tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68578423143118753992024-03-10T20:21:50.531-07:00On the Path to RevivalArjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-89352017848054431402013-07-16T07:51:00.000-07:002013-07-16T08:14:09.029-07:00Google Anita Borg 2013 Annual Retreat in Zurich, SwitzerlandBeing recipient of Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship 2013 for Europe, Middle East and Africa I was invited to the annual retreat at Google offices in Zurich, Switzerland. As readers of my blog very well know that I keep a diary record of significant research events that I attend so here goes.<br />
<br />
The Google Retreat 2013 was held from 30th June, 2013 to morning of 3rd July, 2013. The main activities of the retreat were spread over two days (i.e., 1st and 2nd July, 2013) with 30th June reserved for registration and the welcome reception at the hotel where the scholars and finalists got to know each other through a very interesting networking <i><b>Bingo</b>.</i> The final day consisted of a very brief breakfast tram tour of Zurich.<br />
<br />
Below is a picture of the networking Bingo given to us by Google; for those unfamiliar with the term <i><b>Bingo</b></i> it is a card game played in United States and Canada where a 5x5 matrix has to be completed with numbers printed on a board either vertically, horizontally or diagonally. The difference in Google's version of <i><b>Bingo </b></i>was however that rather than making it a game of chance it was a game of socializing and networking with other fellow scholars and finalists; and it was great to know that most of them were fan of nerdy TV shows like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Bang_Theory">"The Big Bang Theory"</a> and took nerd as a compliment :-)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxkg1FZKRyhCTqjIv6puZ2qAMOCq-Wd_XtXLYqZS9Tutnz0F8P5wyvwmrnnBAl2VfMrRQuYL7e7MGJwjB3wT-o3GYCHNyDsU_Gg8eTpDsEgyF4KAMkeqmsEt9Rhf1940T1azXqnF3G4nh0/s1600/bingo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxkg1FZKRyhCTqjIv6puZ2qAMOCq-Wd_XtXLYqZS9Tutnz0F8P5wyvwmrnnBAl2VfMrRQuYL7e7MGJwjB3wT-o3GYCHNyDsU_Gg8eTpDsEgyF4KAMkeqmsEt9Rhf1940T1azXqnF3G4nh0/s640/bingo.png" width="476" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
The retreat officially kicked off with Oliver Heckman, Engineering Director at Google Switzerland, giving an overview of the engineering initiatives at Google Zurich. Many amazing Google products are a result of hard work by engineers in this Europe-based Google office with some example products being Google Maps, <a href="http://www.google.ie/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html">Google Knowledge Graph</a>, YouTube etc. Oliver also demoed the upcoming <a href="http://searchengineland.com/googles-impressive-conversational-search-goes-live-on-chrome-160445">Google's Conversational Search</a> which seems to be a great leap in the world of Web search engines.<br />
<br />
Next up was a technical talk by Doug Aberdeen who holds a PhD with his topic of expertise being Reinforcement Learning prior to joining Google, and within Google he works with the Gmail product team on things like spam detection but more recently on my personal favorite namely "Priority Inbox". His talk was full of valuable insights for those working in Machine Learning which is why I enjoyed it a lot. Doug's talk was different than traditional machine learning talks in the sense that it considered machine learning from a practical and realistic point of view i.e., from point of view of how to approach machine learning when building large-scale products that have to be deployed in the real-world. He said that machine learning people may seem fascinated by the huge amount of data available to Google engineers but the fact of the matter is that even Google does not have ground truth labels all the time and this is where the real Machine Learning challenge comes in. A somewhat astonishing fact for me was that <span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">90% of machine learning algorithms at Google are simple parallel logistic regression; however, parallelizing logistic regression algorithm at Google-scale is definitely something not trivial. Doug's talk was followed by a tech talk on <i><b>Engineering behind YouTube</b></i> and how YouTube detects copyrights' violations; it reminded me of the following TED Talk by Margaret Gould Stewart:</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="http://embed.ted.com/talks/margaret_stewart_how_youtube_thinks_about_copyright.html" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="560"></iframe></div>
<br />
Moving on we entered the <i><b>Product Design workshop</b></i> which was a fun experience and this activity turned out to be wonderful from a learning point of view giving an interesting insight into product management. We learnt about Google's APM (Associate Product Management) program which is a two-year product management training program specifically designed for those who love managing engineers and coming up with ideas for new products; normally those who are not so good at programming and/or do not enjoy programming enter this line (with lots of those at undergraduate or graduate level). Mind you the product managers are not above engineers in hierarchy as they are simply the people who understand what products people need and then work with engineers to build that product. At the end of the session we were divided into six groups and each group had to work on one of four product ideas; my group got the <i><b>School Diary</b></i> idea which we had to chalk out as a product with various features. The following pictures were taken during the product design workshop:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYy1hW7NOcXdcDOmzjTSNXQFYCXvngx7FV6pLfHDyEnhDG16TU7_2FV83_pjiXacBBcRwk6oNjuqZ32dW9ZOUsu_WCVbPIa6z4DDqhTZ-DaJd9HWYNGBNlPb0GlulBiSNArGRKJbxzKyeu/s1600/20130701_131222.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYy1hW7NOcXdcDOmzjTSNXQFYCXvngx7FV6pLfHDyEnhDG16TU7_2FV83_pjiXacBBcRwk6oNjuqZ32dW9ZOUsu_WCVbPIa6z4DDqhTZ-DaJd9HWYNGBNlPb0GlulBiSNArGRKJbxzKyeu/s400/20130701_131222.jpg" width="300" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJndFBVQ-a-NItHqDw2eXtMsLlDS6ZjG6T4O5hymQPOQow7H3EtYv4Ln9_Wtss81rKvkQQl92E7TKAXSHmUTu6JTIOiuq1aKHySuENm-vVfCxJnkwc0IdLZOKu2qqcBeLihon4SvG0WZTl/s1600/00579.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJndFBVQ-a-NItHqDw2eXtMsLlDS6ZjG6T4O5hymQPOQow7H3EtYv4Ln9_Wtss81rKvkQQl92E7TKAXSHmUTu6JTIOiuq1aKHySuENm-vVfCxJnkwc0IdLZOKu2qqcBeLihon4SvG0WZTl/s400/00579.jpg" width="400" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTSyLwE1kTT64uVOrR8YTT6MGepnVZpwFGyTqTpd0lxDUZCCyryGZn7IOGXAdjo1Q23yQ1YNywe_4ryjQCfX0hQ6fx6gRnRW4dvbDVDV8Vzoya3rVERakTKpz3cuEh_xy6-7VVSK6Syevh/s1600/00838.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTSyLwE1kTT64uVOrR8YTT6MGepnVZpwFGyTqTpd0lxDUZCCyryGZn7IOGXAdjo1Q23yQ1YNywe_4ryjQCfX0hQ6fx6gRnRW4dvbDVDV8Vzoya3rVERakTKpz3cuEh_xy6-7VVSK6Syevh/s400/00838.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
We then moved on to the <i><b>poster show</b></i> where each of us presented our respective research and it was wonderful to get feedback from the fellow scholars/finalists along with Google engineers and interns. Many lines of future work came into my mind after those interactions. We were then taken for half-an-hour Office tour around Google Zurich office and the work environment there was fantastic with loads and loads of isolation compartments where programmers/engineers could lie down for a while, think alone (you know during the tough programming phases when you're stuck badly in some problems) and even talk on the phone. The entire office was full of free snacks, coffee plus various beverages and ice-cream; there was a Sky Lounge, a Jungle Lounge, Water Lounge and my personal favorite the restaurant named Fork() (yes, it is inspired from fork() command under Linux). The day's final activity was the <i><b>talk by SVP of Knowledge namely Alan Eustace</b></i> straight from Mountain View via video conference. Alan Eustace is the pioneer of Google Anita Borg program; he told us a bit of history behind the scholarship and some of the time he spent with Dr. Anita Borg along with some funny stories about his daughter and how he explains Computer Science to her.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
The second day was full of more fun for all of us as most of it had been divided into parallel sessions based on the attendees' year of study and research interests. Following is a list of the parallel sessions with the ones attended by me in bold font:<br />
<br />
09:00 - 11:00 Parallel session 1: Android coding challenge<br />
09:00 - 11:00 Parallel session 2: UX web design<br />
09:00 - 11:00 Parallel session 3: SRE Workshop <br />
<b>09:00 - 11:00 Parallel session 4: Natural Language Processing and Research at Google</b><br />
<b>11.30 - 12.30 Parallel session: Women in Computing</b><br />
11.30 - 12.30 Parallel session: Mind the Gap<br />
11.30 - 12.30 Parallel session: Employbility Session<br />
<b>14.45 - 16:15 Parallel session: Day in life of an Intern </b><br />
14.45 - 16:15 Parallel session: Interview workshop<br />
16.45 - 17.45 Career Panels: BSc students<br />
16.45 - 17.45 Career Panels: MSc students<br />
16.45 - 17.45 Career Panels: PhD students 1<br />
<b>16.45 - 17.45 Career Panels: PhD students 2</b><br />
<br />
Perhaps the session on <i><b>Natural Language Processing and Research at Google</b></i> was one of the most awaited and popular one with most of the attendees opting for it. During the one hour Natural Language Processing session, Enrique Alfonseca who heads Natural Language Processing division at Google, Zurich gave a talk on his recently accepted ACL2013 paper in which a headline generative system is proposed that can augment Google's Knowledge Graph. The problem is motivated by the observation that news headlines are rarely objective and every news agency reports an event differently. From a computational perspective, such noisy headlines make it hard to detect events thereby making it a significantly challenging problem to augment event-based knowledge bases such as Google Knowledge Graph. The proposed model exploits event relatedness in news collections through dependency parsing on syntactic patterns using a Noisy-OR Bayesian network. Those interested can read the full paper <a href="http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41185.html">here</a>. Next up was a panel discussion on Research at Google with David Harper (one of Bruce Croft's PhD graduate). This was a highly interactive panel with research scientists (who were once renowned academics) giving insights into what it's like to work on real-world products/systems used by millions of users around the world; turns out it is a whole new experience with satisfaction far more different than joy of getting your research published. I asked two significant questions during this panel from point of view of my own plans of a research internship during PhD and my ambition to remain in academia. At the end of the panel session David Harper mentioned an important resource that gives a very detailed description of how Google approaches research; it is a Communications of the ACM article that can be accessed <a href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151226-googles-hybrid-approach-to-research/fulltext">here</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlhTMcptFMioJqJ1cWZIlczoV9nS8gT3uZ14peILwIppkUFgx7h_fGLPY3cw9Y6pYJ5DxnGncPf2Qv4U2SsyJf2QMRATA1W14xLbm3RGxT4GsKp52J_rvO49O0yBJO7NIv4HH3EzegPbmo/s1600/00067.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlhTMcptFMioJqJ1cWZIlczoV9nS8gT3uZ14peILwIppkUFgx7h_fGLPY3cw9Y6pYJ5DxnGncPf2Qv4U2SsyJf2QMRATA1W14xLbm3RGxT4GsKp52J_rvO49O0yBJO7NIv4HH3EzegPbmo/s400/00067.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
We then entered the <i><b>Women in Computing</b></i> panel which was very interesting for women Computer Scientists. This mostly centered around the question of how women engineers at Google manage an engineering job in industry with kids. Google, Zurich has a flexible policy for mothers-to-be and up to 8 months of maternity leave are granted; along with that there is an option to opt for part-time work along with the option to work from home. Moreover, it is up to the woman herself how she manages the engineering role with her kids and it all comes down to priorities; for a woman kids are always the priority as a Google engineer very nicely put it, "Engineering work can be done by someone else but only I can be a mother to my child". Then another interesting perspective that came up was with respect to quality time being spent with your kids; according to one woman engineer at Google when you know you are always with your kids you take it bit lightly and the quality of the time you spend with them suffers whereas if you are working you know that all the time you spend with your kid has to be quality time. Moving the focus a bit I asked without taking names of course about the assertions by some women in CEO positions that very few women are in those roles and what were the thoughts of women engineers at Google on that to which they replied that it's all up to a person's priorities, CEO positions don't matter that much as long as you enjoy your work and life both.<br />
<br />
In the panel session on <i><b>Day in the Life of an Intern </b></i>we were told about the work routine in various intern positions at Google. There are basically three intern positions at Google: APM (Associate Product Manager) which has to do with managing products at Google thinking of new features etc., SWE (Software Engineering) which has to do with programming behind Google products, and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) which concerns site administration to keep the Google site up and running round the clock. A typical day of an APM intern involves loads and loads of meetings with engineers, discussions on certain features of products, a lot of email communications and among other things motivation boosters for the product team. A typical day of a SWE intern involves programming on the tasks assigned to him/her for the most part with little or no administrative stuff. A typical day in the life of a SRE intern involves being on wait and rushing to situations when a complaint arrives regarding the site being down.<br />
<br />
The last session I took was <i><b>Career Panel: PhD Students 2 </b></i>which mainly centered around career options that PhD students can take once they are done with their PhD. There was a very interesting friction of academia vs. industry in this panel session with some of the panelists making honest confessions of missing academia specially interaction with students and the joy of getting research published while also accepting that one of the strongest motivations in moving from academia to industry is money. In an industry such as Google things are done differently with less freedom to work on things of your choice (like in academia) and the style of work is product-centric rather than research-centric; you cannot afford to solve a research problem in its entirety as the product release has a certain timeline which has to be met. Note that this is different from the other Web industry giants like Microsoft and Yahoo! which both have a separate research division while Google has merged research scientists with engineers in all of their product teams in order to meet the ambitious goal of "organizing the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsOp2KTfnvt6sqndClpmDsKpPkvSwr8xzZVe3XWOw-TJtaDnt7JTjzHcxuoXjH3sdUskYkgEL6N07WAohiNCKSwcWCXkJeWgcSEWXtv-VUJWkX5kX3KZIeA1Myh8pGsdeZkddHxF1PqwSL/s1600/DSC_2593.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsOp2KTfnvt6sqndClpmDsKpPkvSwr8xzZVe3XWOw-TJtaDnt7JTjzHcxuoXjH3sdUskYkgEL6N07WAohiNCKSwcWCXkJeWgcSEWXtv-VUJWkX5kX3KZIeA1Myh8pGsdeZkddHxF1PqwSL/s640/DSC_2593.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-57928351149358612042013-07-13T12:10:00.002-07:002013-07-13T13:50:33.601-07:00The Journey Towards Becoming a Google Anita Borg Memorial ScholarThose of us who know me and have been following me may know that I recently got the <a href="http://www.google.com/anitaborg/emea/winners.html#toc-2013">Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship for Europe, Middle East and Africa</a>. This is the first time that a woman from Pakistan has won this prestigious scholarship ever since its inception in 2007. Over the past few weeks several people (specially women in Pakistani tech circles) have requested me to share my journey towards this scholarship and what were the hurdles that had to be overcome along the way. So, here I am sharing my story for those who had requested me.<br />
<br />
First and foremost it would not have been possible without the support of two very important males in my life namely my father and my husband. My father has a huge role because he is the one who gifted me with the best education possible throughout my childhood thereby building strong foundations for me in early days. I firmly believe my husband to be one of the finest programmers of the world and those who have worked with him can definitely bear testimony to that. My husband has a huge role in this success as he is the one who is always working hard on me to polish my programming skills (giving me useful advices at every stage of life be it technical or any other matter pertaining to life). For a woman to be successful, it is very significant to have the support of male members of her family and this is what completes a life of a female member in the family despite the fact that media continuously reports negative things; the reality has been different throughout my life and also in the life of those whom I know back home in Pakistan. By splitting family apart no entity of family can function better and I would compare family to a running engine with each part playing an important role.<br />
<br />
Coming back to the story it all began with the nights I used to spend in solving tough mathematical problems during my O-level days. When compared to the matriculation system, we have a considerably different and tougher Mathematics curriculum in O-levels (with subjects such as Probability and Statistics, Differentiation, Vectors etc. included and which normally Matriculation students study at a later stage); more than the curriculum I very well remember the role of my teachers who kept re-iterating their pride in me when I successfully solved a Mathematics challenge problem (our O-levels book had some of those in every activity and normally I was the only one in class who solved them); the joy of getting praise from your Maths teacher for solving a problem that no one in the class was able to solve was simply out of this world and it kept me going until the undergraduate stage came where I had to decide my major. On account of my love for Applied Mathematics a natural choice was Computer Science. This new world both amazed and baffled me for I had no prior experience in programming but challenges are one of the biggest motivators towards the path of learning and even history bears testimony to that; greater the challenges in one's life greater he/she is able to learn to overcome them.<br />
