刚刚接到他电话，称他找到工作了！真心替他高兴！
这几个月，虽然他每天乐呵呵的，可想想都知道，他背负着多么大的压力。自费来美国上学，毕业几个月了一直在找工作。或许几度萌生退意，终于咬牙坚持下来。如今如愿找到工作，可以继续在美国发展，还有什么比这个更让人高兴的呢！
高兴之余，我竟忍不住哭了。这是我在美国最好的朋友啊！他找到工作了，也意味着他也要走了。几个月前想到他要毕业要走，心里就挺难过的。结果他工作迟迟未定，这事也就放下了，似乎忘记了他迟早要先走这事。每周嘻嘻哈哈吃饭打牌不亦乐乎。如今这一天突然就来了…
祝福你吧，我的好兄弟。假以时日，你肯定会成大事！
10/17/2014
7/21/2014
Yo? Yo!
I read an article recently that top managers of Tencent such as Ma Huateng invested in Yo, a plain mobile app. It is really astonishing that such a boring app could involve so many users and raise so much investment. It is said to be launched on April Fool's day as a joke, and it turned out to be so popular. Basically, it could do nothing but send your friends a signal 'Yo!' So if you miss your boyfriend, you send him a 'Yo!'; if you try to wake up someone, you continuously send him 'Yo!'... You can send a "Yo!" whenever you want to draw attention without saying anything.
The phenomenon raises two questions: 1. why people like it? 2. Why business invests in it?
That people like it seems to indicate a trend that the social media is getting lighter. From long blogs to 140-character-limit Twitter, and to the no-word-at-all Yo, people are getting lazier in typing and outputting. It is like a hand wave or a 'hi' greeting in real life; people do not need to say anything essential to appear friendly. However, I doubt how far people would go with it as they cannot customize their message. Sometimes people do want to chat after greetings, right? Maybe the function should be integrated into an IM app, say, by tapping the portrait of a friend, you send him a "Yo"? Isn't it similar to QQ's function ‘shaking your friend'?
Then why business is optimistic about it? The article I read contributes it to the notification system. Yo has the potential to take over the notification system of the cell phone. Indeed, the notification is the first see when a phone is waked. The notification is able to push key information to the user. For instance, markets could push sales information by sending a 'Yo'. It is like a horn signal or a sales banner in reality. The signal succeeds to convey the necessary information without requiring response. This is important as it does not necessarily interrupt the user's on-going activity. The idea is similar to activity awareness. On the one hand, you need to keep your collaborators aware of your activity; on the other hand, you do not want to be interruptive. The design of notification is part of the design of technological support of activity awareness.
I forgot to mention that we moved into our new home last week. It is a two-floor townhouse, with two bedrooms. This place is really perfect for us, and for our coming baby. We put a lot of efforts in designing and decorating our new home. Actually we should enjoy the process much more than the result itself. To design is to imagine the sweet scene we will be in the future. This is, perhaps, similar to the design of technology.
The phenomenon raises two questions: 1. why people like it? 2. Why business invests in it?
That people like it seems to indicate a trend that the social media is getting lighter. From long blogs to 140-character-limit Twitter, and to the no-word-at-all Yo, people are getting lazier in typing and outputting. It is like a hand wave or a 'hi' greeting in real life; people do not need to say anything essential to appear friendly. However, I doubt how far people would go with it as they cannot customize their message. Sometimes people do want to chat after greetings, right? Maybe the function should be integrated into an IM app, say, by tapping the portrait of a friend, you send him a "Yo"? Isn't it similar to QQ's function ‘shaking your friend'?
Then why business is optimistic about it? The article I read contributes it to the notification system. Yo has the potential to take over the notification system of the cell phone. Indeed, the notification is the first see when a phone is waked. The notification is able to push key information to the user. For instance, markets could push sales information by sending a 'Yo'. It is like a horn signal or a sales banner in reality. The signal succeeds to convey the necessary information without requiring response. This is important as it does not necessarily interrupt the user's on-going activity. The idea is similar to activity awareness. On the one hand, you need to keep your collaborators aware of your activity; on the other hand, you do not want to be interruptive. The design of notification is part of the design of technological support of activity awareness.
