On my way back from the Web 2.0 Summit I am attending the Recommender Systems conference (RecSys09) in New York. This is the 3rd year for RecSys and how the community have been growing … we are up near to 300 attendees this year with, as usual, a very interesting mix of academics and industry, and a superb collection of research.
As we head in to the final session of the conference, and ahead of a longer post where I hope to take a deeper look at this year’s RecSys (promises, promises …), I thought it would be useful to follow up on my Web 2.0 Summit Conversations post with a similar tag cloud for RecSys09.
To that end, this tag cloud has been rendered with IBM’s Wordle from all of the tweets using #recsys and #recsys09 hashtags (from Oct 21 - 24). The orginal (and larger) tag cloud can be access here.
On my way back from this year’s Web 2,0 Summit in San Francisco. It was quite an event that deserves a longer post than this, but in the meantime I thought it would be fun to mine the twitter conversations that were ongoing during the Summit (and there were a lot!). To this end, below is a tag cloud (rendered with the help of IBM’s wonderful wordle.net) and produced from all of the tweets posted from October 20 - 23, 2009 containing the hashtag ‘#w2s’, which was what everyone was using to refer to the Summit.
As per usual, more frequent terms are rendered in a larger font and you can find the original (and larger) image on wordle.
I think that the cloud serves to provide a good overall summary of the Summit’s content, events, anouncements and conversations. You can find out more about the Summit here, including links to a sample of videos.
Here’s a wonderful short presentation by Pattie’s group on their latest game-changing technology demonstrator - think mobile phone + camera + pico-projector - which is a real example of bridging the digital-physical divide.
Google announced its Power Meter project this week. It hints at some very interesting work by Google.org (Google’s philantropic arm). Simply put the basic idea is that it will allow us to benefit from up to the minute electricity consumption reports.
Under the heading “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” this is a great step forward when it comes to helping us all to improve our carbon footprint. The problem of course that there is nothing available as yet and Google cant build this themselves. They need yo work with an ecosystem of utilities, device makers and policies makers to allow consumers to have detailed access to their home energy use and make smarter energy decisions. But it is a step in the right direction!
Briefly, HeyStaks is a new approach to social search that works with mainstream search engines and helps people to better organize and share their search experiences.
Here’s a nice application of some simple sensor technology to kepp our house plants happy.
The basic idea is that the ThirstyLight device will keep your ficus fit and you ivy thriving by telling you when they need water. Its a simple moisture sensor that you stick in the soil and just leave it there. When the moisture level dips it starts to flash. At $9.99 it cheap enough to make sense in most households, especially if you share one between a few plants. Nice idea?
How much would it cost to get these talking to the net so that my thirsty plants can email me their requests for attention?
Here’s an interesting piece from Fortune, http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/10/technology/pill_caps.fortune/index.htm, about a novel use of sensors on pill boxes.
The global pharma industry represents 800bn dollars a year in sales. 50 percent of people in US are taking daily medication but 50 percent of these fail to take their meds daily. The pharma industry is therefore interested in so called adherence technologies.
Vitality, a Cambridge company (http://www.rxvitality.com/), have launched GlowCaps a sensor enabled pill bottle cap that reminds people to take their meds, escalating the reminder from simple cap colour change to beeps to text messages etc.
The general concept here is the marriage between sensors and reminders as a way to bridge the physical-digital divide.
Behavioral change research goes further by noting how our friends and loved ones can be really important in supporting us achieve our goals. Thus social reminding is important and social dynamics can be a big motivator.
