Parties and other good thoughts for 2010

White Elephant

Like a lot of places, end of the year means office parties. This year, we played White Elephant.

After some cunning stratagem in the face of fierce competition, I am glad to report that I come away with the biggest prize, an electronic bug killer.

The question now is how do I slip it into the next White Elephant exchange. Thinking...

Happy 2010!

Happy holidays and look forward to a fruitful 2010.

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Robots at PARC

Email Notice

Tomorrow, Dec. 17, I will host three visitors who are bringing their robot to PARC. They will be “exploring” the hallways and the cafeteria with scanning laser range finders and video cameras.

They will engage in 3 activities:

1. Collect a dataset for use by the robotics research community to study localization and mapping.
2. Give a demonstration of the robot and allow interested people to tele-operate it.
3. Collect a dataset with people around.

Does this happen a lot?

It just so happened that I hosted a visitor to PARC over lunch on the 17th. As we chatted in the cafeteria, the robot came toward us. My visitor was not fazed and thought that this happens regularly at PARC.

Well, sort of. We do have a separate lab space for land-bound and flying robots. We don't usually let them out in cafeteria though.

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Digital Content Consumption - through the lens of users

Digital Content Design - building blocks

A major characteristic of digital content that makes it different from the traditional medium is that it can be consumed in non traditional settings. For example PARC has done identified the notion of "micro-waiting" as a new way that users engage content.

We are also exploring the categories/thresholds of "information overload." The obvious implication is how can technology help users find the nuggets of useful information given the constant deluge of data from all sources.

Embodied Interaction Framework

Beyond understanding these building blocks, there are teams at PARC exploring the issue of how to design an embodied interaction framework that leverages natural human behavior to alter system state or trigger interaction. Or, in plain(er) English, create devices/solutions where a user does not need to learn a new "language" to interact with technology. What makes PARC's approach unique is that this explicitly incorporates social science and psychology insight, also areas that PARC has a long history of advanced work, into the technology design.

Moving from Content Creation to Content Consumption

Although nobody would dispute the truism that content creation and consumption are the two sides of the same coin, people don't always think of it that way. Today, there seems to be little understanding of the consumption side beyond aggregate measurements to meet the needs of content creators/providers.

Let's flip the lens around and ask how to measure and deliver consumption pattern in the eyes of individual consumers. If we can make it seamless and nearly invisible, this could ignite the next phase of the digital revolution.

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Flexible Electronics: Materials and Applications

The Textbook

Flexible Electronics: Materials and Applications

Given PARC's work in flexible and printed electronics. It is little surprise that we also write the textbook on this topic. And, this is my reference reading material before attending Printed Electronics USA 2009.

Printed Electronics at PARC

Here are some of the areas that we are working on right now:
- PEN substrate
- Ink-jet printing (nanoparticle)
- Polymer dielectrics
- Polymer semiconductor

In our facility, we support different print head technologies and can customize to each project's specific needs. So far, we have done work with Microfab, Spectra, and Xerox print heads.

Sensors and applications

An area that we are seeing a lot of interests in is printed flexible sensors. We have a project that measures acceleration, pressure, acoustic, and thermal status then incorporates memory and CMOS (logic) into a single printed sensor tape. The initial work is for DARPA but it would have wide civilian applications once the technical kinks have been worked out.

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Printed Electronics USA 2009 Report

PARC's Printed Electronics



PARC participated in PEUSA09 as technical presenter, facility tour sponsor, and exhibitor. Come to this annoucnement if you like to download the assets that you have seen in the show.

PEUSA09 Field Report

Several people commented that printed electronics seem to have developed a robust vendor/supplier base. And, as people stake out their claim in the upstream value-chain, the next step would be for early adopter consumers/buyers to set the application directions.

Beyond the traditional application of OLED (organic light-emitting diode - bendable display screen), flexible and disposable sensors seem to be another area that can be high value-add yet difficult to achieve with traditional silicon based solutions.

Looking at the value-chain, "system integrators" services probably will play an important match making role for the immediate future as the buyers often do not have the development capabilities in-house for printed electronics while the suppliers may be too limited, albeit very in-depth, on the modules and materials.

Not surprisingly, these are the services (characterization & optimization, application development, and full-system prototyping) that PARC offers. More importantly, we have had a lot of interesting conversations with both vendors and buyers to work with PARC.

If you are interested in what PARC can do for you in printed electronics, pls contact PEUSA09@parc.com

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How many computer do you need in a room?

Million instructions per second (MIPS)

It is one of those inevitabilities working in technology. I recently found myself surrounded by 5 computers in my office. Two desktops and three laptops.

One desktop is my official office machine. I also have an official laptop for mobile computing, viz working from home. I acquired a second desktop to test out some beta software where I don't want to accidentally compromise my official machine. Then, I am testing two laptops right now because I am managing a conference where PARC is attending.

How many keyboards can one person handle?

I think the first take away is that I need to train my toes to type since two hands simply are not sufficient for the task. The second take away for me is that I am probably in possession of more computing power on my finger tip than the entire world had until the 1970's. Final take away? I need to get a life. :-)!

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PARC at Printed Electronics USA 2009

Printed Electronics USA

A leader in Printed Electronics, PARC offers three unique capabilities to industry partners:

* Material Characterization: Characterizing and optimizing material performance in devices and circuits for printed electronics market materials suppliers;
* Application Development: Designing circuits and fabricating proof of concept, including sensors and display elements for clients exploring specific applications; and
* Full System Prototyping: Integrating complete systems containing printed electronics and conventional thin film components and/or standard silicon circuitry.

Please visit PARC at Booth 12 or contact PEUSA09@parc.com for more information. For more information on PARC's Printed Electronics capabilities, please visit www.parc.com/peusa09.

Jet-Printing: From Drops to Electronic Devices

Dr. Jurgen Daniel will be presenting in the conference on December 3rd at 12:05pm, discussing how to use jet-printing to fabricate flexible backplanes for driving displays and sensor-tapes for recording blast events in the battlefield.

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Next-gen Advertising using Context Mining

Reality or Context Mining

Migitti is a project that takes advantage of PARC's work on mobile computing and the new information afforded by mobile handsets.

The logical question is what else can you do with a deep personalized recommendation system like that. Maybe it is just a sign of the time taht we live in, advertising seems to be an obvious avenue to explore.

Activity-Based Advertising: Techniques and Challenges

Lots of people are making noise in this space, but from what I can tell, PARC's team are the only people who are exploring the entire eco-system for a total solution.

Activity-Based Advertising:Techniques and Challenges

View more presentations from begole.