<br />
Right in the beginning of my undergraduate years I came across some highly innovative and selfless people and together we formed the first ever open source students body <i><b>BloX</b></i> in our university, under <i><b>BloX </b></i>I imparted useful Linux knowledge to my juniors and helped them in getting a grip over fundamental Linux concepts. Mind you I have completely discarded anything to do with Windows as of now and am a proud Linux convert; and I also attribute a great deal of credit in my success to this wonderful operating system which always teaches you so much about the world of Computing. Many of those who had joined <i style="font-weight: bold;">BloX </i>in its initial days left it; it turned out they were after the fascination of it all as <i style="font-weight: bold;">BloX</i> got to represent Department of Computer Science, Karachi University in ITCN Asia 2004. Soon after ITCN Asia 2004 when actual Linux development had to be done not many wanted to go for it as it was not the <i>"in thing in market" </i>and could not guarantee a job which seemed to be the only purpose of Computer Science undergrads those days (this remains true to this day) and very few cared about the knowledge of science behind Computers. We finally had to dissolve <i style="font-weight: bold;">BloX </i>but the experience left us more motivated and charged; today a smile comes to my face thinking of those fun-filled days. I along with my <a href="http://randomcsthoughts.blogspot.com/">colleague</a> (who happens to be my husband now) kept doing the fun things in the world of Computer Science winning software competitions along the way, developing our own research-based Linux distribution called <i style="font-weight: bold;">PAL Linux</i> which was also distributed to all students of Parallel Computing final year course and finally getting our very own research paper published (it was about redefinition of images so as to enhance semantic search over them). All this while our colleagues started internships/jobs in reputed software houses of Pakistan and they had already begun to make money adding to the peer pressure; however, we kept going despite the odd questions we faced with regard to our career after BS (Computer Science). I did however join a small, unknown software house and I very well remember the critics of this decision from among my class mates; however, that was only to keep some amount of money coming since we needed funds for both marriage and MS abroad (by this time we had made up our minds to pursue an advanced degree in Computer Science).<br />
<br />
South Korea seemed to be the best choice for both of us as there was tuition fees exemption along with a stipend to cover living expenses and KAIST happens to be the MIT of entire Asia. I felt more passionate when <a href="http://dblab.kaist.ac.kr/Prof/main_eng.html">Professor Kyu-Young Whang of Database and Multimedia Laboratory</a> in KAIST was ready to support our application as married students. Despite the fact that to many, South Korea was an unusual choice, and in their ignorance (underestimation of South Korea as significant entity in scientific world) everyone seemed to be advocating for United States as ultimate destination for Master's degree in Computer Science, we knew we had made the right choice and time bore testimony to that. KAIST turned out to be a life-changing experience and I can easily say it made me learn more than what some of my seniors doing MS in Europe or United States learnt. Professor Whang is an ACM Fellow within the Database community and a Computer Science legend within himself; he made us spend hours in the lab (sometimes we would work for more than 16 hours a day and during my Master's thesis defense I spent three days plus three nights straight in the lab with my husband cooking noodles for both in snow using a portable stove). I attribute much of my Computer Science research skills to Professor Whang and his PhD/PostDoc students who taught us valuable stuff behind coming up with a research statement, identifying open issues in current state-of-the-art within a field, design of solutions for solving a research problem in Computer Science, programming in the best way possible so as to keep systems scalable and useful for generations to come and writing your papers as clearly as possible adhering strongly to scientific method of passing knowledge. This <a href="http://arjumand-atif.blogspot.com/2009/06/programming-vs-coding.html">article</a> of mine on "Programming vs. Coding" was a result of some of Professor Whang's advices during his Database class and I did mention this article in my Google Anita Borg application. All this time we maintained links back in Pakistan and students kept writing to me for advices on career paths; I took out time to answer them and to always stay in touch with my roots back home.<br />
<br />
During our respective PhDs, we wanted to explore a different region and Europe was our choice with flexible, caring supervisors and excellent research opportunities to come up with our own problem statement. Adding to this is wonderful experience of my current PhD supervisors namely <a href="http://ww2.it.nuigalway.ie/staff/colmor/c.html">Colm O'Riordan</a> and <a href="http://www.ir.disco.unimib.it/en/people/pasi-gabriella/">Gabriella Pasi</a> who always have enriching research directions from within information retrieval and fuzzy logic; and they provided us with what was missing in South Korea i.e. the opportunity to form research networks around the world and freedom to pursue paths we choose best for ourselves. Lastly, and most significantly, we still maintain a presence in Pakistan via our own research lab within the Computer Science Department of the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan - an experience that could be characterized as both exciting and frustrating. At times it is really painful to argue for hours with people in academic circles back home on the usefulness of a research lab and why it is essential to conduct scientific research. In countries like Pakistan, universities focus mainly on teaching, as there is insufficient support for research (mainly due to economic problems). I am constantly working to break this culture; I work with various students from time to time where I assist them for their thesis or final year projects motivating them for novel research ideas in the domain of Web Science. The <a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/">Web Science and Technology Research lab</a>, despite still being in its infancy, has been successful. Last year it was represented at the International Conference on World Wide Web, one of the most prestigious conferences in my field.<br />
<br />
As a summary here are some tips for those who asked<br />
1) Value people and treat them with respect as you can learn something from each and every person you come across. Take out time to reply to emails of those expecting something from you or reaching out to you even if its a very small matter; it does make a lot of difference at the end of the day.<br />
2) Speak less and do more; there are times when actions mean everything and you have to give up ranting about things like success and rather take steps to achieve your goals. Remember procrastination is human's worst enemy.<br />
3) Don't keep complaining about your circumstances as they are never easy for anyone. I remember a time when I did not have money to buy a Computer table and I had to program sitting on the floor; I didn't complain then and today I own around three computers/laptops in various parts of the world.<br />
4) Communication skills matter a lot and it is extremely important to market yourself in the best way possible. Everyone has something special and he/she just needs the right way to market that something special.<br />
5) Love technical stuff (not just gadgets) but science behind the things; do not kill your intellectual curiosity by settling for "glittering" gadgets and instead focus on innovative ideas stemming out from your gadgets.<br />
6) Do not pay much heed to critics of your decisions for they are there to make you firm. This does not mean not paying attention to meaningful advices from people that matter but remember most of the criticism comes from people who know not.<br />
<br />
To end on a humorous note, I made a funny meme which sort of was my reaction when people acknowledged my achievement in big words. This is not intended to make anyone feel bad and is just pure humor.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0RYb8fjkzLHm6ydwOuEsSiG0uYbFXHUDeP3u7m3wmf3JtTtNskPdQ4FOyfteu7fSuYXKeX0UXF04gQTNWK9ynxmzcXiMS-MD50w-10FtVUDV-8DhtBOO515ZcNH2yOpUPphT6RaqyhxVV/s1600/GoogleAnitaBorgMeme.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0RYb8fjkzLHm6ydwOuEsSiG0uYbFXHUDeP3u7m3wmf3JtTtNskPdQ4FOyfteu7fSuYXKeX0UXF04gQTNWK9ynxmzcXiMS-MD50w-10FtVUDV-8DhtBOO515ZcNH2yOpUPphT6RaqyhxVV/s640/GoogleAnitaBorgMeme.png" width="426" /></a></div>
<br />Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-51703231654013111712012-11-10T09:25:00.000-08:002012-11-10T12:23:48.648-08:00Mining Tweets of World Cup T20 Match between India and Pakistan: Interesting Insights from Social Network AnalysisI have been quite absent from this space I call my blog for quite sometime now and this is not without reason. The past few months have been extremely busy with lots of traveling (Milan, Venice, Rome, Nijmegen and Copenhagen all in three-four months' time), and of course the never-ending paper submissions. As I had explained in my previous post on <a href="http://arjumand-atif.blogspot.ie/2012/05/online-education-initiatives-hope-for.html">online education initiatives</a> I am also taking the Computer Science online courses on Coursera and this semester I happened to take up a very interesting course by Lada Adamic of University of Michigan (<a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/sna">Social Network Analysis</a>). Though I have myself taught some aspects of Social Network Analysis during a <a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/courses/cse509_2011_summer.html">summer course at Faculty of Computer Science at IBA, Karachi</a> but despite that I found this course intriguing and the way Lada enriched it with cool applications of SNA was simply amazing.<br />
<br />
As an optional part of this course the students were to submit a programming project and I thought what better opportunity than this to submit a part of the <a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/Research/TweetCric_ProjectProposal.html">TweetCric project</a> being undertaken by our research group. It's always good to get some early feedback on your work in order to gain useful, innovative directions and hence, I decided to blog about my Social Network Analysis project. Readers are welcome to suggest any new directions or give their feedback in comments so as to help us in this project. Following is a description of the project for interested readers of my blog:<br />
<br />
<!--StartFragment-->Social media applications have considerably influenced the lives of millions and everyday there is a huge amount of updates to various social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. As of March 2012, more than <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023/_3-57448388-93/twitter-hits-400-million-tweets-per-day-mostly-mobile/">400 million tweets were being posted on Twitter</a> each day. The volume of tweets becomes significantly high during a sporting event as many sports fans now use social media as a part of their viewing experience. Users describe this as an experience full of pleasure and fun as described in following Facebook status update during the recent World Cup T20 match between India and Pakistan:<br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<!--StartFragment--><i>"Facebook comments are more interesting than the match. Already more than two pages of comments. Looks like PakInd Vs Facebook"</i><!--EndFragment--></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<!--StartFragment-->Interestingly, the huge amount of content produced during sporting events can be used for analysis of players' performance and in light of that sports managers can decide future sports strategies and hence the notion of crowd-sourced sports critics can be realized in practice. Researchers have already begun to explore the possibility of using this huge volume of user-generated content to solve various research issues such as event detection, video annotations for sports summaries etc. [1, 2]. We argue in this work to utilize this huge crowd-sourced content for the usefulness of sports strategy analysts and decision-makers. In this work, we use social network analysis to highlight significant players during the match along with an analysis of the reasons of why social network analysis methods detect these players.<br />
<br />
<b><u>Social Network Modeling</u></b><br />
<!--StartFragment-->The data was obtained using the Twitter Search API. During the epic match held on September 30th 2012, we gathered tweets for the match using the Twitter Search API. We regularly queried the Search API through a Python script on half-hour intervals thereby collecting fresh tweets as the match progressed. In total we collected a sample of 43,450 tweets during the match with hashtag PakvsInd.<br />
<br />
<!--StartFragment-->We modeled the social graph of the players and commentators using the text content of the tweets. First, using Wikipedia and ESPN CricInfo as an external resource we compiled a list of players and commentators relevant to the India-Pakistan cricket match. This list was then used to detect tweets containing a mention of any player or commentator; following list shows some sample tweets<!--EndFragment--><br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>hafeez goes, 15 from 28 balls.. idiot, wasted his time big time. game over. #pakvsind</li>
<li>like the world cup of pakistani batsmen falling against yuvraj. kamran also departs edging to dhoni. pak 56/4 after 9. #pakvsind</li>
<li>rt @maria_memon: rt @maria_memon: afridi! quit playing games with our hearts....our hearts....#pakvsind'</li>
<li>hafeez is the reason for todays batting performance.... after nazir he put all of the team under pressure! #pakvsind</li>
<li>is dhoni trying to piss off pakistanis by bringing in kohli? #pakvsind'</li>
</ol>
<div>
<!--StartFragment-->We now explain how we formulate the nodes and edges in our social network of players and commentators. Each player/commentator is treated as a node and an edge is represented between players/commentators if they co-occur in a tweet. As an example consider tweet 2 above; there would be edges between yuvraj, kamran and dhoni according to our model. In total 8,587 tweets (19.8%) contained a mention of some player or commentator.<!--EndFragment--><br />
<br />
The following figure shows the visualization that was obtained from this social network (Gephi was used for the generation of the graph)<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOZ3n_HdZfjxtDBg6Re2Uf7TmhnQRXUo7ffvBI8ESpd55Z888Ypq4zrirP06GH-01DSsilNhR3TlURw85dihWcV-GMb83KOOj-kroCEmgMWllnpsXxIBkPRJWGtheVVhlY_VMGzHy5rihZ/s1600/pk_ind_crick.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOZ3n_HdZfjxtDBg6Re2Uf7TmhnQRXUo7ffvBI8ESpd55Z888Ypq4zrirP06GH-01DSsilNhR3TlURw85dihWcV-GMb83KOOj-kroCEmgMWllnpsXxIBkPRJWGtheVVhlY_VMGzHy5rihZ/s640/pk_ind_crick.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Modeled social network of players/commentators during World Cup T20 India-Pakistan match</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<!--StartFragment-->As clear from the Figure, there are three communities within this social network. Nodes are sized according to betweenness centrality and it can be seen that Hafeez is the node with highest betweenness: this is because this particular player was the captain of Pakistani team in that match, Pakistan lost the match due to his poor captaincy, poor fielding placements and poor batting (as per most of the tweets). The node with second-highest betweenness i.e. Kohli is the one who got man of the match and scored the highest runs leading India to a comfortable victory. Hence, it can be seen that social network analysis gives important insights into sporting events. Natural language processing as an alternative approach seems to lack the precision and efficiency that social network analysis offers. Our team has been long arguing for a hybrid approach that utilizes both natural language processing and social network analysis approaches to address the various research questions in the fields of Information Retrieval and Web Information Systems given the low scalability and speed of Natural Language Processing alone [3].<br />
<br />
<!--StartFragment-->We now analyse the communities within this dataset. The community represented in blue is mostly comprised of Indian players and it makes sense as to why they form a separate community. However, the inclusion of Misbah and Ajmal in this community is weird since both are Pakistani players - further analysis reveals as to why this occurred and it was due to Ajmal taking important wicket of Sehwag causing Ajmal to go into that community and Misbah being mentioned with Ajmal once forced him there too. The community in dark green represents for the most part Pakistani players with the exception of Dhoni who is the Indian team captain; this however occurs due to Twitterers comparing Hafeez's captaincy with Dhoni's captaincy thereby forcing Dhoni in that community. Lastly, the community in aqua green represents players who did not play in the match with the exception of Afridi and he was forced into that community due to tweet suggestions from Pakistani cricket fans of dropping him and including him in the list of those not playing the match.<br />
<br />
Lastly as I mentioned in the beginning of this post as well any feedback or idea is welcome. Interested students who want to join this project are requested to contact me personally via email or social networks.</div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
References:<br />
[1] J. Nichols, J. Mahmud, and C. Drews. Summarizing sporting events using twitter. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI ’12, pages 189–198, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.<br />
<div>
[2] A. Tang and S. Boring. #epicplay: crowd-sourcing sports video highlights. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12, pages 1569–1572, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.</div>
<div>
[3] A. Younus, M. Qureshi, F. Asar, M. Azam, M. Saeed, and N. Touheed, “What do the average twitterers say: A twitter model for public opinion analysis in the face of major political events,” in 2011 International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. IEEE, 2011, pp. 618–623.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-130014742675627942012-05-18T07:10:00.002-07:002012-05-18T08:41:20.715-07:00Online Education Initiatives: A Hope for Education in Less Developed Countries<br />