I forgot to mention that we moved into our new home last week. It is a two-floor townhouse, with two bedrooms. This place is really perfect for us, and for our coming baby. We put a lot of efforts in designing and decorating our new home. Actually we should enjoy the process much more than the result itself. To design is to imagine the sweet scene we will be in the future. This is, perhaps, similar to the design of technology.
6/30/2013
Doctoral Workshop in Seattle
This is a three-day workshop in Seattle about the NSF funded program on social computational systems (SoCS). It is actually a PI meeting, but has some sessions to give feedback to doctoral students. Amazingly, it is my first workshop in my academic life, and it has been a really good start.
It's my first time to Seattle. Long before coming to USA, I've learnt the beauty and charm of Seattle. There is nothing thrilling in this city, but its quietness is attractive enough for people to live there for a whole life.
I gave a poster presentation on the first and second day. It's about some preliminary design features to meet challenges of online geodeliberation. It was my first time doing a poster presentation, and it was really challenging. Although poster presentation is more informal than presentation, it doesn't mean it is less challenging. The real purpose of poster presentation is not really report your work, but to rise people's interest in your work, and give a vivid talk about the importance of your work and the challenges you are facing. Also people tend to move around, you need to give them a quick overview of your work, rather than go into too much detail. It may always be frustrating to restart over again as new set of people are joining, so sometimes don't hurry to talk from the very begin. Sometimes you can wait till they ask you some questions and jump directly to that point. Of course you have to keep the balance.
The workshop is a great opportunity for me as I met many professors and students (from University of Washington, MIT, harvad, Ohio State, Oregon State, Virginia Tech, etc. )who are working on social computing, which seems a very promising direction. Many are utilizing social media data (e.g. twitter data) to identify interesting patterns, using data mining techniques. Another popular topic is crowdsourcing, which takes advantage of the power of the public.
As a professor summarized, computer scientists always try to think of solutions to a problem, while social scientists devote themselves to better understanding of the problem, and we working on social computing try to bridge the gap, and always start with people, observe their current practices and identify how their behavior could be improved and facilitated, and design technology to support meet those challenges.
Finally I'd like to put a word I learnt from the workshop:
It's my first time to Seattle. Long before coming to USA, I've learnt the beauty and charm of Seattle. There is nothing thrilling in this city, but its quietness is attractive enough for people to live there for a whole life.
I gave a poster presentation on the first and second day. It's about some preliminary design features to meet challenges of online geodeliberation. It was my first time doing a poster presentation, and it was really challenging. Although poster presentation is more informal than presentation, it doesn't mean it is less challenging. The real purpose of poster presentation is not really report your work, but to rise people's interest in your work, and give a vivid talk about the importance of your work and the challenges you are facing. Also people tend to move around, you need to give them a quick overview of your work, rather than go into too much detail. It may always be frustrating to restart over again as new set of people are joining, so sometimes don't hurry to talk from the very begin. Sometimes you can wait till they ask you some questions and jump directly to that point. Of course you have to keep the balance.
The workshop is a great opportunity for me as I met many professors and students (from University of Washington, MIT, harvad, Ohio State, Oregon State, Virginia Tech, etc. )who are working on social computing, which seems a very promising direction. Many are utilizing social media data (e.g. twitter data) to identify interesting patterns, using data mining techniques. Another popular topic is crowdsourcing, which takes advantage of the power of the public.
As a professor summarized, computer scientists always try to think of solutions to a problem, while social scientists devote themselves to better understanding of the problem, and we working on social computing try to bridge the gap, and always start with people, observe their current practices and identify how their behavior could be improved and facilitated, and design technology to support meet those challenges.