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R2D2 vs. C3PO

Star Wars

I re-watched Star Wars: A New Hope over the weekend. I suspect it would not come as a surprise that I am a star wars fan being in Silicon Valley. More broadly speaking, Silicon Valley is full of people who are of the same ilk.

This reminded me of a chief scientist friend of mine who works in the Los Angeles area.

What?

One time he wanted to highlight what he was vs. was not looking for in a particular technology. To give it more texture, he said "this is like getting C3PO when I wanted R2D2."

And, instead of light bulbs in the room, he got a lot of blank stares.

(For the uninitiated, C-3PO and R2-D2 are two major characters in the Star Wars series.)

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I am happy to report that in a recently visit to Silicon Valley his audience got the droid reference with knowing smiles.

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What do Mr IP and Mr TCP talk about?

Hero Worshiping

Vint Cerf, commonly referred to as father of IP, came to talk at PARC's Forum last week on the topic of "Information on the go".

Before the Forum talk, he came to visit with PARC and mostly hung out near the area where I sit. So, for a while, my area was pretty busy with people coming by to say hi to Vint.

Naturally, more as a brush with greatness opportunity, I emptied my mug and decided to go to the same area for a bit of star sighting.

What do father of IP and father of TCP talk about?

In case you do not know, Van Jacobson, father of TCP, works a few doors from me.

So, as I was doing my beverage refill, Vint, Van, and a couple other people were making tea and chatting. So, what do those groundbreaking great minds spending their time chin wagging about at PARC?

Eggs. How to prepare an egg. Specifically, comparing methods in making softboil eggs - how to get a hard yoke, a soft yoke, or a runny yoke.

Now you know.

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Smart Phones of Near Future and PARC's Migitti Project

New York Times on Smart Phones

Here is an article from NY Times on what the future of smart phone may look like and how key players are pushing the envelop.

PARC's Migitti project was one of the featured solutions in the article. Beyond the technology, we also deployed extensive social science analysis to ensure its usability.

Migitti Project

Activity-Based Serendipitous Recommendations with the Magitti Mobile Leisure Guide

View more presentations from begole.

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Digital Content Consumption - What is Next?

Digital content consumption, today

It would be an understatement to say that digital content consumption is creating a headache for the traditional providers. The latest public display was billed as Media Brawl at Web 2.0.

Digital content consumption, tomorrow

What is right around the corner is a new generation of techniques and solutions. Here are some of the areas that PARC is working on.

* Non-traditional directed consumption through user generated content such as tags
* Predictive models through sentiment analysis and machine learning
* Distributed content and security management
* Recommendation systems built on reality mining in mobile devices

Digital content consumption, the day after tomorrow

One of the areas that there does not seem to get a lot of attention is how are users actually consuming content. Most the discussions have an implicit assumption of a bygone day when a person would actually devote a chunk of time to an activity, i.e. read a news article, in front of a decent size screen. With smart phone projected to overtake laptop as the most ubiquitous mobile device, the inevitable question in a couple of years is when I am on the go with a smart phone, when and how do I want to consume content?

One of the more interesting insight that PARC has worked on already is the notion of "microwaiting." The simple scenario, albeit a bit scary, is to think of stopping your car at a red light in your morning commute. You know the wait is about 60 seconds. And, guess what, we have found that this is an example where people are very receptive to consume content. Thus the term "microwaiting".

One of the things that people don't often know about is how social science plays a key role at PARC. This is an example where this unique combination of technical and social insight leads to really interesting design and business implications.

p.s. Let me know if you want to learn more about "microwaiting". We have published a CHI paper on this topic.

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What is truly important

Fountain of productivity

It should not come as a surprise that coffee is one of the major fuels behind PARC's work. Similarly, it probably is not a surprise that there is a fairly nice coffee maker that would grind coffee beans on-demand in one of the common areas.

So, what happens when the nice coffee maker breaks?

Coffee maker updates

The coffee maker broke recently and there has been a ground swell of low-level anxiety. Not being a regular coffee drinker myself, I did not even know the thing was not working at first. Then, I noticed that, in the weekly lab meeting, the status of coffee maker became a prominent item that everyone seemed to pay particular attention to.

Not that I am suggesting there was ever a threat of a full-blown riot by the frustrated coffee drinkers. On the other hand, I am glad to report that we now have a fully functional coffee maker again.

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Going Mainstream - Cloud Computing's First Black Eye

When a technology goes mainstream

Technology is often known for the hype it generates but less is discussed about when it has gone mainstream. One reason is that when it is integrated into the fabric of everyone usage, it is no longer visible or hype-able (if there is such a word).

Put it another way, when a technology is talked about in the context of violating an unspoken norm of everyday, it is a good indicator that it has gone mainstream.

Cloud Computing's first black eye

So, after all the accolades and fear surrounding Cloud Computing in recent years, this is the first time that it has a specific impact to a substantial number of unfortunate users when T-Mobile, Microsoft 'almost certainly' destroyed users' Sidekick data

Ironic twists of event

The first irony is that this was not high on the list of potential issues that people have been predicting about Cloud Computing.

The second level irony is that this is actually a pretty simple fix that should have been caught/designed-in when the system was being architected.

The third level of irony is that, at the end of day, human remains the biggest variable in the use of a technology.

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Roman Polanski and Sentiments

Polanski in the news

Recently heard that Roman Polanski was captured and there has been lively debate on what to do with him.

I thought this could be an interesting case to see if there is any patterns on sentiments in the digital world. Unlike the Sonia Sotomayor analysis though, this is just a single slice of time look.

In the top 30 terms in the three major web results, most of them seems to be factual with a few negative terms such as "avoided."

(Correction: I originally used "repulsion" as an example of negative term, turns out that it is the title of one of Polanski's films and considered a milestone in the psychological thriller genre. My bad!)

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 30 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
polanski saleby brach escroqueries extradite 8/18/1933 cleland zebiczny pianiste sexual quitters seigner extradition 2000s eatps.web.aol.com wife rozbijemy filming gets chris letterman arrest murderer hour directing revives diamants swindles began musician	polanski travelled directing extradition filming plotted arrest seigner revives murdered roman pleaded arrested dated credited fleeing letterman filmmaker zebiczny repulsion personals directors celebrated avoided meets zurich dwts favre fired collaborated	polanski extradition obama twitter sotomayor gmail geimer facebook zebiczny bankrupt filmography 8/18/1933 getty looting seigner tmz murderer rozbijemy msnbc extradite vick credited repulsion qaida drama screenwriter afghan feeds ancestor swindlers

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CCN open source release at CCNX.ORG

A new approach to networking

I have made references to the CCN project that a team at PARC is working on. Very glad to report that the first open source release has gone live at www.ccnx.org

PARC Newsletter announcement

PARC just released an early version of open source infrastructure software and protocol specifications for our "Content-Centric Networking (CCN)" architecture. Our goal is to enable experimentation in the network research community and establish a foundation of open core protocols for content networking. We are also beginning to work with clients to explore new business solutions enabled by the CCN approach.