I very well remember my time in the Computer Science Department of Karachi University when teachers who did not take classes really annoyed me. Other class-fellows would call me crazy on account of being so nerdy but I knew this was a valuable period of our life which would never come back. This was the age where the mind is ready to absorb all knowledge which thanks to our messed-up education system (not to forget the loads of politics that pollutes it) was literally being wasted. The dilemma of technological sciences such as Computer Science in lesser developed countries like Pakistan lies in it being more of a hype than a science. In my part of the world students flock to Computer Science to get good jobs after graduation: of course this is a necessity and the point of a good education but shall it be the only goal is the real question we should address.<br />
<br />
Back then there was a frustrating time when the Object-Oriented Programming teacher gave us the option of either to learn OOP concepts with C# or C++, and, unfortunately most of the class went for C# due to its being in demand by the job market. At that point, I realized how tough a time Computer Science will get in Pakistan and this remains true to this day. Sadly not only students but teachers have also promoted the job-oriented study model leading to a myth that Computer Science is all about sitting on a desk writing code in .NET or PHP (or any other programming language for that matter).<br />
<br />
Meeting the well-known scientist, Rakesh Agarwal from Microsoft Research confirmed my assertions about the pathetic state of affairs of technological sciences in countries like India and Pakistan. He shared the same dissatisfactions as me, and strongly criticized the industry in the lesser-developed countries. Equivalently sad is the state of affairs at the national universities in South Asia, and the situation is changing at a very slow pace. When Stanford announced its online courses, I saw acquaintances in my social network sharing about it and the ones most excited about these online courses were undergraduate students from institutes of my country. This as I see it is a silver lining admist the dark clouds as online education initiatives like Coursera, EdX and Udacity will now grant access to quality education to students from all over the world. This in my opinion is a huge step towards bridging the digital divide and it is now upon students in the developing world to make most of this opportunity. Today's connected society gives easy and massive access to knowledge unlike the situation I had back in my undergraduate days and I feel students today are far more blessed than students of my time.<br />
<br />
What started as an educational initiative by accomplished Stanford Professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng has now turned into a global phenomenon with the best universities contributing to make knowledge open for all. If studying at world's reputed universities (Stanford University, MIT, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania etc.) was ever your dream then there can be no better time to go and get that dream. Some students might take this as an exaggerated statement but this comes from me after personally taking two online courses this semester and enjoying them to the maximum. Furthermore, Coursera statistics also confirm the value that online education has now added to universities; they could never have achieved this value as Andrew Ng puts it: "I normally teach 400 students," Ng explained, but last semester he taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. "To reach that many students before," he said, "I would have had to teach my normal Stanford class for 250 years."<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC54DDNh5L2qEVcsuahHwVfu6BUxUDdoohNwhhcCGiZr9VG9Vn2xDsMTXQwPZMk6ZIF2pC0vlgt9aIVEyuIPpxnQu7uJWtN1isTqDYun-J6rWPt-5o72jaz9raF_nSFVSMUheihPfaZi1b/s1600/Coursera1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC54DDNh5L2qEVcsuahHwVfu6BUxUDdoohNwhhcCGiZr9VG9Vn2xDsMTXQwPZMk6ZIF2pC0vlgt9aIVEyuIPpxnQu7uJWtN1isTqDYun-J6rWPt-5o72jaz9raF_nSFVSMUheihPfaZi1b/s320/Coursera1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
It is a generally held notion that the academic culture and the styles of teaching in our part of the world are out-dated and boring. I can certainly confirm this assertion on account of my experience in Pakistani academic circles for quite sometime now. For the most part, higher-education circles in developing regions limit ideas to an academic document on a shelf quite unlike the way that things are done in the top research universities of the world. Students have always wanted to know how the ideas that they study in the classroom apply to the real-world problems around them. With world-class Professors offering online courses, there is an oppurtunity to get much of those questions answered.<br />
<br />
Online education as a phenomenon is not new and for years people in less developed regions have been skeptical of them but it's quite different with Coursera and other similar initiatives. The revolutionary ideas behind these initiatives are the concept of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course. Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer science professor who founded Coursera with Ng, explained in her talk at LinkedIn last week, "It will allow people who lack access to world-class learning - because of financial, geographic or time constraints — to have an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families."<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9c2UB2Q8yH9pHf6D54TIAuKQyvXELGdyZ4FjbxBkrEBZcQS1cruCoQ9d8ixRjkHFKHTjIdqaRSylWkO8TLGxFu8R7_-QqgBaDDcMx4RDw8WdVLk6YVxTR3YKhY2nw1bArwonF96cbsjDa/s1600/coursera1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="129" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9c2UB2Q8yH9pHf6D54TIAuKQyvXELGdyZ4FjbxBkrEBZcQS1cruCoQ9d8ixRjkHFKHTjIdqaRSylWkO8TLGxFu8R7_-QqgBaDDcMx4RDw8WdVLk6YVxTR3YKhY2nw1bArwonF96cbsjDa/s200/coursera1.png" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
So the next time students come to me seeking advice on how to start with research or how to apply for foreign universities I'd recommend him/her to take some courses (that relate to his/her area of interest) on Coursera or any such platform. With such initiatives coming from the world's top-class universities there is a hope for revolutionization of higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear top-quality lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-51001584348520861832012-04-15T15:58:00.003-07:002012-04-15T16:33:10.616-07:00WWW2012 Poster: New Media vs. the Old Media<br />
Today's social-media savvy age has considerably changed the paradigm of traditional journalism. Interestingly, it has also led to <a href="http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/10810/use-or-abuse-how-far-will-social-media-activism-go/">new debates</a> within the journalism and media industry with supporters of social media terming it as a platform for the masses' voice while opponents terming it as gibberish and noise. Old-school journalism disregards the significance of social media popularity for any article on the pretense of “journalism is not about feeding the masses with whatever crap they want to be fed with.”<br />
<br />
It turns out that this entire debate is not as simple as it appears to be on the outlook. What old-school journalism advocates do not take into account is the age-old phenomenon termed as “media bias” by the social sciences research community. A <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.8.htm">famous paper published in 2004 by the Department of Political Science at UCLA and the Department of Economics at University of Missouri</a> studies the bias of famous news outlets in the US. Since then there have been various attempts at studying biases in traditional media platforms (such as New York Times, Fox News, Washington Post, CBS, Wall Street Journal) with most of these coming from the sciences (social science, political science, Computer Science). Empirical evidence is what is given utmost importance from a scientific viewpoint and unfortunately the social media circles in Pakistan tend to ignore this angle altogether. This brings into the picture a new phenomenon of bias measurement in various forms of media which turns out to be a huge research challenge within itself. The solution: yes, social media with the insights and popularity judgements can serve as a tool not just for the masses' voices but also for measurement of bias in traditional media and this is exactly what a team of researchers in <a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/">IBA's Web Science group</a> have done.<br />
<br />
The crucial nature of the media industry makes it all the more essential to have ways and means of verification of its content. This leads to the natural question of how new media namely the social media can help measure the inevitable biases inherent in traditional media. Few of these questions have been answered by researchers from one of Karachi's most prestigious educational institute, Institute of Business Administration whereby they investigated differences between news appearing on traditional and social media platforms via publicly available data from famous microblog site Twitter. Being a part of this team made me delve deeper into various aspects of media both internationally and in Pakistan with my observation being that today's media tend to ignore the crucial role of social media and does not take into account popular demands. With this conclusion, we argue for a paradigm shift in how traditional media platforms perceive the new media landscape and <a href="http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/9920/why-comments-and-likes-matter-in-the-new-media-world/">the sooner they embrace this new world the better for their own survival</a>.<br />
<br />
Some technical details of the study warrant an explanation which is as follows. The data mining similarity metric of Jaccard Similarity has been used to investigate the differences in named entity coverage between the 16 million tweets posted during the time period of Egypt uprising (tweets' data obtained from TREC 2011 microblog track) and the New York Times articles corresponding to Egypt. The figure below shows our results:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/Research/WWW2012_Poster/images/jacc_sim.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/Research/WWW2012_Poster/images/jacc_sim.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
It demonstrates a significantly low value of coverage (Jaccard Similarity being below 0.5 for all days) thereby proving the presence of media bias. Moreover, we extend this study to a local level (for Pakistani media outlets) on a daily basis for the month of November. The extension utilizes topic models (specifically standard LDA and Twitter-LDA) in order to discover similar topics in the two media followed by a ranking function which computes popularity of a news item in the two platforms. This is then compared with a manually ranked list with the final result being that the ranks obtained from social media (tweets data) match the human-annotated ranks more closely.<br />
<br />
For those interested, here's the abstract of our paper:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>It is often the case that traditional media provide coverage of a news event on the basis of journalists’ viewpoints - a problem termed in the literature as media bias. On the other hand social media have given birth to an alternative paradigm of journalism known as “citizen journalism”. We take advantage of citizen journalism to detect the bias in traditional media and propose a simple model for empirical measurement of media bias.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Note: This is part of a long-term project by the Web Science research group at Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan and we welcome interested students to be a part of our project.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The slides for the work can be viewed <a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/Research/WWW2012_Poster/posters/WWW2012_poster_wpp241.html">here</a> and the full 2-page poster paper can be downloaded from <a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/Research/Papers/wpp241-younus.pdf">here</a>.</div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-1554620547495543302012-03-04T06:26:00.000-08:002012-03-04T06:26:03.575-08:00Three cheers for Professor MoonFew days back when I read in my Facebook news feed an update from Professor Sue Moon that she is now tenured Professor at KAIST, I was immensely delighted. This post is a special tribute to Prof. Sue Moon from a student that did not get to spend much time with her but whatever time I spent with her played a huge role in my learning path. It all began in Spring 2009 when I took up Professor Moon´s course on Advance Networking. At first she sounded hard to impress but then I figured out it´s her way of teaching the students. The Advance Networking course she was teaching us was special, it turned out to be one of the toughest and yet greatest learning experiences of my life. She had specially designed the course keeping in mind the struggles young researchers have to face. Throughout the semester we were expected to read papers, write a critique of the paper and present some of the selected papers in class as if they were our own papers. This activity turned out to be quite hectic and each student used to dread the day when he/she had to present and one strong reason for that was Professor Moon´s fiery questions about the technical aspects of the paper. She used to spend hours in polishing our presentation and paper reading skills asking us to read papers from a critical angle so as to highlight its strong and weak points. She taught us a skill that is very valuable in the scientific community and that skill was captivating the audience when giving a technical talk, this rare skill is seriously lacking even among the best scientists of our community.<br />
<br />
The semester ended and we all got back to our busy research life at KAIST but then in later parts of my Master´s degree I realized that her teaching and the way she groomed us in that course was extremely helpful. She literally taught us how to fall in love with research: an ability quite rare even among graduate students in world´s top universities. She keeps these <a href="http://an.kaist.ac.kr/~sbmoon/#talk">technical how-to talks</a> on her Web page and I have gone through all of them, I would definitely recommend these for all aspiring Computer Science researchers out there.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I want to particularly thank Prof. Moon for all she gave me. Knowledge, in my opinion is a priceless gift by itself and I am out of words to express my gratitude to her. Thank you Professor Moon for playing a role in my research path, your training has proven to be a great gift for me. Although my own Master´s advisor Professor Kyu-Young Whang taught me the most during my stay at KAIST (his training has also been invaluable in shaping me up as a researcher) but Professor Sue Moon is special due to the fact that she is one of the most outstanding women in Computer Science I have known. This field surely needs more inspiring women like her. I hope to meet her some day in order to thank her in person.</div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-33365530425532312232011-08-27T08:13:00.000-07:002011-09-02T12:25:05.333-07:00Visit to Russia: RuSSIR/EDBT Summer SchoolAlthough I constantly microblogged on Twitter during my trip to Russia but nothing replaces a detailed blog post when it comes to coverage. I definitely wish to have an archive of details for myself and Information Retrieval (with of course other related areas) students around the world. I along with my husband and colleague <a href="http://randomcsthoughts.blogspot.com/">Muhammad Atif Qureshi</a> visited St. Petersburg, Russia from 14th August, 2011 to 20th August, 2011 for attending the prestigious Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR) which was co-located with Russian Young Scientists' Conference where we presented our research work. This year's RuSSIR was quite special as the EDBT summer school was also co-located with it and as such the breadth and depth of the lectures presented at the school was immense. Here is a brief overview of the lecture sessions that I attended along with a good news for students in Karachi, Pakistan.
<br />
<br />
<b>SocM Session:</b> The Social Mining session was conducted by two well-known industry people namely Vladimir Gorovoy of Yandex and Yana Volkovich of Barcelona Media Innovation Center. It was highly interactive and practical with a practical recommendation task for students for which they were provided with a real dataset from Yandex Market. Here is a link for students who wish to try it out: <a href="http://wwwhome.math.utwente.nl/~volkovichyv/russir2011task">Yandex Market practical task from RuSSIR</a>. The session fundamentally covered various aspects of mining social media data, it began with a very correct observation borrowed from Google's analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik that "Social media is the hot thing today, almost every one seems excited to get involved in it but no one actually knows how." This session covered that how with a glimpse into graph mining methods (PageRank, TunkRank and TwitterRank being some examples), models for opinion mining of reviews left by customers, social media engagment metrics and social innovation platforms for the future. In short, it was an extremely engaging and knowledge-enriched session particularly helpful for social media analytics students: I learned a lot during the course of this session and am particularly thankful to Dr. Yana Volkovich for some of her wonderful suggestions that will really help me in my own research.
<br />
<br />
<b>Plenary Session (Knowledge Harvesting from Web Sources):</b> I found this session very informative and full of pointers for new research ideas although it was a bit away from my own research area. Gerhard Weikum (Research Director at Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany) presented a comprehensive overview of research methodologies that can turn the Web into a large-scale Knowledge Base and few examples of such Knowledge Bases include DBpedia, KnowItAll, ReadTheWeb, and YAGO-NAGA, as well as industrial ones such as Freebase and Trueknowledge. The tutorial presented research methodologies along the avenue of knowledge harvesting with some examples of work on unification of WordNet and Wikipedia in YAGO, identification of a long tail of instances of entity classes through harvesting textual snippets on the Web and entity search through language model ranking. Overall the session was intense and the slides quite heavy with lots and lots of natural language processing material but definitely a great learning activity from the point of view of tools to use for your own research.
