European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) 2009 in Padua

I have been on a Summer School about Information Retrieval in Padua last week - ESSIR 2009. In general it was awesome. I met many interesting people, had a lot of fun and also gathered some input concerning my current work. Most of the talks were excellent and really led me to some new insights about Information retrieval in

general.

Talks I liked most - no special order or distinction between quality (or my interests in the topic) of the talk:

• The User in Interactive Information Retrieval Evaluation - Peter Ingwersen
• Information Retrieval in Context - Ian Ruthven
• Web Mining and Next-Generation Search - Aristides Gionis
• Indexing Techniques - Mark Sanderson

Here are some pics:

  

 

There are also some more pics at flickr.

JSLint with Eclipse

Some simple steps to check your JavaScript Code with JSLint:

1. download and install JSRhino
2. make it somehow available, e.g. create a js.bat (one line: java -jar "path/to/rhino/js.jar" %* ) 
3. download JSLint and put it in some folder, e.g. /path/to/jslint.js
4. Add an external tool configuration in Eclipse:

   Location: path/to/js.bat

   Working Directory: ${workspace_loc}

   Arguments: path/to/jslint.js ${resource_loc}

5. you can now check your JavaScript code with JSLint by calling this external tool.

Enjoy.

P.S.: There is a very interessting talk by Douglas Crockford  (creator of JSON and JSLint) at google tech talk that highlights the good and bad aspects of JavaScript. I liked that a lot.

This is just a test post

Windows Live Writer is just awesome to publish to your blog.

I like that picture.

Clay Shirky about television and somehow waste of time

This is a talk of Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008.

He explains in a very entertaining way (in short) that people in the current generation watch too much tv and that in the time e.g. the people in US sit in front of their tv the whole wikipipedia could be written a many thousand times.

The new generation seems to use the media in a more active way. They write blog post and are more active in stating their opinion.

A quote:
TV Reporter: Where do people find all the time to do wikipedia?
Clay Shirky: No one who works in TV gets to ask that question.
You know where the times comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you have been masking for the last 50 years.


P.S.
Clay Shirky is known not only to the "tagging world" for his widely-read blog post with the title: "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags". Tom Gruber refers to this post in an often cited article: "Ontology of Folksonomy: A Mash-up of Apples and Oranges". But that is an other story...

Moday after Nepomuk Summerschool

Today was my first day after the nepomuk summerschool in Malta.
It was great to meet all this interesting individuals and to exchange thoughts and experiences related to semantic web technologies. People were mostly from europe but also two guys from usa and brazil attended the school.

Experimenting with user interface design techniques was one of the things I liked most. And of course the mini project we did where really fun. My team also won a small price for our mini project with the name "chatomuk" ;-)