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Digital Distribution as a Competitive Advantage for Media Companies

The trouble with the digital world

The issues confronting many media companies in the world of internet, in general, and news aggregation, in particularly, is well known by now. The traditional business model of setting up the infrastructure to serve a particular geographic region is no longer seem as a compelling advantage.

Physical distribution of digital content as an advantage

Just thinking out loud. At the most basic level, while internet is considered "virtual", there is still a physical/geographic limitation on the actual routing of bits and byte. For example, by providing coverage outside of homes and offices in a region, this would deter others from setting up parallel infrastructure. Furthermore, by linking into regional advertising base, a media company can provide very fine-grained data for advertisers which would be worth a lot more than just general IP based information.

In other words, could this be a form of digital distribution that is highly defensible?

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Controlling Data in the Cloud: Outsourcing Computation without Outsourcing Control

CCSW 2009: The ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop

The cloud computing paper "Controlling Data in the Cloud: Outsourcing Computation without Outsourcing Control" by our security team with Fujitsu has been accepted by the workshop.

Paper Summary

Cloud computing is clearly one of today’s most enticing technology areas due, at least in part, to its cost-efficiency and flexibility. However, despite the surge in activity and interest, there are significant, persistent concerns about cloud computing that are impeding momentum and will eventually compromise the vision of cloud computing as a new IT procurement model. In this paper, we characterize the problems and their impact on adoption. In addition, and equally importantly, we describe how the combination of existing research thrusts has the potential to alleviate many of the concerns impeding adoption. In particular, we argue that with continued research advances in trusted computing and computation-supporting encryption, life in the cloud can be advantageous from a business intelligence standpoint over the isolated alternative that is more common today

New Cloud Computing Directions

Well, the really good stuff is at the end. They include

• Information-centric security
• High-Assurance Remote Server Attestation
• Privacy-Enhanced Business Intelligence

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Seeking New Obsessions at Lunch Time

From Burning Man to chili pepper

When I joined the table, the conversation was on Burning Man and how participants frowned upon commerce/barter. It then drifted to the bartering spice trade between East and West. Logically, somebody next mused on the impact of Columbus landing in the America through the lens of chili pepper and the resulting culinary traditions around the world.

Human perceptions

With spices, the group got interested on the question of taste. In particular, unlike sight where three colors are enough to fully represent the human experiences via the RBG colors, taste has more receptors and we have not figured out how to fully represent it in a repeatable manner. Wine, for example, is magical in that precise way.

Seeking new obsessions

One person got pensive for a second and declared that it may be time to take on wine tasting because we at PARC spend a lot of time understanding and advancing specific domains. So, it would be the same process with wine tasting albeit more physically oriented.

To that idea, I, helpfully I think, suggested that tea, coffee, and cheese tasting should also be added to the candidate list.

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User-Technology Convergence with Opportunity Discovery

Translating assets and capabilities into new markets and revenues

Companies often come to PARC to develop disruptive solutions for an existing or a new market. From the company's perspective, there is a set of assets and capabilities but internal processes is not always set up to look beyond one year.

PARC's Opportunity Discovery framework has been a favor tool for companies to systematically explore markets and options.

Migitti

Here is a recent project we have developed for DNP of Japan. This should give you a flavor of what kind of work is involved with O/D

Activity-Based Serendipitous Recommendations with the Magitti Mobile Leisure Guide

View more presentations from begole.

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What is Next for Internet, a 40 years Anniversary

Internet is 40 years old

September 2nd, 1969 marked the birth of ARPANET which converted to TCP/IP in 1983 into what we think of as internet today.

Speaking of which, the person behind TCP, Van Jacobson, sits a few doors down from me. And, no, I am not above name dropping.

CCN and Internet

But, more critically, Van is leading the Content Centric Networking effort which will address issues confronting all the internet stakeholders.

The traditional model is to connect devices via IP addresses. With CCN, it would be content based. So, instead of having millions of connections to a single website to watch an Olympic event live (and crash the site), the content can be propagated in a way that ensures high "perceived" throughput without actually requiring a new infrastructure.

Here is a video of Van talking about the content networking idea.

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Social Media Today and Tomorrow

Social Media

It is no longer controversial to suggest social media is here to stay. From blogs, twitts, to Facebook and LinkedIn, PARC is actively participating in understanding and shaping what is to come.

I believe there are at least three interesting ways to look at Social Media and how they are impacting what we do today.

Disrupting Traditional Services

Dis-intermediation is an old concept from the dot com time. And, we are seeing it play out today in industries like newspaper. The woes facing the traditional newspaper is well known. The bundling of breaking news, fact checking, investigation, and editorials to attract a broad audience for advertisers is no longer compelling given the proliferation of citizen journalists and opinion makers through blog, twitts, and videos who in term break up audience into more targeted segments.

There is a lot of work on finding a new business model for the traditional newspaper. I think the litmus test for a new model is to think of how would the next (goodness forbid) "Watergate" would be exposed and discussed.

New Data and Interaction

It is also fascinating to consider how social media is creating a new layer of social fabric into our daily life. For example, some of my friends can only be found via Facebook these days. Conversely, with so much data and unverified facts flowing, how do I know who/what to believe? At a high level, what are the additional insight on social interactions that was not knowable until now where every user is generating discreet data as a primary source?

This is an area of much work at PARC.

Tomorrow's Social Media Today

Finally, with a combination of changing social norm and new technology, it is also changing the lens we will use to see the world. For example, how will the increasing power of smartphone play into this picture? There is a term "reality mining" that may make into the mainstream one day which describes what is possible given the explosion of personal social media and location data through the use of social media tools on smartphones. We have built quite a bit of technology on this front at PARC.

As for the question of the ultimate big brother or the ultimate personal assistant? Only time will tell.

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Nice Shirt!

Nice shirt!

I was walking down the hallway recently and somebody called out "Nice Shirt!" An unanticipated small ego boost(*) aside, I immediately looked at what I was wearing. A plain old shirt it was.

It got me thinking though. What is the dressing norm at PARC?

What are you wearing?

So, I did an unscientific survey of what people at PARC are wearing while walking from pod 6 on the first floor to pod 1 on second floor.

Type	Count
Long Sleeve Shirts Short Sleeve Shirts Polo Shirts T-Shirts	2 2 4 2

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(*) I went home and asked the boss. I am definitely less of a slob than before. Good to be grounded.