<br />
<br />
<img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646159921816845602" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_AaWN252UHw3kUMpPfPzk58kCAZv9AvwMwdwIbS7O_8Knj7tnzG1Qy4TnugTVWUDXqkNwpUPG5jCNSjjqUoNqX5x87obYB_nr9VIFAeiz3_MGMjMrDJAcqCaUqNm-QkzJZhloj-SrXZku/s320/Plenary.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 240px; margin: 0 0 0px 0px; width: 320px;" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxsFtqZDCQPEvB5ZshHKn-WO0Tl-YfLjD_kRM0ZzZwA8ya1Rc-evrJfFLLl27uEXknjwSRbUhrHPC7eE9Iov4eQFMDFx5-c1mPL39__Mf1-KG-2G7nJz4ag5XFzwSpYkSPlLiv8ESUamzF/s1600/SocM_1.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646157744068984562" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxsFtqZDCQPEvB5ZshHKn-WO0Tl-YfLjD_kRM0ZzZwA8ya1Rc-evrJfFLLl27uEXknjwSRbUhrHPC7eE9Iov4eQFMDFx5-c1mPL39__Mf1-KG-2G7nJz4ag5XFzwSpYkSPlLiv8ESUamzF/s320/SocM_1.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 240px; margin: 0 0px 0px 0; width: 320px;" /></a>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>SentA Session:</b> This session was one of the most exciting ones for me as my own research centered around Sentiment Analysis. Professor Mike Thelwall who heads the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton delivered the talks in this session and it mostly centered around the Sentiment Strength detection tool of his research group namely SentiStrength. We were also taken through a live demonstration of the tool after which Professor Mike Thelwall explained in detail its various features along with the underlying algorithms and its experimental evaluations. The SentiStrength team has done a pretty good job at managing this tool and the best things about it is that the word list marked with a word's positive/negative strength is publicly available for research purposes. During this session students were also introduced to machine learning methods of Sentiment Analysis with detailed explanation on feature selection, gold standard creation and 10-fold cross validation. To sum up, this session was extremely useful for students wishing to make a career in Sentiment Analysis and I specially thank Professor Mike for his valuable suggestions on various aspects of the field. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiETvIsKBv5A2WVU9te3T-cbu3B74_3mSKaq1KVQ9sqZcY5DAi7WA2cQIxlJ0IokUQZQGMmlLtmgTSK-aR9kNSLG7kdrIkwLSV1SPqOPHiCfvkeIyJ7EUCwukQcmoFBGfoc_WkyH9l4xTIh/s1600/SentA_1.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646491345435282034" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiETvIsKBv5A2WVU9te3T-cbu3B74_3mSKaq1KVQ9sqZcY5DAi7WA2cQIxlJ0IokUQZQGMmlLtmgTSK-aR9kNSLG7kdrIkwLSV1SPqOPHiCfvkeIyJ7EUCwukQcmoFBGfoc_WkyH9l4xTIh/s320/SentA_1.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 240px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646491660542386514" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQVQ5HYMTO-mMP2Nu9ZCwP0NPd_eMugOLvYmJzLuVYb6MH1g7ii9E22LGiT6362dM4MkV7xOclcFlN6tXoqd4Jl1cKjcovaE_p3xPG2d37pdl_wGkMQN-7RzmzzVJ5Gya3JvJmgYlF5g-G/s320/SentA_2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: right; height: 240px; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; width: 320px;" />
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b>
</b></div>
<div>
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b><br /></b><br />
<b>ColIR Session: </b>This was a short session conducted by Chirag Shah of Rutgers University. It touched completely new dimensions within the field of Information Retrieval namely Information Retrieval facilitated through collaboration. According to Professor Chirag Shah with the emergence of collaborative Web platforms, information retrieval has also moved towards a completely new dimension. The traditional view of IR is that it is an individual activity: the Collaborative IR community challenges this notion by describing it as a co-ordinated activity and they have also proved their ideas in both theory and practice. This session covered both the theory and practice behind collaborative IR situations, systems, and evaluation techniques.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>TopK Session:</b> This session presented by the two charming ladies Sihem Amer-Yahia and Julia Stoyanovich was simply fantastic. We were introduced to a whole new approach of solving some of the toughest problems in social media and this approach comes from the old, classical database field. The session mainly centered around Top K processing, one of the well-known methods for ranked retrieval within the DB-IR research community, which was presented in a unique manner with a special focus on applying it to search and information discovery on the Social Web. Such applications were discussed from two significant viewpoints: 1) efficiency (minimizing both space and time requirements) and 2) user satisfaction. Both the researchers presented a comprehensive overview of their papers published in top Database and Information Retrieval conferences: VLDB, ICWSM, SIGMOD and ACM HT. Their research within the efficiency dimension was based on incorporation of upper bounds on classical top-k algorithms (threshold algorithm and no-random access algorithm) in order to minimize time and space complexity. Their research within the user satisfaction dimension presented the fundamental idea of scaling up user studies to thousands of users through leverage of crowd-sourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk.Currently I am reading these papers to look for dimensions that can be applied to my own research in Social Media Analytics.</div>
<div>
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD3LwBf4bpF9GMSVDTyxTx_ZvLtXCtrWdF7tvVLwFg6IR9yInmRxruz6uIfiE56r4DokrLIcNznpcdQNhw84Vscf0NFffXxR_pqX1ZOYkj5BxzFz62ax6e6GjTyX6CXxfqFqQjaiK1xWty/s1600/TopK_1.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646580798568233938" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD3LwBf4bpF9GMSVDTyxTx_ZvLtXCtrWdF7tvVLwFg6IR9yInmRxruz6uIfiE56r4DokrLIcNznpcdQNhw84Vscf0NFffXxR_pqX1ZOYkj5BxzFz62ax6e6GjTyX6CXxfqFqQjaiK1xWty/s320/TopK_1.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 240px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5646580957079714546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggr3yyqyGsXvJRYmmLG0jblJMnHUSrQyasIhRefdoR2-NEti0YVkA0GjYcQBxlkJK012YOw03uLLx-vxAhhbccVQ_9L8xF1Xn1wTMtMsQGE57Up5rjiQVOJVtbfYVR4jwxHUF2FSV-iEua/s320/TopK_2.jpg" style="cursor: move; float: right; height: 240px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; width: 320px;" />
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Here is an archive of tweets during my attendance at RuSSIR:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>#RuSSIR sessions kick off with interesting presentation on Social Media Mining by @yvolkovich and Vladimir Gorovoy</i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
<div>
<i>Not many people know abt. a social network exclusively devoted to travel and hospitality: CouchSurfing</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Can an online social network build enough trust to allow strangers to sleep on each others’ couches: Adamic's paper http://bit.ly/prdxTy</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>"The Web today is the largest knowledge encyclopaedia - we need it to turn it into a comprehensive Database" - Gerhard Weikum at #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>In a very interesting talk by Mike Thelwall explaining the working of the famous sentiment analysis tool SentiStrength #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Automatic sentiment analysis has more or less the same accuracy as human sentiment analysis due to complexity of problem - Mike Thelwall</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>A look into inside of Yandex Market by @vgorovoy in session of Social Media Mining http://twitpic.com/66vfkp</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Interesting talks in TopK session at #RuSSIR: essentially about converting social media research problems to traditional database problems</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Researcher from Barcelona Media Innovation Center explains the science of social media mining #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Mention of work of KAIST's @sbmoon in #RuSSIR in Social Media mining lecture</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Andrey Plakhov explains how entity-oriented search works at Yandex: Russia's search engine that has larger market share than Google Russia</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Wonder where this rule came from #RuSSIR #Yandex http://twitpic.com/67e4w1</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Sihem Amer-Yahia of Qatar Computing Research Institute continues day 3 of session on TopK Processing for Social Applications</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Wonderful graphic by @yvolkovich on visualization of social media conversations during Spain protests #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Take-home from ColIR session: Science is all about collaboration unlike the Humanities #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i>AlJazeera English tracking information of users who visit the site for improved user experience - Sihem of QCRI at #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>SearchTogether by Microsoft Research takes user-mediated Collaborative Information Retrieval one step ahead #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>ColIR session: reason behind failure of Google Wave was the difficulty of the system requiring a 60-minute video tutorial #RuSSIR</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Take-home of TopK #RuSSIR session: Social Web is full of challenges, our online social experience will be as good as we researchers make it</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>A week of super-duper learning and knowledge-sharing, intense discussions and lots of research take-aways. Hats off to #RuSSIR team!!</i></div>
<div>
<i>
</i></div>
<div>
<br />
In short Russia is a wonderful place to visit and St. Petersburg is mind-blowing. Russian people are extremely hospitable, friendly and what's best about them is their love and passion for Mathematics. All in all Russia is a great place to visit if you are a Computer Science researcher as it is full of wonderful Computer Scientists both established researchers and young science-aspiring students. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
At the end I am glad to announce that <a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/">Web Science group at Institute of Business of Administration</a> will conduct an open seminar which will educate Pakistani students in some of the above-mentioned topics. Feel free to contact me in case of any suggestions for the seminar, or any topic you wish to include.</div>
Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-9763212147241019862011-07-28T23:03:00.000-07:002011-07-29T07:37:54.910-07:00Thoughts on Computer Science's 'Sputnik Moment'I have not had the chance to blog of late. The past few months have been extra-ordinarily busy with lots of research ideas in the pipeline and I along with <a href="http://randomcsthoughts.blogspot.com/">my colleague and husband</a> am also into teaching now with the newly introduced "<a href="http://websci.iba.edu.pk/courses/cse509_2011_summer.html">Introduction to Web Science and Technology</a>" course at the <a href="http://cs.iba.edu.pk/">Faculty of Computer Science, Institute of Business Administration</a>. It's been a great experience working in Pakistan trying to evolve Computer Science research culture here at par with international standards: it is a tough but all the same a fascinating journey.<div>
<br /></div><div>Today I am writing on the request of a student who asked for my thoughts on the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/06/15/computer-sciences-sputnik-moment">debate being conducted in New York Times on the topic of "Computer Science's Sputnik Moment"</a>, it all began when I shared one aspect of this debate on my Facebook wall. I shared the viewpoint of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/06/15/computer-sciences-sputnik-moment/computer-science-is-central-to-our-future">Dr. Ed Lazowska (University of Washington)</a> who believes Computer Science to be central to our future. What particularly appealed me was his statement below:</div><div>
<br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>For students who want to change the world, there is no field with greater impact or leverage than computer science. Just take a look at the 2010 report by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, which characterized computer science as “arguably unique among all fields of science and engineering in the breadth of its impact.</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>
<br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><i>
<br /></i></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I received a private message from a student who had a disagreement with this view point and he shared <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/06/15/computer-sciences-sputnik-moment/thinking-beyond-the-bubble">Vivek Wadhwa's arguments</a> on the same debate. The student who happens to be an alumnus of FAST-NUCES wanted to know my viewpoint on the famous "tech bubble." The premise behind his argument was that of today's students flocking to Computer Science due to their passion to become the next Zuckerberg, and the driving factor behind a rise in Computer Science grads is gimmicky social media applications which in spite of being a major innovation is a bubble. The premise is no doubt strong; however, the point being missed here is the difference between a scientist's approach and a technologist's approach. Wadhwa lacks the insight necessary to grasp the point being made by Dr. Lazowska which is that Computer Science as a whole new science has the potential to impact almost all other fields of science: it is indispensable for society today. </div><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic and this in my opinion may be one of the reasons he fails to grab the essence of Computer Science as a whole. True that a large chunk of today's students run after the sparkling thing called social media but it often happens that their perception of Computer Science changes once they explore the theoretical marvels of this field. A glaring example of this is the Web Science course I am conducting at the <a href="http://iba.edu.pk/">Institute of Business Administration</a> - initially students did not understand what the course was about and what they will be learning in it for sadly Web to them means ASP, PHP, HTML and nothing beyond that. Once we began teaching the Web from a scientific perspective students were simply amazed; we are at the point where they think beyond SEO and are well aware of the science behind search engines. The point to be illustrated is that students may not see the real depth in science first but it is not just their fault: those responsible for Science curricula should be doing things the right way and this will definitely create a difference.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Secondly, the point is not about lasting careers or high-paying jobs: it's about making a difference to the world through Computer Science. The point is about pursuing Computer Science because your country needs you and not because you need a mere job! That's what's meant by a "Sputnik moment." Look at the reports that Lazowska links to -- Computer Science is a key to the future due to its vast potential to deliver in areas that matter to our countries such as the health sector, the energy sector, the military surveillance sector and many such others. I can go on and on but what really is disturbing is the naiive approach of our students who have limited life goals and no vision on a broader scale.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Furthermore the examples that Dr. Lazowska quotes are of Noam Chomsky, Watson and Crick. Obviously, these people were not new kids on the block aiming to become the next Zuckerberg, and were not simply running after some social media setup. They were scientists with a vision: a vision to further knowledge so that it serves as a foundation for generations to come. Many of the Google tools you play with and spread on your social networks would not have even existed without Computer Scientists like Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan.</div><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I would love to hear thoughts on this particularly from the Pakistani Computer Science circles be it students or researchers. It is hard to get people in Pakistan engaged in a knowledgeable debate and this is true even for people who have done their PhD's or PostDocs, but it's always worth a try. So feel free to add your viewpoint in the comments section.</div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-87735844836806278462011-05-03T21:47:00.000-07:002011-05-03T23:55:04.791-07:00Interacting with Pakistani Students: Some Tips for Taking Up a Research CareerAlmost every week or two I receive emails from students around the world requiring help in their research work and tips on getting into a research career. However, there is a marked difference in the emails that I receive from Pakistani students and the ones that I receive from students in other parts of the world. European students in particular are normally requesting for my Master's thesis or papers and are at times asking questions about the techniques we use in our papers. Similarly students from Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Egypt, and Malaysia ask brilliant questions with respect to research and are more focused towards a specific topic, in fact they even suggest some novel aspects into already existing work including pointers for some useful technique we can incorporate in our work. In short they have already identified a research path for themselves and work towards that research path with their questions aimed at getting guidelines towards their chosen topic. On the other hand, most of the students from Pakistan have this single question: please suggest me some research topic or research idea?<br /><br />Today I feel the urge to write to specially address this question by Pakistani students as I feel this issue has to be taken up carefully. My advice for such students is very simple: no one can tell you a research topic of your interest. I am sure Pakistani CS students would find this answer slightly confusing so I will elaborate further. Just like nobody can tell you what is your favorite food, similarly no one can tell you what area of research you should pick for that is completely dependent upon your likes and dislikes. The fundamental problem with such a question asked by Pakistani students is that they do not even narrow down the research area/domain within which they want to work and rather put the question up at others that please suggest a research topic for me, it would be understandable if the students at least narrow down research area in which they wish to work. Dear students, please remember one thing: if you would be told your research area by someone else although you may be able to finish up the task at hand but you will never be able to realize the passion that is needed in research, you will never enjoy your research and research without enjoyment can never attain fruitful results.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">"If you fancy a career as a researcher, you'll spend tens of thousands of hours on work over the next 10 years. The only way you're ever gonna spend 10,000 hours on research is only when you truly deeply love it. If something really engages you and makes you happy, then you will put in the kind of energy and time necessary to become an expert at it."