are about the same, too.

Finally, there's E-Ink, which one can use for low-power displays. This is very promising, though the prototyping set costs $3000, which I imagine is a bit steep for most

The great thing about these tools is how it may be possible to use them and build completely new gadgets. For someone like me, who isn't well-versed in hardware development, this is a great opportunity to get involved in actual prototype development rather than just making graphics and writing code on my laptop.

Even better is the fact that companies like Bug Labs are starting to really promote and focus on the idea of open hardware. I'm curious to see how long it takes for people to start playing around with this. Hopefully I'll get into it too, sometime soon.

Note: click on image for credits.

Scanning the Web for Diseases

From www.dis-order.net.

Let's start with two over-simplifications. There's a lot of information on the Web... And, it's hard to analyze it. Indeed, regardless of which field of study you work in, the Web probably applies to you -- whether you're an economist studying auction systems, a computer scientist looking at technical infrastructure, or pretty much anything in between.

One very relevant application that tries to solve this problem for health practitioners is HealthMap. Funded by Google, it's a perfect example of the intersection between data mining and public policy.

HealthMap: An Overview

HealthMap scans various health sites and news directories, constantly looking for news related to health and diseases. It does this by scanning the actual text of the articles and, using a text classifier, tries to categorize every article into (1) a specific disease, and (2) a specific region. This is much harder than it sounds, as the software needs to know the difference between a team of American doctors studying a new outbreak in England, and a team of English doctors studying a new outbreak in America. While this is easy for humans to do, computers are often quite terrible at telling the difference.

Once this information is collected and synthesized, the site displays information on outbreaks as a Google Maps mashup, making it easy to check where outbreaks are happening and what is going on in specific regions.

An overview of the technology is provided in a recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

The great thing about this is that using open source web crawling tools like Nutch, WVTool for text analysis, and Weka for model generation, you can build prototypes of HealthMap-like tools in several weeks. Of course, the accuracy of your classifiers and mapping articles to specific regions and diseases is often the hardest (and most important!) part.

The Challenge of Unstructured Data

HealthMap is a great response to the deluge of data that people and organizations have to deal with on the Web. Collecting data, analyzing it, and making it accessible is a major challenge in almost every field of study. Another example of a response to this is Issue Crawler, which allows one to explore political discussions online.

The main difference between these approaches and tools like Wikipedia and Who Is Sick? is that the latter use distributed networks of people to collect and organize information. I imagine that one great opportunity in the next few years will be combining the use of such "people power" with machine learning to build web services that help us deal with all this information and data.