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Inference Engine and Applications

Inference Engine

One of the things that internet/web enables is to make low-cost data collection and analysis mostly a computational question. Add in the idea of "wisdom of crowd", then you have the making of PARC's inference engine technology - if you would allow for a gross simplification.

What the inference engine is good at is to identify items that may be linked in ways that is not always obvious. My favorite example is how the inference engine easily cracked the heavily redacted story on the location of a CIA agent's first assignment in How to catch a spy.

Web Chatters

But the same technique can also be used to identify emerging trends (chatters) on a specific topic. So, I used the Inference Engine to look at the top terms associated with the Sonia Sotomayor's nomination process to the US Supreme Court at Sotomayor Web Chatter Index.

And, indeed, it is interesting to see what are the top ranking terms associated with that process and how it points to specific concepts that come in and out of favor in the web crowd.

Private Corpus

Finally, it may be worth noting that the same technique can also be applied to data corpus beyond the visible internet. For example, eDiscovery in legal proceeding is a space where this capability would be very helpful by expanding beyond simple keyword search to a more nuanced understanding of how information linked to each other.

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Mobile Computing and Cloud Today

The Short half-life of Predictions

The hazard of the technology world is that the future is always just around the world. So, it is interesting to note that I have done an analysis of Cloud Computing earlier this year and one of the conclusions is that mobile computing will be a key influence on how people access the Cloud. Mobile, the next Cloud frontier?

Microsoft and Nokia's Mobile Cloud offering

It is, therefore, not a surprise to hear about how Microsoft and Nokia is joining force to offer standard productivity tools like Office for Nokia smart phones. Microsoft and Nokia to bring cloud computing to mobile phone users

What would be interesting to see if users finds the offering compelling. Mobile computing has its own set of form factor and operating norms and fitting the mental framework of productivity tools in that context would be a fascinating story.

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 12

New items and faded topics

The term "111th" which refers to the fact that Justice Sotomayor is the 111th for the Supreme Court, continued its appearance in the top 20.

For the first time, "Malesko" and "Alito" both showed up in all three rankings. Would this presage the basis for the first analysis of the Supreme Court once she is sworn in and decisions are rendered?

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
sonija leval sotomyaor judgeship rulings 111th stating sotomayor coxe gurfein gop malesko judging 68-31 chin ginsburg ruled eight legislator alito	sotomyaor sotomayor sonia souter malesko mcmahon destefano bronxdale alito ginsburg hispanic scotus nominee scotusblog supreme scalia hearings morgenthau 111th allowing	sotomayor alito scotus moynihan obama statehood souter 111th rulings destefano retiring scalia stating legislator ginsburg malesko cabranes scotusblog mahoney rendell

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Virtual World for a Neophyte

Video Games

I got recruited by an intern to participate in a study on virtual world. What specifically sold me on the idea is that I would get to play a "video game" - given my last formal training in video game dates around Donkey Kong on a hand-held.

Before the experiment started, I confessed to my lack of gaming context. And, with a knowing glance, the experimenter quickly gave me a tour on how things work in virtual world. For example, to navigate forward, back, left, and right, the keys are, respectively, W, S, A, and D.

At the end of the experiment, I was asked to fill out a questionnaire by hand. Again, with the experimenter's knowing glance I pre-apologize for my chicken scratch's illegibility and suggested that the collection be done via a keyboard next time.

A world of neophytes subjects

Later I found out that these were two of the most common concerns with PARC participants - don't even know the rudimentary controls and type better/faster than hand-write.

But, hey, the game was pretty cool!

PARC and Virtual World

I do not mean to imply that game playing is beneath PARC. As a matter of a fact, there is very active exploration on gaming and virtual worlds at both the technology and social interaction levels.

In the case of this experiment, however, the thing is that these very same people are also running the experiment. In other words, they are stuck with neophytes like me.

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 11

Confirmed to the US Supreme Court

By a vote of 68-31, Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice on August 6th, 2009.

New items and faded topics

All the usual suspects such as "nlj (National Law Journal)", Foxnews, and "wsj.com" dropped off the top 20 list.

The new term that is making a rapid ascend is the term "111th" which, in case you missed the news, Justice Sotomayor is the 111th for the supreme court.

Next week, we will have the final installment on the top 20 analyses.

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
sotomyaor stating sotomayor rulings sonia faced sued assail baer gop coxe 111th gurfein meant approval involving judging â nominees murders	sotomyaor sotomayor sonia souter malesko judgepedia mcmahon destefano bronxdale alito scotus ginsburg scotusblog nominee hispanic supreme judgeship hearings morgenthau tasini	alito sotomayor obamaâ scotus moynihan obama statehood 111th souter scotusblog retiring destefano malesko legislator politico cabranes noting mahoney stating judgeship

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ByOnic and T Rex's Peptides

Taste like a Chicken

You may have heard that dinosaurs are related to birds. A study on the soft tissue of a T.rex fossil pioneered the theory but there has been enough heated debate that several other teams have re-analyzed the data. See Dinosaur Study Backs Controversial Find in Science.

Suffice to say that PARC's Bioinformatic team entered the fray with ByOnic, a peptide identification program. And, indeed, T.rex is related to birds.

ByOnic

Beyond looking at a pre-historic top of the food chain animal, the technical advantage of ByOnic over the traditional peptide identification tools is in its ability to do "smart scoring". In other words, it has a more accurate way of matching observed spectra to "theoretical" spectra predicted from protein sequence.

For easy searches, a smart scorer like ByOnic beats the standard scorers by a margin of, say, 30%. However, as the complexity of the searches increase, such as the number of proteins, chemical modifications, mutations, spectra with more than one peptide, etc., the total advantage of smart scorer goes up significantly. In other words, a very smart scorer system should be just as good as manual analysis - without the manual work.

We believe ByOnic is almost there.

There are also other crowd pleasers features such as the ability to trade off speed and sensitivity to do large searches and "wild-card" modification to catch peptides with unanticipated modifications.

Work with ByOnic and PARC's Bioinformatic team

Please contact me if you are interested in trying out ByOnic for your peptide analysis. The PARC research team thinks that the T.rex analysis was "easy", say a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10. If you have searches in the difficult range of 8, 9, or 10, we would love to talk with you.

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 10

Senate Confirmation Debate

Now that the Senate Judiciary Committee has endorsed the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the nomination is now in the full Senate for debate.

New items and faded topics

The term "nlj (National Law Journal)" and its sister term "pubarticlenlj.jsp" have kept up its ranking. As a matter of a fact, it shot up to #1 in one of the engine results.

Foxnews has quickly lost its top 20 ranking while "wsj.com" continues to assert its relevance to this discussion. Also appearing for the first time is the term "Barack" and debuting as #1 no less. Similarly, "conservatives" made its top 20 appearance.