</span> - Click for <a href="http://computersalert.blogspot.com/2009/08/following-speech-is-extract-from-speech.html">Source</a><br /><br />This is not to blame or strongly condemn the students. In fact my point is to convey what mistake our students do and I do not blame them for this state of affairs. In a country where education is more of a corporate business, and where in particular Computer Science education is hijacked by technologists who know nothing about science and where Professors do not know international standards of research and are not even aware of the best academic conferences of their field such a confusion among students is bound to exist. The problem is clearly lack of guidance for the students and not many people wish to do anything about it, in fact there are some "technology experts" who are even cashing on this "lack of guidance" for their own fame and publicity. In fact the state is so pathetic that our students do not even know what a research paper is let alone reading one, and hence they fail to grab the whole point of scientific research. When a student has no idea where to begin how can he/she get any idea about a research topic.<br /><br />Here I list down some tips on basis of my research experience, these are specifically for such students who wish to do research but have no clear idea of how to carry on.<br /><br />1. Narrow down your research area: if you do not know which research areas exist within the broad field of Computer Science then no worries: simply visit the web site of Computer Science departments of famous research universities such as MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Cambridge, Oxford, CUHK, ANU, KAIST etc. and browse to their research sections where you will find many research areas listed. Do not just get fascinated by the name of a particular research area, read more about it and then make your decision on whether the area interests you or not.<br /><br />2a. After step 1 i.e. identification of your research area find out the conferences/journals that are well-known for that particular area. This task will also not be hard, use DBLP for that purpose which is a Computer Science bibliography web site listing all reputed conferences and journals: the name of the conference/journal will pretty much tell you whether it's for the field you have identified or not.<br />2b. In addition to step 2a one more step is to google out names of famous research groups working in your identified research areas, for instance if the field you have narrowed down is Social Computing then simply search for "Research Groups Social Computing" and then browse the works of the well-known groups of that domain.<br /><br />3. After listing down conferences and journals within the research area of your interest, read the most popular and latest papers of those conferences. For example any one interested in distributed systems would immediately discover Google's MapReduce paper as the de-facto distributed computing standard and should read that. Another significant factor to look for is the citations the paper has received, read the most cited papers first to get a grip on the topic, Google Scholar will help you in finding number of citations for a paper.<br /><br />After having read 20-30 papers you will definitely come up with a crude idea and refinement of that idea will of course require discussions with your advisor/seniors researchers, in fact you can even email the authors of some of the papers you read. Researchers love to share and increase knowledge for that is the whole point of research: unlike the corporate, commercial world the research world does not like to hide for it is all about knowledge-sharing and a researcher who does not share his/her knowledge is never looked upon with respect.<br /><br />Another handy and useful tool that can help immensely in research is Twitter, although it's known as a social networking or micro-blogging service yet it is known as the new journal archive by many in the scientific community. Some of the groups you identify within your areas of interest would be active on Twittter and you can follow them there for updates, for their latest works, and many a times for useful reading material that can help you a lot in your research. But a note of caution: don't bother them with silly questions like please tell me a topic of research, they are quite mature researchers with top-quality students and when anyone would come up to them with such questions they will consider that student as an alien and this is where you have to be extra-cautious.<br /><br />Feel free to email me with any questions, and I will be glad to help. Please remember that a research career on the surface seems to be attractive but it requires extra hard-work than you would normally have to do in the software house or technology culture of Pakistan because there are no ready-made sweets in research: crafting and scientific knowledge discovery is what you would have to master which of course requires years and years of efforts.Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-64876945911132422452011-03-27T15:43:00.001-07:002015-08-21T04:51:44.657-07:00Invited Talk in Research Universities of Malaysia: The Web Goes SocialAs I write this blog post, I am packing stuff and getting ready to leave Malaysia where I came for invited research talks in 3 best schools, namely UTM, MMU and UPM. It was indeed a very hectic but fun-filled trip nevertheless with lots of interaction with faculty and students. Many of the faculty members at Malaysian universities gave an overwhelming response, and inquired about dimensions for research using social media. It was a great learning experience for me to answer their questions, and also to share mutual research discussions that can prove fruitful for joint research collaborations in future.<br /><br />At UTM I presented my work on Web crawlers done in the Database and Multimedia lab of KAIST as part of my Master's thesis, while at the other two universities I presented my work on Social Web Mining which has been done in collaboration with different institutes of Pakistan.<br /><br />As many researchers know that social media is not just a toy for masses but also a pool of Web data where Web mining researchers can have lots and lots of data to further their research in various dimensions. The dimension I took up in the talks was related to my research area "Web Search" and it focused on what social media tools have to offer to search engines and how social media along with its vast pool of data serve as an effective enhancement tool for search engines. Not only that I talked about how my research (in particular on Twitter) can provide an effective news monitoring platform that can be useful for media outlets, journalists, political organizations and even governments. I then focused on two works by my research group in this dimension: 1) blogosphere clustering, and 2) Twitter as real-time news analysis service.<br /><br />Slides are attached here, also I managed to make a video during the last talk at UPM (Universiti Putra Malaysia), and those interested can listen to the talk along with viewing the slides. As before, interested students/researchers may contact me personally if they wish to work in any of these areas as my research group is now actively seeking for students to work on research publications of this domain.<br /><br /><center><br /><iframe src="//www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/wD1qsVc3JXDGck" width="425" height="355" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px; margin-bottom:5px; max-width: 100%;" allowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="//www.slideshare.net/AYounus/the-web-goes-social-blogosphere-and-twittersphere-7406352" title="The Web Goes Social: Blogosphere and Twittersphere" target="_blank">The Web Goes Social: Blogosphere and Twittersphere</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="//www.slideshare.net/AYounus" target="_blank">Arjumand Younus</a></strong> </div></center><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><br /><br />The talk is in four parts which I have included in this post:<br /><br /><center><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/P33BPVuEBio" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ai_zxhziJiY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><br /><br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/7_ZzcS_doTE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><br /><br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ESiVprYDdC4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><br /></center>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-89922563816868853302011-03-20T10:37:00.001-07:002011-03-20T10:56:51.527-07:00Good Bye Korea: Memories of Database and Multimedia Lab of KAISTTonight happens to be my second last night in Korea and Korea for me was for the most part limited to my lab which is the Database and Multimedia Lab of KAIST. Even tonight as I am about to leave the land of Kimchi I am working in the lab doing some final experiments as part of my Web crawling paper. I still have lots and lots of work remaining, cleaning the home, packing many small things and yet here I am in the lab doing final jobs for my paper. <div><br /></div><div>It is said that the path of a graduate student and that too in a subject as innovative as Computer Science is really hectic and requires a lot of patience. This was practically experienced during my Master's degree at KAIST. Though it's been a journey of immense stress and pressure, yet it has been enjoyable and fun all along. In particular life in the Database and Multimedia lab has a culture of its own. Even in the "kaali raats" (the term used by Database and Multimedia Lab members to refer to a night which we completely spend in the lab), we had fun and I will surely miss each and every member of this family of mine. I may or may not come back to Korea, that is still undecided but with this video I wish to thank my family at KAIST. We have had some extreme tough times but we have been a family, times spent in this lab are one of the most precious memories for me where I learned a lot both from point of view of scientific research and enjoying work.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br /><center><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JCuWQLE1S38" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /></center>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-60735874206184588182011-01-07T06:15:00.000-08:002011-01-07T07:38:40.910-08:00Co-relating News and Tweets: "Ins and Outs of News Twitter as a Real-Time News Analysis Service"The Web has seen a massive transformation with its read-only nature diminishing more and more and evolving into a read-write nature. Social networks are one of the driving forces behind this transformation and hence, the Social Web can be seen as a fundamental source of more and more UGC (user-generated content). <div><br /></div><div>The phenomenon of "UGC" has also had a significant impact in the domain of Web Search, which happens to be my area of research: a <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101231/tc_afp/usinternetitcompanyfacebookgoogle">study</a> conducted in 2010 puts Facebook ahead of Google in terms of Web site hits. Many of the major search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are now looking at means to take into account the Social Web into their search results. The WWW 2010 paper titled <a href="http://blog.vark.com/?p=352">"Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine"</a> describes the phenomenon in considerable detail and I recommend it as a must-read to those interested in the field. In fact the team behind this paper created a social search system <a href="http://blog.vark.com/">Aardvark that has now been acquired by Google</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Despite the tremendous amount of importance and attention being given to the concept of <a href="http://arjumand-atif.blogspot.com/2010/05/is-search-really-dead.html">social search</a>, one significant domain within this area has not yet been explored much which this recent paper by me and my research group attempts to explore. In this paper we present a system which aims to identify and detect hot news items in real time by taking into account user popularity and temporal features. We present a prototype of the approach using the popular microblogging service "Twitter" and present the results of some initial evaluations of our approach. </div><div><br /></div><div>The proposed system analyzes real-time news by using the data from Twitter. We give a description of news services, followed by an architecture of how one can assess news popularity. The architecture is built upon a Web crawling framework and a news parser followed by application of natural language processing techniques on the news data which is then finally linked with the Twitter Search API. At the user interface end, we use a simple timeline-based visualization to showcase the popularity of news across time. Furthermore, data from the popular news service Dawn.com over a period of 10 days was crawled on a daily basis and analyzed for co-relation with tweets, this analysis reveals interesting results such as the news bias exhibited by news services. Below is the paper, which can be downloaded as well.</div><div><br /><br /><center><object id="__sse6477862" width="477" height="510"><param name="movie" value="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/doc_player.swf?doc=vissw2011submission6-110107075422-phpapp02&stripped_title=vissw2011-submission-6&userName=AYounus"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed name="__sse6477862" src="http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/doc_player.swf?doc=vissw2011submission6-110107075422-phpapp02&stripped_title=vissw2011-submission-6&userName=AYounus" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="477" height="510"></embed></object></center><br /><br /></div><div>The paper will be published in the proceedings of the workshop "Visual Interfaces to the Social and Semantic Web (VISSW 2011)" co-located with International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2011) to be held at Stanford University in February, 2011. I am sharing it over my blog on request of some students who have shown a lot of interest in the field. For further details/questions/feedback a personal email to arjumand_younus@yahoo.com would be preferred. Also, students willing to work with our research group in this dimension may contact me in person. I will also be uploading the slides and talk for this paper soon. </div><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-44320810003155692312010-12-30T02:13:00.000-08:002015-08-21T04:49:33.913-07:00Master's Thesis: Design and Implementation of a Scalable High-Speed Parallel Web CrawlerI have been planning to share this for quite sometime, and today finally I managed the time to do so. My Master's thesis covers a very fundamental component of search engines, namely Web crawlers. The research focus of my work is crawler efficiency which is related with scalability and speed of a Web crawler. <br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The proposed architecture extends the <a href="http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/05/crawling-is-harder-than-it-looks.html">DRUM technique proposed in the best paper</a> of WWW 2008 titled "<a href="http://irl.cs.tamu.edu/people/hsin-tsang/papers/www2008.pdf">IRLbot: Scaling to 6 Billion Pages and Beyond</a>": the technique is used for a single-machine Web crawler. In the thesis, I extend it for a parallel crawler. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Following is my Master's thesis defense presentation, which I successfully passed on 16th December, 2010.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br />
<center>
<br /><iframe src="//www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/8GNtJO05ZYRi0x" width="425" height="355" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px; margin-bottom:5px; max-width: 100%;" allowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="//www.slideshare.net/AYounus/masters-thesis-design-and-implementation-of-a-scalable-highspeed-parallel-web-crawler" title="Masters Thesis: Design and Implementation of a Scalable High-Speed Parallel Web Crawler" target="_blank">Masters Thesis: Design and Implementation of a Scalable High-Speed Parallel Web Crawler</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="//www.slideshare.net/AYounus" target="_blank">Arjumand Younus</a></strong> </div>
</center>
</div>
<div>
The full-text of the thesis will be available soon. Interested students/researchers may contact me for any questions, comments or feedback. Any researcher interested in the domain of Web crawling may also contact me if he/she has any suggestions. The full-text of the thesis can also be requested via email.</div>
<script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script><script src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js?c1=7&c2=7400849&c3=1&c4=&c5=&c6="></script>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-14372524463371379792010-12-07T19:13:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:32:05.816-08:00When There's Nothing to Eat in Korea There's Always KimbabBack in Pakistan when this situation arose of no time to cook anything, we had the option of Maggi noodles. But in Korea almost all noodles have some sort of pork (or pork ingredients) so is there no option of having some 2-minute thing? Nopes, there is the all-time Korean favorite Kimbab. Bab in Korean means cooked rice, so Pakistanis describe it as rice burger :), quite unusual and strange, right.<br /><br />These days my husband and I are under the Masters thesis defense phase so most of the time we face this situation of no time but wanting something quick to eat so Kimbab comes to the rescue.<br /><br />Gimbap or kimbap is a popular Korean dish made from steamed white rice (bap) and various other ingredients, rolled in gim (sheets of dried laver seaweed) and served in bite-size slices. Gimbap is often eaten during picnics or outdoor events, or as a light lunch, served with danmuji or kimchi. It is similar to the better-known Japanese sushi. We eat the Yaachae (vegetable) or chamchi (tuna) one as all the others have meat. Here are images of two variations of Kimbab. The first one is served in restaurants with a very delicious soya soup that is excellent for winters.<br />The second one is found in stores packed like a sandwich and is really cheap.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtvyvT3vbegQ8vnuzG3TBI97RIE2ynUv_jjDSvAkcAm0OQCsX9G7vc71BcviN-l68zdrS2AT6bu-z_KDE4OUFagkBItwCkKHdlLU47caGIb6ihUdgQA5o7F0zUTY_MtGpi-PO6bWVTawD5/s1600/yachae_kimbab.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtvyvT3vbegQ8vnuzG3TBI97RIE2ynUv_jjDSvAkcAm0OQCsX9G7vc71BcviN-l68zdrS2AT6bu-z_KDE4OUFagkBItwCkKHdlLU47caGIb6ihUdgQA5o7F0zUTY_MtGpi-PO6bWVTawD5/s320/yachae_kimbab.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548148546093630450" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3qIa69wvDWvlqwPMOxgOrz3QrYZ4KU33Y4rVT47cAAwUQnn0OpnkIJVOa22D_38gH1pcDCLz667RNqXLdQuWOfjAc0wyHODnwOiWJPQTbz9dQkvlrYpqIHGAxJtyyn7rk0ulhzRB8Ntoq/s1600/tuna_kimbab.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3qIa69wvDWvlqwPMOxgOrz3QrYZ4KU33Y4rVT47cAAwUQnn0OpnkIJVOa22D_38gH1pcDCLz667RNqXLdQuWOfjAc0wyHODnwOiWJPQTbz9dQkvlrYpqIHGAxJtyyn7rk0ulhzRB8Ntoq/s320/tuna_kimbab.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548148682004143010" border="0" /></a><br /><br />So now I am off to buy my Kimbab from the KAIST cafeteria store :)Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-79260889002171189942010-11-17T23:51:00.000-08:002010-11-22T01:16:09.078-08:00South Korea: the Pioneer of Social NetworksSocial networks have considerably revolutionized the Internet usage patterns. Some studies have estimated that users now spend more time on social networks than on search engines. The most popular social network services include Twitter and Facebook. <div><br /></div><div>Today I will shed some light on use of social networks in South Korea and their role in what can be termed as the social network revolution.