Finally I'd like to put a word I learnt from the workshop:
"I alone can't change the world, but I can throw a stone across water to create many ripples".
― Mother Teresa
1/31/2013
GIS as Communication Tool
Previously I viewed GIS as more of a professional tool -- although I tries to turn it into commercial use by common people. GIS was used in the context of one person, one computer. The user take advantage of GIS to make spatial analysis. I believe that is largely why GIS has long been targeted to experts only.
In fact, another big facility of GIS is to serve as a communication tool, among a group of people, or even a whole community, in addressing a spatial issue. The difference between the two uses of GIS is data. In the first case, data has been collected from various sources (often in large amount), and ready to be cleaned and analyzed. In contrast, in the communication context, data is originally stored in user's mind. As he describes his spatial proposition or spatial experience, he either sketches a map or makes reference to a spatial feature. In other word, the map is dynamically created, and is dynamically changing.
The communication problem is actually a problem of information flow. In a situation of two-people dialogue, information flows from one participant's mind to a physical or digital information carrier (often a map in spatial issue), and from the information carrier to the other participant's mind. The process involves the translation from spatial mental model to system conceptual model, and again from conceptual model to mental model. There are two difficulties in the translation: 1) how to minimize the loss of information; 2) how to keep information on the receiver end as consistent as possible as that on the sender end.
The problem becomes even more complex when the social scale becomes larger, to a community, for example. People of various backgrounds are involved in discussion. As they make spatial reasoning and deliberation, they communicate their spatial proposals, assertions, comments, and arguments, which form a large reservoir of information. Furthermore, different pieces of information is highly related to each other. This relation might be linguistic structure, topic embedding, or spatial related. How to keep management of the complex structure of information is worth considering.
According to Walton and Krabbe's typology, human dialogues can be categorized into six: information-seeking, inquiry, persuasion, negotiation, deliberation, and eristic dialogues. Each type of dialogue bears different characteristics, and requires different GIS model.
GIS as a communication tool can be a very promising direction, which involves multiple disciplines like linguistics, social science, cognition science, HCI, etc.
In fact, another big facility of GIS is to serve as a communication tool, among a group of people, or even a whole community, in addressing a spatial issue. The difference between the two uses of GIS is data. In the first case, data has been collected from various sources (often in large amount), and ready to be cleaned and analyzed. In contrast, in the communication context, data is originally stored in user's mind. As he describes his spatial proposition or spatial experience, he either sketches a map or makes reference to a spatial feature. In other word, the map is dynamically created, and is dynamically changing.
The communication problem is actually a problem of information flow. In a situation of two-people dialogue, information flows from one participant's mind to a physical or digital information carrier (often a map in spatial issue), and from the information carrier to the other participant's mind. The process involves the translation from spatial mental model to system conceptual model, and again from conceptual model to mental model. There are two difficulties in the translation: 1) how to minimize the loss of information; 2) how to keep information on the receiver end as consistent as possible as that on the sender end.
The problem becomes even more complex when the social scale becomes larger, to a community, for example. People of various backgrounds are involved in discussion. As they make spatial reasoning and deliberation, they communicate their spatial proposals, assertions, comments, and arguments, which form a large reservoir of information. Furthermore, different pieces of information is highly related to each other. This relation might be linguistic structure, topic embedding, or spatial related. How to keep management of the complex structure of information is worth considering.
According to Walton and Krabbe's typology, human dialogues can be categorized into six: information-seeking, inquiry, persuasion, negotiation, deliberation, and eristic dialogues. Each type of dialogue bears different characteristics, and requires different GIS model.
GIS as a communication tool can be a very promising direction, which involves multiple disciplines like linguistics, social science, cognition science, HCI, etc.