Finally, the term "dissented" which appeared in the top 20 last week kept its position this week.

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
justices stating cityâ rulings dissented sotomayor sotomayorâ questioning proceedings defenses nominees malesko krimstock â supporting issued ended nearly senator supreme	nlj sotomayor sotomayorâ krimstock sonia malesko souter pubarticlenlj.jsp destefano ginsburg scotusblog nominee hispanic judgeship supreme judgepedia hostednews jury hearings leahy	barack sotomayor moynihan statehood obama leahy souter cuomo destefano cabranes scotusblog online.wsj.com ginsburg conservatives affirmative prosecutor stating nlj rulings politico

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Face Tracking for Video Analysis

Is it Hollywood or is it for real?

This is one of the question that I have wondered ever since watching the first Terminator movie where Arnold, aka Mr Governor, identified his victim by analyzing video images. I am glad to report that, with no casualty count, there is indeed similar technology at work at PARC.

I have covered some of the details on this entry Video Analysis and Responsive Mirror part II. Now, I've got Maurice Chu, who worked on and modeled this technology, to share a clip.

Face tracking on a video feed



Maurice's explanation: The clip demonstrates the processing of video to track the face and its parts. In particular, the six face parts are the left and right eyes, the left and right eyebrows, nose, and mouth. The output of the face tracker is a cloud of points representing the location of the six face parts in image coordinates. These can be used to determine the 3D orientation of the face relative to the camera. Some of the challenges that the algorithm overcomes is that it can handle when people put on glasses, eye blinking, and other deformable movements like the lips. The algorithm runs in real-time, currently at about 10 fps, is people-generic, and requires no initial calibration.

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 9

Senate Judiciary Committee Confirmation

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted, 13 to 6, today to endorse the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor

New items and faded topics

The term "nlj" which refers to "National Law Journal", has kept up its ranking and added a related term "pubarticlenlj.jsp" "judgepedia" - a wiki on judges - kept its place.

Foxnews has come back with a vagence as #3 on Google. On the other hand, Washingtonpost.com disappeared from the top 20 ranking. "wsj.com" continues to do well losing one notch, edged out by "Obama" on Microsoft ranking.

Also interesting is to see the term "dissented" in the top 20. We will see if it would stay next week.

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
justices www.foxnews.com sotomayorâ rulings cityâ dissented judiciary defenses sotomayor courts americans souter malesko hearings â senators circumstances krimstock issued reversal	sonia sotomayorâ sotomayor souter destefano krimstock nominee ginsburg nlj hearings morgenthau judgepedia tasini leahy judiciary malesko cuomo judgeship supreme justices	sotomayor statehood moynihan obama leahy online.wsj.com nlj souter destefano cuomo stating rulings ginsburg cabranes republicans prosecutor affirmative pubarticlenlj.jsp politico gained

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PARC's Longevity

PARC is better than NASA

That should get your attention.

In a Harvard Business blog (http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/sviokla/2009/07/organized_information_is_the_n.html), John Sviokla argued that we need another ambitious project like NASA's Apollo on organizing information. Then, he concludes by arguing that for a cost of $100 million, PARC is a better investment than NASA's $150 billion.

With all due respect, I suspect his is a minority view. A better description is that both PARC and NASA spectacularly fulfilled their respective raison d’être in intended dimensions and beyond.

PARC's Longevity

Indeed, in my mind, a more interesting question is how has PARC kept up its role as a world leading source of technology and innovation.

For those who are looking for the Cliffs Notes version on PARC's longevity, the short answer is that PARC has continuously evolved existing know-how and invested in new ideas as each new generation of global technology and innovation come on-line.

I should start a new short series on PARC's longevity.

In the meantime, here is an interactive tool that highlights some of the milestones at PARC since 1970. (http://www.parc.com/about/milestones.html)

Organized Information at PARC

Coming back to John Sviokla's entry, PARC has a lot of investment into this precise issue. Here is a blog that talks about the notion of Augmented Reality as a way of intelligently organizing information. (http://blogs.parc.com/blog/2009/07/augmented-reality-increasing-collective-intelligence/)

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 8

Confirmation Hearing

With the confirmation hearing done, it is interesting to see how the discussion has shifted into some factual and some "speculative" terms.

New items and faded topics

"judgepedia" - a wiki on judges - kept its place. It is also joined by the term "nlj" which refers to "National Law Journal"

Foxnews has completely dropped off from the top 20 rankings after being highly ranked for most weeks. Interesting to see Washingtonpost.com making a come back - I wonder if it is a reflection that now the denizens inside the Washington DC Beltway are doing most of the chattering. As for wsj.com's come back, do you have any thoughts?

Also interesting is to see the term "unanimous" in the top 20 which does seem to reflect the mainstream media's consensus on her confirmation.

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
justices repeatedly stating americans sotomayor questioning judiciary dissented reversing helped defenses lawyers nyt â cityâ souter www.washingtonpost.com saying became unconstitutional	sotomayorâ sotomayor sonia souter krimstock ginsburg nominee judgepedia nlj morgenthau tasini cuomo hearings leahy judgeship supreme justices judiciary republicans hispanic	sotomayor moynihan statehood online.wsj.com obama nlj souter banc cuomo leahy rulings politico gop stating reversals ginsburg prosecutor unanimous affirmative cabranes

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Opportunity Discovery

Fail fast fail cheap

This is probably the slogan that best captures the operandi modus of Silicon Valley and, to some extent, to innovation in general. The trouble is that "fail" is a dirty word in most places outside of Silicon Valley but the innovation imperative is not any less.

Over the years, companies have looked to PARC as a partner in creating innovation solutions. And, we have developed a methodology on how to "fail fast fail cheap" without the "fail".

Now, we are talking!

PARC's Opportunity Discovery service

The insight is that while small validations upfront to test assumptions and ability to consider all adjacent applications may add some additional initial overhead, they will yield a more robust and successful result and generally result in lower overall project resource and time requirements.

With PARC's Opportunity Discovery service, or O/D, we have created a systematic framework and a set of tools to unearth market and user insights which provide the basis to design a product/service.

On a per product/project basis, O/D allows the client team to capture and share information for better decision making. At the corporate level, O/D allows the management to feel comfortable that all reasonable options have been actively considered and explored before making a large investment.

Video Analysis and Responsive Mirror part II

Responsive Mirror part II

For those who are interested in what happened to the responsive mirror as discussed, here is a look at the second generation of the technology.

It is more integrated in terms of form factor and uses an enhanced video analysis core. As reported by Boing Boing: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/06/30/how-parcs-responsive.html

Video Analysis

For the inner geeks in us, here is a high level description of the video analysis technology used for Responsive Mirror

1. Finding matches across images is performed by deriving a metric of similarity (i.e., a distance) between two images.
2. Then, an optimization is performed to find the best matches across two sets of images that minimize the aggregate distance between the two sets.