<br /><div><br /></div><div>To the surprise of many readers of my blog South Korea is the pioneer of social networks, although you cannot find widespread use of Facebook in South Korea. In South Korea Twitter and Facebook are dwarfed by the local social networks, the most popular of which is CyWorld by SK Communications. Cyworld social network is used by 78 percent of Koreans with Internet access. The Facebook-style service was a pioneer in social networking, launching way back in 1999 and launching as a mobile service in 2004. SK’s instant messaging service – known as NateOn – is also the most widely used in Korea, and is three times more popular than Microsoft’s Live Messenger. It is a popular myth especially amongst the Pakistanis that the credit for making social networks popular goes to Mark Zuckerberg and the likes whereas the real pioneer is South Korea. Furthermore, South Korea's CyWorld was so popular and unique that its US counterpart by name of CyWorld US was launched in 2006. In Korea social networks are not just a social gathering point; in fact they are a very successful business model and as per my Korean lab mates social networks have been known to the Koreans back from the age of the dial-up Internet. </div><div><br /></div><div>Korea's example according to me is an example that we Pakistanis can learn from. Back in Pakistan when Facebook was banned after the "Draw Muhammad" fan page controversy some people argued that creation of a local social network is not a workable solution since we need to communicate internationally - that is an argument that in my opinion comes from defeated minds and without knowledge of the science of social networks and their evolution patterns - CyWorld is a forum which international community has joined (yes many foreigners joined CyWorld to interact with Koreans) and learned from leading Korea to earn a respectable place in the world of SNS and mobile services with all this causing international communications to increase. Moreover, the data users share on social networks is a critical asset for any country and should not become a commodity for any other country which is currently the case due to not having any idea of the significance of local social networks. </div><div><br /></div><div>For all the above-mentioned reasons Korea's case is one that has important lessons for many countries in Asia and in particular Pakistan where anything foreign and in particular by US is considered irreplaceable whereas many other countries of the world are moving in a different direction.</div></div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-1486944403948152212010-09-14T00:01:00.000-07:002010-09-14T07:21:14.839-07:00Experience at TEDxKAIST: Happiness for Science and Science for HappinessAlmost all of us know about the <a href="http://www.ted.com/">TED platform</a> which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it is an annual event where world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to share what they are most passionate about. The TED platform gave birth to an accompanying, new initiative called TEDx and this is a new program that enables local communities such as schools, businesses, libraries, neighborhoods or just groups of friends to organize, design and host their own independent TED-like events. Such an event was organized in KAIST on 11th September, 2010 by some students of KAIST and the team was wonderfully led by <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/markwhiting/">Mark Whiting</a>, a Masters student at the Department of Industrial Design, KAIST. They called it TEDxKAIST and it turned out to be an energizing event for the hard-working KAIST students. <div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSXFnZ18qoUCgy6lBb4R84tC7V9as-bcEoAoAUWxvx03bb5oSfnhjaOIQIHzl63ZYXyvrT4oO_RcAwg5z9n76AiECvW-lc6srJYRBbVuZCnlPLJXhQZUqW0pB7o9K_U40PcVuzn7Al7R27/s1600/4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSXFnZ18qoUCgy6lBb4R84tC7V9as-bcEoAoAUWxvx03bb5oSfnhjaOIQIHzl63ZYXyvrT4oO_RcAwg5z9n76AiECvW-lc6srJYRBbVuZCnlPLJXhQZUqW0pB7o9K_U40PcVuzn7Al7R27/s320/4.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516667005622805922" /></a><br /><div>KAIST is one of the nation's most prestigious science and technology institutions and keeping this in mind the theme was well-thought: "Happiness for Science and Science for Happiness" - its a significant one as KAIST is all about hard-working students actively engaged in scientific contributions and advancement. There is a famous saying for KAIST students that KAIST never sleeps - the KAISTIANs struggle hard to survive in the seeming paradox of hard work and true happiness. The inspiration for the theme came from this excerpt:</div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Of the more highly educated sections of the community, the happiest in the present day are the men of science. Many of the most eminent of them are are emotionally simple, and obtain from their work a satisfaction so profound that they can derive pleasure from eating and even marrying." - Bertrand Russell (1930); The Conquest of Happiness</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzS6wpCqrCKHcVsWMcao94hSxtYjz5D5dG4gXwh2Kyja-2qMAq9zPNPaIffV9C6vYGHzFyZPRcbwYOWs_I0UAqWzRM8rTCpOLjvAfEtnFYXJZqQvDHmUzMo4b93cgT9zFZs4AVLzkvDcyD/s1600/IMG_2062.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzS6wpCqrCKHcVsWMcao94hSxtYjz5D5dG4gXwh2Kyja-2qMAq9zPNPaIffV9C6vYGHzFyZPRcbwYOWs_I0UAqWzRM8rTCpOLjvAfEtnFYXJZqQvDHmUzMo4b93cgT9zFZs4AVLzkvDcyD/s320/IMG_2062.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516700042817038578" /></a><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">In this blog post I will share my take aways from TEDxKAIST and some of the key points from the speeches that all people associated with science should keep in mind to become a "happy scientist contributing to a happy world." Following is a brief profile of each of the speakers who spoke in TEDxKAIST and gave their view of a happy scientist: </div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul><li><a href="http://hss.kaist.ac.kr/eng/profile.html?sno=30&kind=_eng">Dr. Young Hae Noh</a> who is a Professor at School of Humanities and Social Sciences at KAIST and has also served as dean of multiple departments at KAIST. </li><li><a href="http://minhwalee.co.kr/">Dr. Minhwa Lee</a> is the Business Ombudsman who makes a link between government and the small and medium businesses; he is also a Professor at KAIST.</li><li>Spanish Koffee, a very famous music group in Korea which pursues free distribution of digital music in their mission of "Passion worth Spreading." </li><li><a href="http://soundlab.kaist.ac.kr/~woony/">Dr. Woonseung Yeo</a> is a Professor at Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST and his PhD work at Stanford university includes introduction to the field of sonification which implies transmitting information through audio signals.</li><li><a href="http://www.iafastro.com/index.html?title=Sung-Dong_Park">Sungdong Park</a> is the CEO of Satrec Initiative which is the world's leading company in high-performance, cost-effective Earth observation small satellite solutions. He won a Civil Merit Medal, a presidential commandment and an Industrial Service Medal for his contributions to Korean space science and technology.</li><li>Byungwoo Jang is the CEO of LG OTIS and has served LG for many years. He comes from a family of great scholars of English literature.</li><li><a href="http://www.jnd.org/">Dr. Don Norman</a> is a distinguished visiting Professor at KAIST and holds many other significant positions around the world. His work has resulted in a number of influential books including “The Design of Everyday Things” and most recently “Living With Complexity.”</li></ul></div><div style="text-align: left;">Professor Noh began her speech with a quote on definition of success by Benjamin Zander, <b><i>"Success is not about wealth, fame or power; it's about how many shining eyes I have found."</i></b> She shared her story about her musical classes - a love story but a very different one: a Professor-student love story. She shared her tips on being a successful Professor - a Professor that brings out the talent in her students to the full, that is both loved by the students and loves the students and a Professor that incites passion and enthusiasm in the students which in my opinion is quite lacking in a majority of today's students. She advocated the idea that Professors should give freedom to students by allowing them to discover their potential and greatness in a journey of their own and at the same time Professors should be keen observers of students and should extract joy in discovering interesting features of their students.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXE49_XnsP0gdmf_mO_NW-vwgIMLem0uDOrg7Y9luxqV8_bIgGbkPfOzBDv9lt_jgP72Jjhe695kY_ucgNjnS1vsJlwvauykRzudn7Us0F5VAJ0ePavdSVN9xnhRXNmBl6x0X3vzawBsTL/s1600/6.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXE49_XnsP0gdmf_mO_NW-vwgIMLem0uDOrg7Y9luxqV8_bIgGbkPfOzBDv9lt_jgP72Jjhe695kY_ucgNjnS1vsJlwvauykRzudn7Us0F5VAJ0ePavdSVN9xnhRXNmBl6x0X3vzawBsTL/s320/6.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516704341602187186" /></a><div>It was really interesting to see and actually observe the scientist's definition of happiness: surpassing challenges and overcoming obstacles; sharing and inculcating passion all around is what happiness is from a scientist's point of view and this view came out more clearly in the talk by Sungdong Park. His story was one of courage and bravery, of making the impossible possible despite all hardships and of rising after setbacks. He shared a newspaper cutting which said, ""First Park Sung Dong got mad. Then he got even." Before establishing Satrec Initiative he was the leader in developing advanced small satellites in KAIST for 10 years - but then something happened which eventually led him to the success he enjoys today but the path was not easy. His government lab was laid off; it was a hard time but he did not lose hope and launched a venture with his old lab's technology. His vision was to make all of SATREC's engineers become millionaires - apparently a crazy idea but with passion and devotion Park made this possible and today Satrec is the only private company in Korea that is a member of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) and is deploying satellite solutions for Dubai, Malaysia, Singapore and Turkey.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another talk that inspired me a lot and in which were the things I have always advocated for science and engineering students was the talk of Byungwoo Jan, the main theme of the talk being technology needs art. His talk was about importance of literature for science and engineering students - without literature any student is incomplete for literature is a way to imagine yourself in the position of another person. Today there is lack of feeling of the pain of others which is making the world an insensitive place - one way to overcome this is through literature. The LG OTIS CEO highlighted how reading books makes life more meaningful and transforms individuals - many successful people have literature behind their back. Thomas Edison is reported to have read 3.5 million pages a life and think of all the imagination and creativity he derived from all these books. Abraham Lincoln had an unfortunate childhood, his life was transformed completely after reading the biography of President Washington and he decided to become a President. Reading books and works of literature that today's students of science and engineering do not do nor enjoy much is a very healthy habit for the mind and can be a new source of creativity and inspiration for tomorrow's scientists so they must not give up this habit.</div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOl5lXiGHgH4WW4mkuxwREHri_mLXHZHptI63QodfnXpMUmwmSnG-xZbnYHR7s6xdU5OLmOQduo1OPUXJAJWQCfw9qxRmQAmTnRuhKytbaiYkJ1j1WPpjJGNxXkC4XCMZrP1dJlaCzYx9h/s1600/1.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px; text-align: center; " src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOl5lXiGHgH4WW4mkuxwREHri_mLXHZHptI63QodfnXpMUmwmSnG-xZbnYHR7s6xdU5OLmOQduo1OPUXJAJWQCfw9qxRmQAmTnRuhKytbaiYkJ1j1WPpjJGNxXkC4XCMZrP1dJlaCzYx9h/s320/1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516728154980488738" /></a>At the end was the talk of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman">Professor Don Norman</a> which was undoubtedly the highlight of the entire event. The thing that was really surprising about this talk was that he did not use any slides, instead he drew all the material he wanted to present on a white board and the talk was inspiring indeed with lots and lots of lessons for people of science and engineering. The talk was fundamentally organized around the following<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ8pTbwjWOBzCM2kPIOSAQ84y-kr6kvX6sAcMvC4adwzpJzogE-MurhJZkgapRXg_CEzZPhMhLlQNnSk3zx1q_TXghu9J21iIE3dEpdOgJ1RXa3goa2eujucfBYZao1_Hm4pTfEivfmcqw/s1600/blog+post.bmp"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 317px; height: 288px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ8pTbwjWOBzCM2kPIOSAQ84y-kr6kvX6sAcMvC4adwzpJzogE-MurhJZkgapRXg_CEzZPhMhLlQNnSk3zx1q_TXghu9J21iIE3dEpdOgJ1RXa3goa2eujucfBYZao1_Hm4pTfEivfmcqw/s320/blog+post.bmp" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516738224320084386" /></a>He first asked the audience about the ones who were happy and ones who were not and then moved on to say that those that said neither happy nor unhappy made a smart choice - because if you're happy then it means you are not doing well in your pursuit in life because on every path happiness comes with a lot and lot of unhappiness; being successful means not going through the normal way but through lots and lots of pain and difficulty. He then explained further about the happiness and sadness - it is just a state which can be measured and when on the path of achieving something one should not worry about being happy; satisfaction and dissatisfaction - it is a judgment which no one can measure except a person himself/herself and optimism and pessimism - these are points of views and this is what determines everything. As an example on point of view he explained the fear that a human feels when asked to walk on a plank placed in mid-air as opposed to no fear when he is asked to walk on the same plank placed on the floor meaning that points of views are driven by a human's emotional system, his approach and instincts and this has to be the driving factor if a scientist is to derive happiness from his science - happiness for both himself and the world.<div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhME8gl2Phyphenhyphen87VcjBxhyeuZsCRcV_oR6nKyPZkRX2OdLFCHLut9nUj2g4qMmTCIL5_DtNQYK-W64GG2tp2ip9hhrGwKHr55AfmxQPStgEEMfxSEV4qrhJGabY55YnOBJ2QtxK2oo8OG5Ss8/s1600/IMG_2071.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhME8gl2Phyphenhyphen87VcjBxhyeuZsCRcV_oR6nKyPZkRX2OdLFCHLut9nUj2g4qMmTCIL5_DtNQYK-W64GG2tp2ip9hhrGwKHr55AfmxQPStgEEMfxSEV4qrhJGabY55YnOBJ2QtxK2oo8OG5Ss8/s320/IMG_2071.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5516744091906798946" /></a>He related a story about his experience at Apple which shows how a fusion of happiness and anxiety can lead to success in science - his tip was that when thinking about new ideas and when embarking on journey to creativity one must have fun, relax, be in a comfortable state of mind but when decision has been taken on some idea then accomplishment comes through anxiety and a worried state of mind. Lastly his talk threw light on the paradox of urgent problems vs. the important problems - it is the important problems that need to get done first because what you want to do in life is the important thing and that makes the difference.<div><br /></div><div>This event was a great experience and a memorable one during my stay at KAIST and surely the lessons and tips given here will help me throughout my academic life.</div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-50911341539971849402010-09-01T08:18:00.000-07:002010-09-03T00:06:12.379-07:00Coling 2010 Workshop The People’s Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Semantic ResourcesSaturday, 28th August, 2010 was a long and eventful day as I attended a workshop co-located with <a href="http://www.coling-2010.org/">COLING 2010 in Beijing, China</a>. The workshop was organized by the <a href="http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/">Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab in the Department of Computer Science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany</a>. The main theme of the <a href="http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/scientific-community/coling-2010-workshop/">workshop</a> centered around collaboratively constructed semantic resources and their role and influence in Natural Language Processing researches of today. Though this workshop was organized for the second time and had a small community with new faces appearing this time yet the way the discussions were carried out seems to offer much promise for this community.<div><div><br /></div><div>The following diagram gives a pictorial representation of what the workshop was all about:<div><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYyvpMcwFgV47-By9_arvpRPj0xGdPJ3wEqycOMr34jsx5MM6PlpWn0rogeJQT1nGtop0sWy6Qk1dS9i3Nl_sM-aASgPqgr2cnkLXUo_jrGZ6iL22o2_G8jz_I0eTn2Vabsuc8TPID6BV/s1600/CCSR_WorkshopTheme.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 280px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYyvpMcwFgV47-By9_arvpRPj0xGdPJ3wEqycOMr34jsx5MM6PlpWn0rogeJQT1nGtop0sWy6Qk1dS9i3Nl_sM-aASgPqgr2cnkLXUo_jrGZ6iL22o2_G8jz_I0eTn2Vabsuc8TPID6BV/s320/CCSR_WorkshopTheme.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511976110829860018" /></a><div>Within the natural language processing domain there used to exist what we can call a knowledge acquisition bottleneck; earlier this bottleneck was resolved through development of semantic, lexical resources by experts; WordNet being a typical, classical example. However with the emergence of Web 2.0 the scenario has completely changed and the focus of the NLP community has moved from the classical resources to collaboratively constructed semantic resources (CCSRs); Wikipedia being the most popular example which is why we can now see an increasing number of research publications directed towards such themes in many reputed conferences such as CIKM, WWW, EMNLP etc. </div><div><br /></div><div>As the diagram above shows the workshop's focus was on researches directed towards use of CCSR's for enhancement and furthering of NLP and also the other way around using NLP to improve CCSR's</div><div><br /></div><div>The best thing about the workshop was that it welcomed researchers from diverse domains some this time and promising more for the next time; in fact the invited speech by <a href="http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~chuats/">Professor Tat-Seng Chua of National University of Singapore</a> was also from a diverse area namely community-based question answering. Hence the papers presented were from two categories:</div><div><ul><li>Those using collaboratively constructed resources as sources of lexical semantic information for NLP purposes such as information retrieval, named entity recognition, or keyword extraction</li><li>Those using NLP techniques to improve the resources or extract and analyze different types of lexical semantic information from them. </li></ul><div>Overall there were 8 papers presented in the workshop of which 5 were on Wikipedia, 1 on Amazon Mechanical Turk, 1 on translation resources and 1 on the blogosphere. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>The paper presentations at the workshop were followed by an extremely interactive and knowledgeable discussion on the theme of the workshop - collaboratively constructed semantic resources. In my opinion everyone amongst the attendees had something to take from the discussion and below I am sharing all the questions raised during the discussion along with the thoughts of the attendees. Readers can chip in their comments/thoughts/suggestions for the mutual benefit of the whole community.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first question centered around the scope of the workshop's name i.e. whether the scope of name "Collaboratively Constructed Semantic Resources" was too wide or too narrow. The very first suggestion from the invited speaker Professor Tat-Seng Chua was a very useful one and he suggested using the term Community Based Semantic Resources instead. Two other suggestions suggested the use of the term crowd sourcing or wisdom of the crowds as these are the more popular terms used within this area and workshops co-located with other reputed conferences use these terms. However one of the workshop chairs <a href="http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/people/dr-torsten-zesch/">Dr. Torsten Zesch</a> put forward a valid argument against these two terms: one can find it hard to agree that Wikipedia falls under a crowd sourced resource and as such this term may narrow down the scope of the workshop too much; on the other hand wisdom of the crowds is a very widespread term for Web 2.0 tasks and many other conferences use it but it is too broad a theme keeping in mind that the workshop centers around use of the resources for NLP tasks and using NLP tasks for improving collaboratively constructed semantic resources.