12/28/2012
Some reflections on reading a paper
The first semester in PSU has ended. One of the best lessons I've learnt is how to read and review a paper. There are two papers that serve as a guidance:
Fong, P. W. L. (2009). Reading a computer science research paper. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 41(2), 138. doi:10.1145/1595453.1595493;
Smith, a. J. (1990). The task of the referee. Computer, 23(4), 65–71. doi:10.1109/2.55470
The reading process can be divided into three tasks: comprehension, evaluation, and synthesis. The latter is dependent on the former and requires deeper understanding of the paper.
To fully comprehend paper in the shortest time, read the paper asking yourself four questions:
1. What is the research problem? Around this problem, motivation of the research may be addressed. Possible situations may include: there is some weakness in existing research approaches; there is some crisis in the current research field; or the paper challenges the existing research paradigm.
2. What are the claimed contribution of the paper? Try to find something new in the paper. The new thing may include:
- a new question,
- a new understanding of an existing research problem,
- a new methodology,
- a new algorithm,
- a new proof technique,
- a new formalism or notation,
- a new evidence to substantiate or disprove a previously published claim,
- a new evaluation method, or
- a new research area.
3. How the paper substantiates the claim? A paper becomes scientific only if it is strongly supported, or it becomes a mere opinion. To support the authors' claim, some methodology must be used, which may include:
- theorems
- experiments
- data analyses
- simulations
- user studies
- case studies
- examples
4. What are the conclusions? What are the lessons learnt from the paper?
Most often, all the four components can be found in the abstract and introduction sections. When writing an article ourselves, we should also make them explicit in the two sections.
Evaluation goes along with each component. Ask yourself the following questions:
1. Is the research problem significant? Does the work enable practical applications, deepen understanding, or explore new design space?
2. Are the contributions significant? Are the author simply repeating the state of the art? Are the authors aware of the relation of their work to existing literature? Are there any real surprises?
3. Are the claims valid? Has the right theorem been used? Any errors in proofs? What assumptions are made? Comparing apples and oranges? Experimental setup problems?
Synthesis requires to think beyond the paper. Some questions can be asked after reading the paper:
1. What are the alternative way to substantiate the claim?
2. Is there any good argument against the case made by the author (contention)?
3. Can the research results be strengthened?
4. Can the research results be extended to other contexts?
5. Is there any relationship between this paper with other literature?
11/15/2012
师兄毕业了