Some technical details

1. What is the similarity metric between two individual images?
Modified version of Euclidean distance by treating an image as a large vector of pixel values.
2. What is the “aggregate distance” between two sets of images (as opposed to two individual images)?
Contact me (email: "yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com") for more information on the answer
3. How is the optimization performed?
Greedy descent algorithm to minimize aggregate distance.

Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 7

Confirmation Hearing

Now that the confirmation hearing for Ms Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the US Supreme Court has started, I am curious to see how the chatter profile would change.

New items and faded topics

"Litigator" did not have the staying power to remain in the top 20. "Firefighters" is also waning. The new entrant to the top ranking is "judgepedia" - a wiki on judges, did not know one existed.

Foxnews has dropped in rankings after being highly ranked for most weeks. Would it come a come back now that the confirmation hearing is now?

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
senators esquire judiciary www.foxnews.com jury sotomayorâ reversing senator ruled dissented courts sotomayor reversal sued rulings nominated attorney married belief securities	sotomayorâ sotomayor sonia souter gillibrand krimstock ginsburg schumer judgepedia nominee cuomo judgeship justices morgenthau supreme leahy cabranes firefighters www.foxnews.com republicans	sotomayor gillibrand obama schumer moynihan souter cuomo rulings centrist reversals politico gop republicans leahy ginsburg firefighter prosecutor mahoney cabranes affirmative

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Video analysis and shopping

Responsive Mirror

One downside of working at PARC is that a lot of technologies sound so out there or address very specific (fundamental) problems that they don't make for good cocktail tales.

Responsive mirror, on the other hand, uses cool technology in a context that we can all relate to. It lets you do side by side real-time comparisons of clothing with prior pieces as you put on a new one instead of conjuring up the images of what the prior piece look like.

Of course, this is not one of 'em before/after pictures in diet pill infomercials. Responsive mirror follows your actual movement and plays back the same movement with the prior article. In other words, you can do not just "apple-to-apple" comparison but "same-side-of-apple-to-same-side-of-apple" comparisons. Now, that is cool!

Here is a link on the tool: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=21045

Video Analysis

Of course, under the hood, PARC has built up a platform on a robust video analysis and given the proliferation of both cameras and screens beyond laptop computers (think smart phones), there are a lot of applications that are still waiting to be imagined.

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Migitti: Mobile Recommendation Systems

Reality Mining

Most of us have heard of data-mining even if we cannot write a nested query to save our lives. With the proliferation of rich-media mobile devices, there is a new gold mine in the form of reality-mining. In other words, instead of firing up a browser on my phone to do a search on Yelp and decipher what catches my fancy given where I am at, a system can be built to incorporate my personal preference and location information to give me the most tantalizing (and relevant) choices.

Migitti Project

Well. We've built one at PARC.

Here is the link to the slide-ware
http://www.slideshare.net/begole/activitybased-serendipitous-recommendations-with-the-magitti-mobile-leisure-guide

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 7

New items and faded topics

Firefighters made the top 20 list this week. Litigator also made the top 20. Two timely entries on the current discussion. We will see how long they last.

As noted last week, "racist" made an appearance. It disappeared this week and "centrist" actually made its appearance. Gingrich completely dropped off in all three results. Also interesting to note that Foxnews dropped significantly in one of the rankings.

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
rulings www.foxnews.com dissented sotomayorâ sotomayor souter litigator questioning nominees krimstock proceedings republicans defenses â cityâ ended res judges reversing efforts	sotomayor sotomayorâ sonia souter krimstock schumer ginsburg nominee cuomo judgeship justices supreme cabranes judgepedia biden firefighters hispanic republicans www.foxnews.com leahy	sotomayor schumer obama moynihan souter cuomo rulings gop centrist republicans politico reversals cabranes ginsburg firefighters prosecutor leahy affirmative litigator nominees

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Projectors today and tomorrow

Ethnography and Social Science at PARC

I suspect nobody would be surprised to know that technical merit is not the sole success factor of a technology. Everything roughly equal, the more user-centric solution usually wins.

What may be a surprise for some though is that PARC has a long history investing in ethnography and social science as part of its technology platform. And, the ability to view the world with human factors an integral part of the overall context has been viewed as an important competencies for our clients.

What is wrong with my projector?

Below is a video that talks about projects which highlights the complex issues when human and technology mix.

I will confess that it really forced me to think about how I interact with it and its potential problems. You would too!



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Boing'd

Boing Boing

Boing Boing is a technology blog run by a group of writers. They visited PARC recently to see what cool stuff PARC is working on today.

You can see a series of entries on PARC here (http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/30/today-at-boing-boing-62.html)

Organic food, Unix parties, coyotes, and geeks

Lisa, a Boing Boing writer, call me up for a few questions on life at PARC. For those of you who do not have time to read the entire entry, just know these two words "Sushi Wednesday!" (http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/06/30/a-day-in-the-life-of.html)

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 6

New items and faded topics

Jarring but interesting to see that "racist" made the top 20 this week. Palin also vaulted to into the top 20 this week. Letterman made a come back to the top 20.

As noted last week, CNN indeed dropped off the list as suspected. Nightline probably did a program on this topic so it made the top 20, we will see if it stays next week. And, finally, instead of making a run for the top spot that Foxnews occupies, Gingrich lost ranking in all three results. It may be time for him to say a few new things.

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
sotomayorhtml www.foxnews.com justices sotomayorâ courts nominees facility concerns serving issued cityâ ended ricans served moved rican hearings filed krimstock sotomayor	www.foxnews.com sotomayor sotomayorâ sonia souter online.wsj.com scotus scotusblog gillibrand gingrich nominee judgeship schumer ginsburg supreme justices krimstock nomination hispanic racist	scotus palin gillibrand gingrich schumer obama scotusblog justices gop souter rulings politico republicans nominee cuomo blotter sotomayor nightline letterman unanimous

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Mobile, the next Cloud frontier?

Buzz Words

I have been following Cloud Computing. Buzz word or not, it is a good way to talk about a shift in how we think of computing services. And, like many computing services, it would eventually impact the life of everyday consumer.

Cloud Computing prediction

I did an internal analysis and presentation recently. It got me thinking about the implication of that shift and how it would manifest itself. At a high level, Cloud and mobile computing seem inevitable - I think the bigger question is which mobile platform (smartphone, netbook, etc.) will be the winner.



I suppose we will only know for sure in a few more years.