</div><div><br /></div><div>The next question was a very important one as it bridges NLP researches of yesterday and today: what is the relation between expert-made and collaboratively constructed resources; are they complimentary or are they different? Further explanation of this question was provided by the <a href="http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/people/prof-dr-iryna-gurevych/">workshop chair Professor Dr. Iryna Gurevych</a>: for many years the NLP community has relied on classical lexical, semantic resources and they have served us well but with Web 2.0 CCSR's are in widespread use so do we still need the classical resources, shall we spend our efforts in improving the classical resources? On this question almost all the attendees were on agreement that the quality and correctness issues in CCSR's have to be addressed for example Wikipedia has some quality and correctness issues and there is very less work on addressing these issues. When compared to classical resources CCSR's are better in terms of coverage and the classical resources are better in terms of quality so the need is to incorporate quality of classical,expert-made resources into CCSR's and for this we need to provide incentives for guiding the crowds who are generating the CCSR's: Mechanical Turk for example has a nice way of ensuring quality through monetary incentives and the research community needs to think of more ways in which to ensure that CCSR's of high-quality are produced.</div><div><br /></div><div>The third question focused on the various types of CCSR's and their classifications: what are the most valuable collaboratively constructed semantic resources, how can we classify them? The various types of CCSR's mentioned by the attendees were Wikipedia, Twitter and social networks, forums and CQA sites, YouTube, Flickr, Wiki family e.g. Wiktionary, Wikiversity, Wikitravel etc. As for the value of any CCSR the attendees held agreement that coverage and number of people involved in the resource creation are the determining factors. As for the most valuable CCSR's Wikipedia's importance cannot be denied by any means and there is ample evidence to suggest this; for the future of CCSR's Twitter may emerge as an extremely valuable resource as it a whole wealth of knowledge waiting to be mined; moreover Twitter has managed to attract the attention of the research community in a very short span of time and this can be assessed from the amount of research publications using Twitter as a source of data; reputed publication venues such as WWW, CIKM, SIGKDD, COLING etc. now have many papers on Twitter and if the NLP community directs its efforts towards this resource properly then it can be used as a very effective and useful CCSR. As for the classification of CCSR's a well-grounded classification of CCSR's does not exist and this may also be one research problem within this area as classification is a multi-dimensional thing. One significant line of discussion between Wikipedia and Twitter is that in Wikipedia the user's intention is to make a single,useful resource whereas on Twitter people share their thoughts/message separately in a 140-character long tweet implying that the nature of each CCSR is different and it is important to take this factor into account.</div><div><br /></div><div>The fourth question centered around the impact CCSR's are having: where do CCSR's have the largest impact, do they really make a difference? Everyone agreed that impact of CCSR's is huge as it has solved the knowledge acquisition bottleneck for researchers and data is now a free resources and since free zones empower people hence its worth the effort and exertion of research efforts towards CCSR's will be beneficial in the future as well. People start to think in new ways with new resources and it benefits the whole community: within this direction an important point was raised by one of the attendees that the commercial giants such as search engines may already be using CCSR's for their tasks and this may also be a significant business secret for them. All this implies that CCSR's have a great potential to heavily impact both research and commercial applications and the community needs to think about more and more ways for creation and improvement of such resources: an example being "games for a purpose" which gives people a leisure incentive rather than monetary one for creating the resources and Google's Image Labeler is one such application which Google uses to generate image tags and hence improvement of its image search.</div><div><br /></div><div>The fifth and last question concerned the different research areas that have interest in CCSR's: which scientific communities have collaboratively constructed semantic resources as their distinct topic, which fields other than Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing/Human Language Technologies should we collaborate with regarding CCSR's? This question has a broad range of answers in my opinion; some answers discussed during the workshop had suggestions to collaborate with people from the social sciences field as <a href="http://labs.yahoo.com/news/319">"Social Science meets Computer Science"</a> is an emerging, prominent theme recently; moreover people from the computer networking domain can also provide useful insights with respect to CCSR's and hence in the future we may see a broad range of researchers gathering to work collaboratively on collaboratively constructed semantic resources.</div><div><br /></div><div>The workshop was a great experience for me and I look forward to attending and presenting my work in it in future as well. Readers are advised to drop in any comments/suggestions with respect to collaboratively constructed semantic resources.</div></div></div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-47368762287639342142010-08-06T05:05:00.000-07:002012-10-01T04:57:08.735-07:00Applying for a Masters/PhD ProgramI have been receiving many emails from students asking for guidance on the application procedure for Masters/PhD and at the same time many students seem concerned about scholarship.<br />
<br />
So today I am writing a post to answer all these questions by the students.<br />
<br />
Firstly and most importantly students should know that now Computer Science has turned into a very competitive field with largest number of conferences and yearly publications. It is what you can call a hyper-active field with lots and lots of research around the world. As such the model has now changed and the Masters program in Computer Science around the world now comes in two flavors: Masters by Coursework and Masters by Research, whereas PhD is a pure research-based program.<br />
<br />
The difference between the two is that in Masters by Coursework you just have to finish course credits and that's it, you're not part of any lab or you don't have to be Research Associate under any Professor. You can say its just like the Masters program we have back there in Pakistan in universities like FAST-NU (though I have been told that as of now FAST-NU encourages research and a project/thesis is a mandatory part of MS degree requirement). On the other side of the spectrum the Masters by Research program is very much like PhD program and your transition to PhD is much easier if you go for Masters by Research program, you have to do a Masters Thesis and you basically work for a Professor as Research Associate. Your choice of thesis topic is with him and its pure research and quite tough too but yet a great learning experience. Some Masters by Coursework programs such as the Erasmus Mundus Masters program and Masters program in some Swedish universities also has the requirement of a Masters Thesis but the choice of your thesis is entirely upon you and little supervision is given during the thesis for example you don't have to complete a literature survey phase, design phase etc. with any Professor.<br />
<br />
Applying to the Masters by Coursework program and getting admitted into it is considerably easy. All you have to do is go to the university website, search for the application instructions for applying to Masters by Coursework program, prepare your documents as per the instructions and send them by airmail. That's it.......you have applied to the Masters by Coursework program. Now you have to wait for admission results of the university to which you have applied.<br />
<br />
Now coming to the procedure to apply for MS by Research or a PhD program you have to do the following:<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>First you have to identify your research area and search for universities around the world that have research labs/groups working in those areas. This step has to be conducted really carefully as you are the one who knows your research aptitude and potential areas of your interest. Go through the lab's research work very thoroughly, read some of their important publications and decide on basis of that. There is no point in going for research in Computer Science if you have no aptitude for it or cannot narrow down any specific research area for yourself. Most students from Pakistan just want to get admitted anywhere and for that they even don't bother whether the field interests them or not. In fact some even change their field like they have one research area during Masters and land up in a completely different area during PhD, how could anyone who has love for scientific research not choose the area carefully in the first place. This approach may make you get admitted but is not going to help your career as a scientist if you are willing to become one that is.<br /></li>
<li>After you have completed step 1 you must have a list of potential universities in which you are interested and the research groups you find appropriate for yourself have to approached now. The way to do this is to approach through Professors, basically co-ordinating with a Professor from your research area before application. The main thing is getting some Professor interested in you joining as a Research Associate in his lab and the process of approaching Professor has to be well thought out. Dig deep into the work of his lab and explain to him clearly why you want to work with him and in what way you think you will contribute towards his research. Read some of his papers and then compose an email for him. That email should also be written after a lot of study and include a web link of your online profile for the Professor; if you do not have an online profile then create one. An online profile is extremely important in this era of competitiveness and more so if you want to do research in the field of Computer Science. It is better not to attach things with your first email as first email to Professor has to be very short and concise. Here are some great advices for prospective research students by a Professor of University of Virginia: <a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/advice/prospective.html">advices</a>.<br /></li>
<li>If after reading your email the Professor thinks you can be productive for his lab he will be ready to take you and agreement of Professor is like 70% of process done.<br /></li>
<li>For the next step he will ask you to send your application package to the university and will support your application. Professor's support of your application highly boosts your chances of successful admission.</li>
</ol>
Now coming to scholarship: that varies from country to country and university to university. Many universities of the world have tuition fees exemption for international students and in addition to that they give stipends for living expenses so no you don't have to do a job. This is the case in many Asian countries like Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong,Taiwan etc. and don't think that since these countries are in Asia their universities are not good. In fact these afore-mentioned countries currently have the highest academic publishing rate in the world even more than what is currently in the US......they have some excellent researchers and Professors with a brilliant environment for research. Whereas the case in most European and US universities is that scholarships/funding is not available for Masters students be it Masters by Coursework or Masters by Research and the situation after global economic crisis is even worse so you might have to do a job which may be a great burden for your research work or you may have to arrange for the amount beforehand which also is quite tough. The case for PhD programs is different; PhD students get scholarship by default almost everywhere since PhD implies you are a Research Associate in some lab so the lab is responsible for your funding.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This is about it, I hope students find this helpful. If there are any queries or any sort of help needed you may contact me on my personal email id: arjumandms@kaist.ac.kr or arjumand_younus@yahoo.com</div>
Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-49515315594230904632010-07-23T07:21:00.000-07:002010-07-26T10:47:44.018-07:00[From SIGIR 2010]: Best Paper on Value of Search Trails in Web LogsWe search daily for information; in fact it would not be wrong to say that search has become an integral part of our life on the Web. However while searching for particular information comes a complex range of interactions which varies for different users and different queries and it is these complex interactions that are recently attracting focus of researchers at Microsoft for their Bing search engine and this was the theme of the best paper in SIGIR 2010 "Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs."<div><br /></div><div>The paper itself is very interesting and again it seems that the focus of future Information Retrieval researches would heavily come from Human Computer Interaction as was also obvious from <a href="http://arjumand-atif.blogspot.com/2010/07/from-sigir-2010-keynote-on-refactoring.html">keynote talk in SIGIR 2010</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>What happens when you enter a keyword for searching on Google, Yahoo or Bing: a list of Web pages are returned which are ranked based on their relevance which has been computed for much time with the much-renowned PageRank and now variants of PageRank are used for the purpose. Now what do you do with these results? You either follow the different links one after another and finally set to a page that you find to be most satisfying for your query: the entire set of pages followed have been referred to as search trails by White of Microsoft Research and Huang of Washington University and in this research they have studied the value that users derive from this entire activity through a log-based analysis. The researchers collected logs of URL visits of users who opted to provide this data through a widely distributed browser toolbar; the data was collected over a three-month period from March 2009 to May 2009. Formally a search trail is defined a temporally-ordered sequence of URLs beginning with a search query and ending with either: (1) another query, (2) a period of inactivity of 30 or more minutes or (3) termination of browser instance or tab; the figure explains this more clearly:</div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgyK_4KtPEEuH1We3KRv-iZcDkvlGzZzxDucuMiQfmVINFjL8hPQaT-PboGUsiSrXgI1SvRVThCWyfskD1J9fLdsAZm5BQEZuUEpA3Ly5EwjPHvcYxInIkbn117XtnbV3h0nQRAMVVxwN3/s1600/SIGIR+best+paper.bmp"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 120px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgyK_4KtPEEuH1We3KRv-iZcDkvlGzZzxDucuMiQfmVINFjL8hPQaT-PboGUsiSrXgI1SvRVThCWyfskD1J9fLdsAZm5BQEZuUEpA3Ly5EwjPHvcYxInIkbn117XtnbV3h0nQRAMVVxwN3/s320/SIGIR+best+paper.bmp" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5497135306120038274" /></a><br /><br />In the figure the circle represents query along with search engine result page, rectangles represent web pages that user navigates to from the search engine result page, double vertical lines represent backtracking to an earlier state and back arrow shows that user has requested to see a page earlier in search trail. Example in the figure shows a typical example of a search trail with query Q1 initiating the trail and user navigating to page P2 from the results page, then to page P3 and from page P3 to page P4; page P4 does not satisfy the user so he returns to page P3 which is why page P3 has the double vertical lines and then finally navigates to page P5. In this context page P2 is origin page and P5 is destination page. <br /><br />Currently search engines provide only the origin page in their results, this research aims to study the value derived from following of links so that in the future search engines may offer more refined results for example showing of full trails directly on search results, query-specific and user-specific search results etc. The findings showed that following search trails provides users with significant additional benefit in terms of coverage, diversity, novelty and utility: there is a lot of value in the trail and hence we may see in future recommendation pages in Bing with an integration between the recommendation systems and search engines.Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-55678164659491266562010-07-21T01:24:00.000-07:002010-07-21T02:05:36.112-07:00[From SIGIR 2010]: KeyNote on Refactoring the Search ProblemThe largest forum for researchers in the Information Retrieval community "ACM SIGIR" is underway in Geneva, Switzerland and it began yesterday. The best thing about social network platforms of today is that even though you are not in the conference, you are up to date with all the talks , the papers and new innovative ideas being presented and thanks to Twitter and blogosphere much of SIGIR 2010 happenings are coming to me straight and live :)<div><br /></div><div>This year's SIGIR conference has 15 papers from Microsoft Research which clearly shows Microsoft is going to put a lot of effort into IR in the near future and researchers at Microsoft are certainly working hard to make Bing better and better.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yesterday's keynote speech at SIGIR was presented on refactoring of the search problem in which Gary W Flake of Microsoft Live Labs described and demonstrated Microsoft Pivot. </div><div><br /></div><div>From what I see it, Pivot seems to be a cross of the aspects of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and Information Retrieval. Watch this TED talk for a live demo of Pivot:</div><div><br /></div><br /><center><object width="446" height="326"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"> <param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/GaryFlake_2010-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/GaryFlake-2010.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=783&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration;year=2010;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;theme=a_taste_of_ted2010;event=TED2010;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;"><embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="446" height="326" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/GaryFlake_2010-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/GaryFlake-2010.