今天是师兄的毕业答辩。积累了6年，要在短短1小时内说清楚，中间还不停地被老师打断，真的很不容易。
师兄做的问题很大，很复杂，但也很实用。大致讲的是promote collaborative awareness。回顾6年，按时空划分，他做过same time & same place 的 collaboration，different time & different place 的collaboration，而dissertation做的则是 same time & different place的collaboration。应用的场景例子是nuclear release的求援，涉及到一线救护员，人员指挥中心，资源调配中心，交通部门等等。如何让系统支持这些部门协同工作，有效地分配和共享信息，是迫切需要解决的问题。用的方法是event-driven based framework。
再看看自己的工作。三个功课，三个literature review。我计划分别做adaptive GIS, intention recognition, 和GIR的review。第一个基本已经做完，学到不少经验，一定要做好文献的整理，过段时间写一篇关于怎么读paper的心得。
师兄做的问题很大，很复杂，但也很实用。大致讲的是promote collaborative awareness。回顾6年，按时空划分，他做过same time & same place 的 collaboration，different time & different place 的collaboration，而dissertation做的则是 same time & different place的collaboration。应用的场景例子是nuclear release的求援，涉及到一线救护员，人员指挥中心，资源调配中心，交通部门等等。如何让系统支持这些部门协同工作，有效地分配和共享信息，是迫切需要解决的问题。用的方法是event-driven based framework。
再看看自己的工作。三个功课，三个literature review。我计划分别做adaptive GIS, intention recognition, 和GIR的review。第一个基本已经做完，学到不少经验，一定要做好文献的整理，过段时间写一篇关于怎么读paper的心得。
10/28/2012
地理与信息
今天读到两则有趣的报导。一则强调地理在当今信息时代重新显示出其重要性 (A sense of place, http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21565007-geography-matters-much-ever-despite-digital-revolution-says-patrick-lane)，另一则则表示地理优势在信息经济新时代已经越来越不明显 (亚马逊VS沃尔玛：信息经济时代零售霸主逆战，http://www.21cbr.com/html/topic/201210/28-10535.html）。
第一篇文章回顾了历史上对地理的三种看法。第一种是出现在90年代的end of geography。由于互联网的共享性，全世界任何一个角落的人理论上都能享受到共同的资源。在网络上不再有距离的概念（the death of distance)。第二种概念更加极端，认为网上的虚拟世界可以完全替代真实世界。我想这是在21世纪初随着SecondLife这样的cyberspace兴起时的思潮。在这样的虚拟世界里用户可以模拟现实生活中的几乎一切事情，甚至有自己的货币。然而这种想法被证明是不现实的，虚拟世界不可能脱离现实存在，比如虚拟的货币仍需要通过真实货币来兑换。
第三种认为现实世界会影响网上的行为。正如地学第一定律所述（Everything is related and things closer in space are more related），用户更关注身边的事 (local)。随着移动设备的普及和地理定位技术的成熟，企业提供这种local service成为可能。从这个角度讲，geography成为local business越来越重要的因素。
第二篇文章比较了亚马逊和沃尔玛两个零售业巨人。后者是传统的线下销售，前者是这个信息时代特有的产物。近年来亚马逊的营业额逐年上涨，剑指行业老大沃尔玛。沃尔玛通过数十年努力建成的由土地、建筑构成的实体网络正在遭遇前所未有的危机。网络商店的出现，让传统零售业的法宝 location, location, location显得不再那么重要。而目前，两家公司都采取着相似的战略：线上线下的有机结合。
曾经有人疑惑，网络到底需不需要有距离的概念？这涉及到一个问题，即地理到底应该在多大程度上与网络、与信息结合？这里面涉及一系列问题，包括人对（地理）信息的需求，人感知（地理）信息的偏好和习惯，（地理）信息系统如何满足人的认知习惯等等。作为地理信息科学的研究人员，我觉得我们的时代马上到来了。
第一篇文章回顾了历史上对地理的三种看法。第一种是出现在90年代的end of geography。由于互联网的共享性，全世界任何一个角落的人理论上都能享受到共同的资源。在网络上不再有距离的概念（the death of distance)。第二种概念更加极端，认为网上的虚拟世界可以完全替代真实世界。我想这是在21世纪初随着SecondLife这样的cyberspace兴起时的思潮。在这样的虚拟世界里用户可以模拟现实生活中的几乎一切事情，甚至有自己的货币。然而这种想法被证明是不现实的，虚拟世界不可能脱离现实存在，比如虚拟的货币仍需要通过真实货币来兑换。
第三种认为现实世界会影响网上的行为。正如地学第一定律所述（Everything is related and things closer in space are more related），用户更关注身边的事 (local)。随着移动设备的普及和地理定位技术的成熟，企业提供这种local service成为可能。从这个角度讲，geography成为local business越来越重要的因素。
第二篇文章比较了亚马逊和沃尔玛两个零售业巨人。后者是传统的线下销售，前者是这个信息时代特有的产物。近年来亚马逊的营业额逐年上涨，剑指行业老大沃尔玛。沃尔玛通过数十年努力建成的由土地、建筑构成的实体网络正在遭遇前所未有的危机。网络商店的出现，让传统零售业的法宝 location, location, location显得不再那么重要。而目前，两家公司都采取着相似的战略：线上线下的有机结合。
曾经有人疑惑，网络到底需不需要有距离的概念？这涉及到一个问题，即地理到底应该在多大程度上与网络、与信息结合？这里面涉及一系列问题，包括人对（地理）信息的需求，人感知（地理）信息的偏好和习惯，（地理）信息系统如何满足人的认知习惯等等。作为地理信息科学的研究人员，我觉得我们的时代马上到来了。
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