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 5

New items and faded topics

"Gingrich" is mounting a come back. It has gone up a bit on the ranking in both Yahoo and Microsoft and is just one place shy of making it into the top 20 for the Google result. Interesting to see CNN popping up high in the Yahoo result; I wonder if it will fade next week. Even more interesting, Google show up in the top 20 for Yahoo results. Not sure what is the explanation on that one.

www.foxnews.com retained its #1 ranking in two of the three search engines. I don't suppose Gingrich would make a run for the #1 spot?

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine used in this analysis, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
www.foxnews.com justices rulings defenses sotomayorâ questioning dissented nominees sotomayor circumstances schumer fourth krimstock souter cityâ ended activist judges efforts rican	www.foxnews.com sotomayor sotomayorâ www.cnn.com sonia souter www.newsday.com gingrich nominee schumer ginsburg judgeship nlj cuomo krimstock supreme justices www.google.com hispanic republicans	schumer gingrich justices obama gop souter defenses cuomo sotomayor republicans rulings democrats nominee politico leahy moynihan centrist reversals princetonian prosecutor

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T-shirt contests

Subject: Intern t-shirt design
Sent: Tuesday, June 09, 2009
To: PARC

Design this year’s Intern t-shirt!

Clever, Silly, Colorful, Funny, Serious, Technical
Whatever your mood, design this year’s intern t-shirt.

Submit your design by 5:00 pm: Thursday, June 18.

Everyone welcome to submit designs, the interns will vote on their favorite.



My submission

--
Subject: And the winner is...
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009
To: PARC

... the “PARC Grass” intern t-shirt design.

Congratulations to the design team.

Ordering.
Please send an email with your t-shirt size and if you’d like a women’s or men’s.

Thanks,


Winner: PARC grass

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 4

New items and faded topics

Meteor rise of "Gingrich" had an equally hasty retreat on Google. #1 last week and #30 this week. The interesting new entrant for this week is Letterman of the TV talk show fame. Do you think that is the amount of time it takes for Letterman's writers to come up with a good line on this topic?

www.foxnews.com keeps coming back up. I suppose this confirms its position as the voice of the opposition to her nomination.

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
sotomayorhtml www.foxnews.com justices sotomayorâ courts nominees facility concerns serving issued cityâ ended ricans served moved rican hearings filed krimstock sotomayor	www.foxnews.com sotomayor sotomayorâ sonia souter online.wsj.com scotus scotusblog gillibrand gingrich nominee judgeship schumer ginsburg supreme justices krimstock nomination hispanic racist	scotus palin gillibrand gingrich schumer obama scotusblog justices gop souter rulings politico republicans nominee cuomo blotter sotomayor nightline letterman unanimous

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Unofficial Tour

Intern season

Summer intern season is upon us. New faces to know and interesting ideas to toss around. This is going to be fun.

Unofficial tour for interns

--
From: Juan, Y.F.
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009
To: Interns
Subject: Unofficial tour: the PARC time machine

Hi folks,

As you know, PARC had a finger or two in starting many technology that we take for granted today. The better question is that now you are at PARC, have you seen or touched these original ideas in person?

Today at 3pm, if you are interested, come by...there will be a tour on Ethernet, Alto, etc.

Bring your camera!
--

A piece of history in hand













T. Peck and a 4Mb disk for Alto
(Picture by Brian Lim)
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National Initiative for Social Participation

Where is social media taking us?

If you are reading this blog, you are a participant in social media. And, in a world of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, social media is not just a technology phenomenon, it is an important part of the cultural and social fabric.

Given its prominence in the everyday life around the world, it is surprising that there has not been a systematic understanding of its many dimensions.

Some fundamental questions surrounding social media

Peter Pirolli at PARC is one of the organizers behind this whitepaper that tries point out the importance of social media and calls for a national level organization like NASA to tackle the following six challenges:

* A Nation of Neighbors
* A National Deliberative Process
* Encyclopedia of Life
* Climate Collaboratorium
* Energy Initiative: Socio-technical systems supporting reflective communities
* Enabling Healthy Living

You can find the full document and related information at http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com/

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 3

New items and faded topics

It is interesting to see how the three search engines find relevant. The new item that caught my eye for this week was the word "Gingrich" which was not in the top 20 from the prior weeks. This week, it showed up as top 20 in all three.

On the other hand, "www.huffingtonpost.com" completely disappeared in the result; not just the top 20 but the top 1,000 entries. I wonder if this means that www.huffingtonpost.com's voice is being overwhelmed?

More on the results

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
gingrich sotomayorhtml rulings judges questioning nominees malesko americans proceedings sotomayor sotomayorâ matters ricans helped upheld princetonian issued correctional criticized aspects	www.foxnews.com sonia sotomayorâ sotomayor souter online.wsj.com www.newsday.com scotusblog granholm gillibrand malesko gingrich nominee schumer ginsburg supreme judgeship justices krimstock upheld	schumer gillibrand granholm obama justices hispanics gingrich correctional scotusblog republicans gop souter rulings politico nominee judgeship racist centrist leahy reversals

Sotomayor Web Chatter Index - Week 2

Yahoo vs. Google

It is always interesting to compare the results. While I expect the results to converge on the topic over time, it seems that we are still in the early stage in this discussion.

What is particularly interesting is to see Yahoo seems to list more news outlet as a key term than Google. On the other hand, the ranking of the news outlet is different between the two.

Notes, Technical and Otherwise

I was having some technical difficult generating data from Microsoft's Live Search. Hope to get it fixed in time for next week's queries.

A reminder, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine, please let me know at yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com.

Update: 2009-06-03
Thanks to the technology team, Microsoft results were collected and added to this list.

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
democrats www.huffingtonpost.com ruled sotomayor www.foxnews.com hispanics americans courts lawyers seeks granholm died upheld questioning doctor dissented nation souter helped sotomayorâ	sotomayorâ sotomayor www.foxnews.com sonia souter www.newsday.com nominee upheld malesko www.huffingtonpost.com justices granholm ginsburg supreme gillibrand krimstock hispanic nomination judgeship claret	schumer obama granholm hispanics justices correctional gillibrand republicans gop rulings souter centrist unanimous upheld nominee reversals leahy www.huffingtonpost.com reversed

Numerology

Primed Slot

I like math. Not great with it. But, I enjoy reading things like Flatland and find the application of second derivative and the resulting slope shapes scintillating.

Hence, it should not come as a surprise that when I had to pick a slot recently at PARC, I specifically requested a prime number. 19, in case you are wondering.

Cartesian Padlock

On the other hand, I am just a white belt at PARC.

In a recent conversation, I asked for the combination of a padlock. It starts with "-2". Negative two?! Took me a split second to realize that the combination was expressed in an one dimensional Cartesian number line.