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=783&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration;year=2010;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;theme=a_taste_of_ted2010;event=TED2010;"></embed></object></center><br />Pivot's claim is to get rid of the curse of information overload in this information age by making the user search experience more near to a search rather than simple browsing.........this he said is achieved by taking raw data and combining it with metadata for faceted navigation. The idea seems promising but I find it is more so borrowed from Wolfram Alpha who have already experimented with this type of search engine which they call a computational knowledge engine: <a href="http://www.wolframalpha.com">http://www.wolframalpha.com</a><div><br /></div><div>Also some hard challenges in this task involve server-side issues and a question: is this style of search a good model for all kinds of searches? That the future will tell as Microsoft has plans to integrate Pivot technology with their recently released search engine Bing.</div><div><br /></div><div>I will be blogging more on some key papers and talks in SIGIR...........if you are interested in live updates follow on twitter with hastag #sigir2010, #sigir and #sigir10.</div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-32857840973457174552010-07-02T06:27:00.000-07:002010-07-02T07:24:09.149-07:00Paper Reviews: A Great Learning ExperienceReading a fairly good, published paper is a very different thing from reading an unpublished paper submitted for a conference. Most papers presented in decent conferences are well organized and reasonably written and those are the only papers you probably have read in classes and for your research. For a task of reviewing as part of program committee, you get to read quite different papers and many of them are poorly written in one way or another. This I realized when I had to do my first paper review task for the papers submitted for the reputed <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/cikm10/">CIKM conference of this year</a> as <a href="http://dblab.kaist.ac.kr/Prof/main_eng.html">my Professor</a> is part of the program committee for this conference. The paper review task is assigned to all PhD students of our lab for learning how to write a good paper the premise behind it being that if you can review papers well then you can also write good papers, luckily I was the only MS student who got to do such a paper review job because out of the assigned papers by CIKM one was related to my MS thesis topic.<br /><br />The review process is a very rigorous one with a whole round of discussions between the students and seniors (PhD and PostDoc students) ; we read each and every paper carefully along with identifying the problem statement in each paper, the related works in the dimension and the solution proposed to solve the problem. We then identify strong and weak points in each paper which is of course the tough part and is the determining criteria whether to accept or reject the paper.<br /><br />This whole activity although time-consuming and cumbersome offers a lot to learn specially for students like me since you are in shoes of a reviewer who reads papers you submit to conferences. You are reminded of the do's and dont's while submitting your own paper and this is the entire point of this activity. Reading the papers makes you learn how to write a good paper by following some essential guidelines and keeping in mind the mistakes you should not do at all.<br /><br />Most importantly the effort that goes into the review process of these credible and prestigious conferences is what Computer Science community in Pakistan should learn from..........these days there is a whole "blogging" boom with bloggers considering themselves extremely credible about which I also <a href="http://arjumand-atif.blogspot.com/2010/04/is-blogging-really-something-to-brag.html">wrote and criticized few days back</a>. The people who are related to Computer Science back in my home i.e. Pakistan and in other developing countries need to learn that credibility comes from published, reviewed and innovative work. At the end of the day Computer Science is a science and has to be treated like that, the technologists might be good in their respective fields but they lack the expertise needed to make a country prosper in the long run...............scientists are needed to create technologies of the future and this is what matters when it comes to real development of a country.<br /><br />I wrote a quick post to voice out my concerns for the betterment of Computer Science in developing countries and now back to review job as writing the review is another tough part of the job which I have yet to finish.Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-64796061937136202992010-05-28T06:44:00.001-07:002010-05-31T10:47:31.661-07:00Python and C++ Integration TutorialToday I am going to write for the wonderful Python community out there, beauty of open-source is the huge community and help that they provide to each other through blogs, forums, mailing lists etc. So after my struggle with Python and C++ few days ago I planned to write this post to help those who may be struggling with a similar problem.<br /><br />Although Python is such a great programming language in which you can do almost anything as I mentioned in my previous post but when it comes to performance and efficiency C/C++ has no competitor. So there are times especially for large-scale systems where performance cannot be sacrificed and you have to resort to C/C++ but oh no!!! Most of your source code is already in Python.........so what now?? Well not to worry. Another great thing about Python is the concept of extending it using C/C++ and that's exactly what I did. But it's easier said than done.<br /><br />Calling C from Python is relatively easy but calling C++ is the real headache so I am sharing how to do it for any programmer that needs it, I had a tough time due to lack of proper tutorials on the subject and this also motivated me to write one :)<br /><br />The sample class that we use here is Employee and we will use its data members and methods in Python. You can download the complete code <a href="http://unhp.com.pk/programmingResources/sample_code.zip">here</a>.<br /><br />In the Employee.cpp file there is a piece of code that does the actual work, Python can call C functions with Python C API and hence its necessary to provide C extensions by keyword extern, here is the code that does it:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-family:arial;font-size:78%;"><b>extern "C" {<br /> Employee* Employee_new(){ return new Employee(); }<br /> void Employee_promote(Employee* emp){ emp->promote(); }<br /> void Employee_demote(Employee* emp){ emp->demote(); }<br /> void Employee_hire(Employee* emp){ emp->hire(); }<br /> void Employee_fire(Employee* emp){ emp->fire(); } <br /> void Employee_display(Employee* emp){ emp->display(); }<br /> void Employee_setFirstName(Employee* emp,char* inFirstName){ emp->setFirstName(inFirstName); }<br /> void Employee_setLastName(Employee* emp,char* inLastName){ emp->setLastName(inLastName); }<br /> void Employee_setEmployeeNumber(Employee* emp,int inEmployeeNumber){ emp->setEmployeeNumber(inEmployeeNumber); }<br /> void Employee_setSalary(Employee* emp,int inNewSalary){ emp->setSalary(inNewSalary); }<br />}</b><br /></span><br />In the code the return type of all methods is void, the constructor must have the form ClassName*...........the tough part is when you have methods that take arguments and I had quite a tough time figuring that out due to lack of tutorials on the subject. The way to do it is like this, within the extern block write the method signature as before but after the object you should have the parameter types in the signature as shown here: void Employee_setFirstName(Employee* emp,char* inFirstName){ emp->setFirstName(inFirstName); }<br /><br />Now the library generation part, here's how to do it in g++<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">g++ -c -fPIC Employee.cpp -o Employee.o</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">g++ -shared -Wl,-soname,libEmployee.so -o libEmployee.so Employee.o</span><br /><br />This will generate the dll libEmployee.so (you can give it any name of your choice) and then it can be easily called in Python. Here is an example of Python code calling a C++ class, marvelous:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;font-size:78%;">from ctypes import cdll<br />lib = cdll.LoadLibrary('./libEmployee.so')<br /><br />class Employee(object):<br /> def __init__(self):<br /> self.obj = lib.Employee_new()<br /><br /> def EmployeeTest(self):<br /> lib.Employee_setFirstName(self.obj,"Marni")<br /> lib.Employee_setLastName(self.obj,"Kleper")<br /> lib.Employee_setEmployeeNumber(self.obj,71)<br /> lib.Employee_setSalary(self.obj,50000)<br /> lib.Employee_promote(self.obj)<br /> lib.Employee_promote(self.obj)<br /> lib.Employee_hire(self.obj)<br /> lib.Employee_display(self.obj)<br /><br />emp=Employee()<br />emp.EmployeeTest()</span><br /><br />So ctypes does the trick and makes it quite simple........there are also other alternatives such as Boost and Swig which I have not yet explored but will do in near future as I have to work with Python and C++ for my research work for MS thesis. So stay tuned for more.Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-56099760419870031592010-05-14T04:47:00.000-07:002010-05-14T08:22:50.835-07:00The Python ExperienceToday I will write an introductory post on Python, few days back a student said to me, "Python must be hard" and she is the main reason why I came up with this post.<div><br /></div><div>In one phrase I would say that Python is the best of both worlds because it is capable of delivering the power of traditional compiled languages like C, C++ and the ease of use and simplicity of scripting, interpreted languages like Perl, Tcl. In the world of Python imagination literally becomes the limit for the programmer.</div><div><br /></div><div>Few people know that Python is used for major tasks by companies like Google, Yahoo!, NASA, Red Hat, Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks. In fact today what we see as Yahoo! mail was the Rocketmail Web-based email service and it was designed in Python. Today many universities are planning to use Python to teach introduction to programming so that students can focus on problem-solving skills instead of being bogged down by the difficulty of the language and some including MIT have even started to do so.</div><div><br /></div><div>So here goes for the students back in Pakistan the basic features of Python which make it so appealing and powerful:</div><div><br /></div><div><ul><li>Of course it is a <b>high-level</b> language, its beauty lies in its higher-level data structures that reduce the development time marginally.</li><li>Python has support for <b>object-oriented</b> programming, in fact it is an object-oriented language all the way down to its core.</li><li>With python the code is <b>compact</b> and that's also the beauty of it. Python is often compared to batch or Unix shell scripting languages. But with them there is little code-reusability and you are confined to small projects with shell scripts. In fact, even small projects may lead to large and unwieldy scripts. Not so with Python, where you can grow your code from project to project, add other new or existing Python elements, and reuse code at your whim. </li><li>Python's <b>portability</b> is also what makes it the most widely used programming language today, it can be found on a variety of systems. Python is written in C and due to C's portability Python is available on practically every platform that has an ANSI C compiler.</li><li>Python is extremely <b>easy to learn</b> and students can grasp it very quickly so I would certainly recommend to many students reading this post and if you need any sort of help feel free to contact me.</li><li>Python's code is very <b>easy to read</b> so much so that even a reader who has not ever seen a single line of Python will begin to understand and read the code instantaneously.</li><li>Python code is extremely <b>easy to maintain</b> and if you review a piece of code you wrote some months back you will be able to grasp it in no time.</li><li>Python is <b>robust</b> to errors. Python provides "safe and sane" exits on errors and when your Python crashes due to errors, the interpreter dumps out a "stack trace" full of useful information such as why your program crashed and where in the code (file name, line number, function call, etc.) the error took place. These errors are known as exceptions. Python even gives you the ability to monitor for errors and take an evasive course of action if such an error does occur during runtime. These exception handlers can take steps such as defusing the problem, redirecting program flow, perform cleanup or maintenance measures, shutting down the application gracefully, or just ignoring it. In any case, the debugging part of the development cycle is reduced considerably. </li><li>Now comes the one great thing I simply love about Python:<b> numerous external libraries</b> have already been developed for Python, so whatever your application is, someone may have traveled down that road before. All you need to do is "plug-and-play". There are Python modules and packages that can do practically anything from natural language processing in NLTK to scientific computing and everything you can imagine. In Python if you cannot find what you need chances are high that there is a third-party module or package that can do the job.</li><li>Python has its own <b>memory manager</b>, the thing that makes C and C++ extremely burdensome is that memory management is the responsibility of developer: the programmer has to take care of dirty tasks of memory management no matter what but with Python this headache is gone.</li><li>Python is classified as an <b>interpreted</b> language. However traditionally purely interpreted languages are almost always slower than compiled languages because execution does not take place in a system's native binary language. But like Java in reality Python is <b>byte-compiled</b> i.e. results in an intermediate form closer to machine language. This improves Python's performance while allowing it to retain the advantages of interpreted languages.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></li></ul></div><div>So dear students I would certainly recommend all of you to do give it a go at Python as in the long run it will really benefit you.</div><div><br /></div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-54577198867737928512010-05-11T00:38:00.001-07:002010-05-11T00:51:56.345-07:00Is Search Really Dead??<div>Gone are the days when I had to go through newspaper sites or search engines to find out the result of a late night match that I could not watch the previous night.........today all I do is just login to my Facebook account and there it is it: the latest news right before me. So where are we heading towards?</div><div><br /></div><div>This post is a little glimpse into the future of information retrieval: yes today I have decided to throw some light on my research area but not from too much of a technical standpoint but from an interesting standpoint which opens a whole new area of research. The area and concept is becoming so important that a special panel was devoted to this discussion in this year's <a href="http://www2010.org/">WWW 2010 conference</a> at Raleigh, USA. WWW Conference is the world's most renowned platform for WWW researchers and the theme was "Search is dead." The panel comprised of the following people:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://research.yahoo.com/Andrei_Broder">Andrei Broder</a> – Fellow and VP, Search & Computational Advertising, Yahoo! Research.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/">Marti Hearst</a> – Professor, School of Information, University of California-Berkeley.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.barneypell.com/">Barney Pell</a> – Partner, Search Strategist for Bing, Microsoft.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.tomkinshome.com/andrew">Andrew Tomkins</a> – Director of Engineering at Google Research.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://research.yahoo.com/Prabhakar_Raghavan">Prabhakar Raghavan</a> – (Co-organizer and Moderator) Head, Yahoo! Labs .</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://elizabethchurchill.com/">Elizabeth Churchill</a> – (Co-organizer) Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo! Research.</div><div><br /></div><div>If I have to sum up the discussion in one line it is "Search as we traditionally know it is already dead!!!!"</div><div><br /></div><div>Already user expectations from search engines are changing, the traditional task of typing in a query and being offered 10 blue links in response now amounts to a failure.Completeness is the key here: users want search engines to incorporate all the incredible level of richness that is available these days as today there is much more diverse data sources and presentations than links to web pages. So with the user needs getting "weird" and the search business competition getting "fierce" we are at the doorstep of yet another information retrieval (IR) revolution after PageRank.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well it boils down to an important question: who is a key player in all this??? Any guesses??? Yes social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Orkut. <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/zuckerbergs-buildin-web-default-social/">Mark Zuckenberg's statement at Facebook's F8 Conference, "We are building a Web where the default is social"</a> throws a lot of light into this entire phenomenon and in particular the new Facebook Platform, crucial parts of which are the Open Graph and Social Plugin. Already as <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_14698296">statistics say</a> Facebook has surpassed Google in Internet traffic and this may be the beginning of the new revolution.</div><div><br /></div><div>So what's your say on it? Is the search really dead?? I will reserve my own thoughts on this for sometime :) and would love to hear from my readers.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the end a short video to throw some more light into this social media revolution:</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br /><center><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/lFZ0z5Fm-Ng&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/lFZ0z5Fm-Ng&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object></center>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6857842314311875399.post-90866538480081346742010-04-10T05:17:00.000-07:002010-04-10T07:07:30.351-07:00Is blogging really something to brag about?Today I was shocked at reading a debate on Facebook on whether the HP products are good or not. One argument really threw me in shock and then when I came out of that shock I landed into a worry. To some the comment may not come as a worry but if you look at it from an analytical viewpoint then it surely is a time of emergency for Computer Science in Pakistan, the comment was "I am a blogger and I write about HP!!!" Seemingly it is harmless but the authority with which it was said left me astonished.<div><div><br /></div><div>My astonishment comes from the level of significance these bloggers are claiming for themselves, fine you blog about stuff and you do have a voice in the news arena and your blog activities may be shaping minds of some people but does that mean that every word you write is credible and warrants acceptance. Your profession is what makes you credible, if you think that just blog posts are what matter then there would not have been any such thing as research value through publications and citations.</div><div><br /></div><div>It really bothers me to see the state of Computer Science in Pakistan and what's more disappointing is the attitude of the people in the field. They do not even realize where their ignorant and arrogant attitude is going to take the country and on being corrected they strike back with more arrogance and ignorance.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am afraid that if this trend is carried on it will lead us to a mere consumer society which we already are, here I have my Professors working on mining and analyzing the blogosphere; and back there we just have people content in writing blogs so we are just the data for researches of the future. </div><div><br /></div><div>Things really have to change and they have to change fast!!!</div></div>Arjumandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03679172506796211394noreply@blogger.com3