OK, those of you who have heard me complain loudly about not being able to load up my Creative Zen player (the generic version, not the vision) may be pleased to know that I’ve finally resolved the issue. To back up for a second, here was the bad behaviour… I connected my zen to an [...]

Since it had been a while, I figured it might be a nice change to read something completely unrelated to my work or school, to refresh the spirit. Which I think was achieved. The book is typical Dickens in it’s esoteric vocabulary, but I tend to like that kind of reading material anyway. I was surprised at how I managed to get through high school and college without reading it though – I believe my curriculum must have substituted another of Dickens’ works in its stead.

You may or not be aware that the SGI-USA site has, for a long time now, provided the “Daily Wisdom: From the Writings of Nichiren Daishonin” perpetual calendar online. It’s a set of daily inspirational quotes taken from the Gosho. I love it, I have the hardcopy that you can buy at the SGI-USA mail [...]

Someone (could not hear the name) talked about using social network analysis in the context of online auctions. Ignoring the complexity of the multiple different type of auctions that he mentioned (english v. dutch, etc), it was interesting to me, since it has elements of covert networks, particularly the game that the banned auctioneers are [...]

A review of:
Memon, N.; Hicks, D.L.; Larsen, H.L., “Harvesting Terrorists Information from Web,” Information Visualization, 2007. IV ’07. 11th International Conference , vol., no., pp.664-671, 4-6 July 2007

Today we talked about Casey’s non-cooperative game model for P2P networks, (using bittorrent as a specific example).  In a non-cooperative context, we talked about incentives to prevent leechers and promote sharing.  MessageReaper has the same need for incentives (the current model is based on past history) that reward current activities (like reputation). We also talked [...]

Review of:
Sharan, U. and Neville, J. 2007. Exploiting time-varying relationships in statistical relational models. In Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis (San Jose, California, August 12 – 12, 2007). WebKDD/SNA-KDD ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 9-15.

A review of:
Liben-Nowell, D. and Kleinberg, J. 2003. The link prediction problem for social networks. In Proceedings of the Twelfth international Conference on information and Knowledge Management (New Orleans, LA, USA, November 03 – 08, 2003). CIKM ’03. ACM, New York, NY, 556-559.

This totally rocks! A petition to have the old Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon series released on DVD. http://www.petitiononline.com/thundarr/petition.html

Today we mostly checked in about the status of our projects. Professor Wu did mention that Professor Vemuri (retired from LLNL) is interested in terrorism applications and I might want to write him a note to express interest in that area. We also had a lengthy discussion about privacy (and inference) in social networking. In [...]

A review of:
Watts, Duncan J.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan; Newman, M. E. J., 2002. “Identity and Search in Social Networks”. Science, Volume 296, Issue 5571, pp. 1302-1305.

A review of:
Morselli, Carlo, Petit, Katia and Giguère, Cynthia, 2006. “The Efficiency/Security Trade-off in Criminal Networks“.

Journal of project discussion section meeting (teleconference) taking place on 07 May 2008.

I am speechless.  Well, almost.  One of those R2D2 toys, hacked to be a dvd projector…  Sweet!

A review of “Uncloaking Terrorist Networks” by Valdis Krebs.

I started twittering a little while ago, just for the fun of it, partially as a result of being forced to keep a research journal.  After a while, I discovered the firefox extension, TwitterFox, and the integration application on Facebook that allows twitters to replace your “current activity” microblog in your profile.  But then I [...]

Today we talked about link prediction, anti-social (covert) networks, and an intriguing idea to use the FOAF project to bridge multiple online social networks (or improve search within them).

This is my blog, technorati…

I’ve had intermittent problems with my sound card in Fedora 7, since the beginning. Come to find out, it was my frigging webcam instead, or so I believe at this point.

Today we talked about deliverables for the project and what the various teams are looking at doing this quarter.