Brilliant!

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Sotomayor Web Chatter Index

Catching Sonia Sotomayor

As you may recall from the How to catch a spy entry, PARC has developed a technology that can automatically infer what are the relevant words to a particular topic.

It was announced earlier today that Ms Sotomayor had been nominated for an appointment to the US Supreme Court. I thought it would be interesting to run a regular scan of the web chatter to find out what are the words that web-tizens consider relevant to Ms Sotomayor.

Notes, Technical and Otherwise

This is based on results from three of the most popular search engines - Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. As a technology geek, it is interesting to see how different engines deal with the same data corpus from the internet.

Before going into the actual results, it is also worth noting that since this is literally day one of the web chatter, there is likely to be some divergence on the results. I would speculate that the results would converge over time, but we shall find out!

Finally, if you are interested in finding out more about the result details or the inference engine, please let me know at "yfjuan (at) parc (dot) com"

Results (top 20 terms ranked in the order of relevance with the most relevant on top)

Google	Yahoo	Microsoft
2009/politics/05/26 justices sotomayor presser nominate nominees nominations nominated appeals ruled sotomayorâ believes decisions alito employee gillibrand 21st fourth sekulow claim	sotomayorâ sotomayor souter scotus justices sonia ginsburg scotusblog www.cnn.com alito rel cabranes bader nominee rosen gillibrand sekulow breyer www.huffingtonpost.com leahy	sotomayor court â she her supreme judge sonia obama from new 2009 law may york nomination who has president us

Content as Network

Hero Worshiping

It is kind of rare to meet your hero in person. Rarer yet is to be able to work with your hero on a regular basis.

So, it is a pretty mind blowing for me to say that I sit only a few doors down from Van Jacobson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jacobson) who is the primary contributor to TCP/IP which in term provides the foundation for internet as we know it today.

Content Centric Networking (CCN)

Van is leading the effort for content centric networking (CCN). This is a high level talk that he gave a while back that explains what he has in mind.



CCN for the rest of us

Naturally, if you are not fully conversant with the 7 layers of network protocol hierarchy, e.g. business development folks like me, too need an answer on what is CCN.

This is what I say, we are working on the next generation of internet. :-p!

--
I hope to explore the roadmap and implications of CCN in periodic entries. Suffices to say, the CCN group is very busy at work right now.

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Nothing is a success until it has been canceled three times

Hi-Tech Ethos

I was chatting with one of the PARC colleagues about one of the projects that I am working on and he made the observation "nothing is a success until it has been canceled three times."

I think this captures the spirit of Silicon Valley as well as any that I have heard.

Let a thousand ideas bloom

In the old days, the rule of thumb about getting a new idea funded by a VC works something like this.

For every 10 ideas, 1 turns into a business plan
For every 10 business plan, 1 turns into a VC conversation
For every 10 VC conversations, 1 gets funded.

In other words, an idea has a 1 in 1,000 chance of getting funded. And, this is makes no prediction on if a funded idea has even a 50-50 chance of surviving beyond the first two years.

1 in 3 vs. 1 in 1,000

Given the 1 in 1,000 context, having something canceled/rejected three times is really not that big of a deal.

On the other hand, if you feel light-headed after reading this statement, you should not be in Silicon Valley.

---
I think the real question is how does PARC continue its longevity and relevance. Maybe I can convince somebody in the social science group to do an analysis.

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Earth Day 2009

Subject: PARC Earth Day 2009!

PARC’s Earth Day Celebration this year is going to be held on Wednesday, May 6th.

Our theme this year is: “Sustainable Smarts”. During the event you will be able to:

• Drop off personal e-waste from home. Leave it in the large cardboard bin marked “e-waste”.
• Drop off expired or unwanted medicine for proper disposal—At the P.A Water Quality Dept. booth
• Exchange your old mercury thermometer for a new electronic one for free!
• Pick up a plant, vegetable or flower at our Adopt-A-Plant booth
• Enter a drawing to win sustainable and eco-friendly prizes
• Shop organic produce at the Farmer Stand
• Check out the electric car
• Take a ride on the scooters
• Eat food cooked via solar power

My contributions to PARC earth Day 2009

Dropped off
• CPU
• Latptop
• PDA
• Cell phones

Got a sweet basil plant.

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Can 802.11 cut the HD TV cords?

802.11/WiFi for HDTV

For those of us in the know, 802.11 is the de facto wireless standard for computing devices that comes with all wireless PC/laptop and is increasingly available with mobile handsets and gaming console.

So the logical question is can 802.11 become the de facto wireless standard for all electronic devices. Say, instead of wiring up my new HDTV with all the players and other devices, would something like 802.11 help cut the cords?

This is an issue that a lot of industry players are grappling with and the latest verdict, for whatever it is worth, is yes according to this analyst report "802.11n Wi-Fi Technology is the Spoiler at the Wireless HD Video Party; Will Dominate (http://in-stat.com/press.asp?ID=2513&sku=IN0904455MI)"

Reality Check

Instead of arguing over the technical details, we conducted an analysis on how 802.11n will perform in typical home scenarios. Think of it as simulations on how 802.11n will work in a perfect environment - so your performance at home will only be worse...

Assumptions

It turns out that working out the specific variable/assumptions are the most tricky part. So, this is what we came up with. We want a home environment where there are different type of wireless traffics: some web surfing, some VoIP chatter, some TV watching, and some Blu-ray video watching.

We also looked into the distances amongst all the devices because interference is a very real issue with 802.11. As things are further apart, there is less inference and vice versa.

So, here are the variables that we tried in our simulations.

Devices:

Blu-ray video
HDTV
Media center (MC) - provides Blu-ray and HD TV to, up to, two (2) TV's
Web session
VoIP call
Access Point (AP) - support the web and VoIP sessions

Distances:

Short - 3m/10ft
Medium - 10m/30ft
Long - 15m/50ft

Scenarios

Without being exhaustive, scenarios range from:

Most “forgiving”: 1 MC + 1 HDTV + 1AP + 1 VoIP + 1 Web at long distance (15m/50ft)

to
Least “forgiving”: 1 MC + 1 Blu-Ray + 1 Blu-Ray+ 1AP + 1 VoIP + 1 Web at short distance (3m/10ft)

Results

The performance threshold that we used was less than 200msec delay. If it is more than that, it becomes noticeable to human perception.

The long and short of it is that 802.11n only works within the acceptable range in the case of one HDTV far away from other devices, i.e. the most "forgiving" scenario. On top of it, all the other users such as web surfing and VoIP would have to accept significant performance hit.

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I would love to hear your experiences using 802.11 in a mixed-media environment with multiple users. Maybe I am missing something here.

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P@P