Posts Tagged ‘initiative’

Applications are invited for the position of “Post-doctoral Research Fellow” as part of a joint research project between the Masdar Institute of Science& Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project’s Principal Investigators are:

• Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Masdar Institute& MIT (www.mit.edu/~irahwan)
• Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT (http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy)

The successful candidate will work on a collaborative interdisciplinary research project. The project , titled “Influencing Collective Human Behavior Using Distributed Intelligent Systems,” aims to help people use resources more efficiently. The project will have (1) a theoretical component focusing on game-theoretic and incentive mechanism design issues, and (2) an empirical component to test these techniques in behavioral experiments using lab experiments and real deployment through mobile computing and sensor technologies.

For further details, please see: http://www.mit.edu/~irahwan/docs/20100529_postdoc_advert.pdf

SA-REST is a simple and open microformat for enhancing Web resources with additional semantic information. In addition to HTML and XHTML, the SA-REST approach can also be used to enrich Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. SA-REST is one of several open microformat standards.

Although mashups fully embrace the idea of customization on the Web, read-write is another story. The complexity of application development using Javascript makes it hard for average developers to create new mashups and to customize the existing ones. To solve this problem, several companies are developing tools for mashup creation that require little or no programming knowledge. These tools, exemplified by Yahoo! pipes, IBM’s QEDwiki and Google’s Mashup Editor, facilitate the selection of some number of RESTful Web services or other Web resources and chain them together by piping one service’s output into the next service’s input while filtering content and making slight format changes.

SA-REST is a microformat to add additional meta-data to (but not limited to) REST API descriptions in HTML and XHTML. Developers can directly embed meta-data from various models such an ontology, taxonomy or a tag cloud into their API descriptions. The embedded meta-data can be used to improve search (for example: perform faceted search for APIs), data mediation (in conjunction with XML annotation) as well as help in easier integration of services to create mashups.

SA-REST submission to W3C can be found here: http://www.w3.org/Submission/SA-REST/

More information about SA-REST can be found here: http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/SA-REST

The Annotations feature will give developers much more flexibility around the context of a tweet. The feature will allow developers to “add any arbitrary metadata to any tweet in the system.” So, just like a tweet can today be transmitted along with information about which other tweet it was in reply to, or what location it came from, or what application it was created on, now Twitter will allow developers to make up new stuff. Twitter is looking to see how developers use Annotations before it creates any sort of taxonomy for them.

Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content.

You can find all the information about Twitter Annotations at groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce/browse_thread/thread/fa5da2608865453?pli=1

What do you think about this upcoming feature? What would be the potential of semantically tagging tweets using Common Tags, for example, instead of hastags? Leave your comments below to start the discussion

Bueda increases the value of rich media and user-generated content via its innovative semantic analysis engine. Leveraging research from Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, Bueda combines user-generated tags, existing ontologies, and semantic analysis in order to provide publishers with actionable information that can be used for content categorization, targeted advertising, content recommendation and search engine optimization. Via Bueda’s API, any UGC website can have access to the latest technology for tag disambiguation and cleanup with minimal integration hurdles.

Tags are increasingly used to organize user generated content. They give the users the freedom to tag their content with the words that make sense to them making it easier to find their own content. Unfortunately, different words are used for the same things and it is very common to find tags that are missing spaces, have typos, and are redundant or not informative. A publisher with tags of this sort is unable to connect content properly or target advertising effectively. Tags enriched by Bueda can provide not only a better overall user experience but can increase revenue generated from user content.

The Bueda API can transform noisy and redundant tags into back clean, normalized tags, with a breakdown of the semantic concepts represented in the tags. This means that your users still have the freedom of tags, and you still get the benefits of neatly categorized and curated content.

The result is happier users, a better user experience and more revenue.

The Bueda API is currently in private beta.

You can find all the info and even a demo at the Bueda website:  http://www.bueda.com

ViewChange.org is using the power of the latest Web technology to make videos, articles, blogs, and actions readily available to people working in global development. While watching high-impact video stories on the site, viewers can choose to dig deeper by exploring up-to-date details on which organizations are involved, links to related content, and lists of relevant actions they can take.

For example, imagine you are watching a short documentary about clean water issues in India. As the video plays, adjacent windows will dynamically generate links to actions and media directly related to each scene. These could include organizations involved in clean water and sanitation, action campaigns related to water issues, relevant videos from YouTube, articles from research organizations, and the latest updates from news services and blogs.

The site will automatically create these links using semantic Web tools. Rather than simply scanning for keywords, this new technology also analyzes context and meaning to find the most relevant results from all the latest information and links available. It will also employ the Linked Data model, which assigns unique identifier tags to specific “entities” and organizes data in ways that can be read and understood by other applications. This allows the site to easily differentiate whether the word “Sahara” is being used to refer to the desert in North Africa or a hotel-casino in Las Vegas, and to communicate about the correct topic with other websites that hold related information.

By tapping into the semantic Web, the Linked Data model, and partner APIs, ViewChange.org is taking the latest advances in online technology and harnessing them for social change.

LinkTV created the working model for ViewChange.org by fostering relationships with semantic technology innovators such as OpenCalais and Zemanta. They are also actively experimenting with the open APIs of sites like YouTube and Kiva.org.

Link TV’s long-term Web development partner Definition is responsible for building the platform and will utilize Freebase, Zemanta, OpenCalais, and other APIs help to provide an innovative customizable user experience.

In addition, ViewChange.org will feature an open API, inviting third-party sites and developers to create applications and pages fueled by our content. This API will feed into the Linked Data model. The code behind the platform will be made freely available.