We are/were not alone in the universe?

"NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." Source:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html

Geotool by Flagfox

For a long time already I'm using Flagfox extension to Firefox to see where a server that hosts web pages I currently see is located. But by some reason I have not noticed such nice online tool from Flagfox developers:

http://geotool.flagfox.net/

The tool utilises GeoLite data created by MaxMind.

AAL Forum 2010 (Odense, Denmark)

Almost two weeks passed since a day I returned back from AAL Forum (Odense, Denmark). A few-pages report is finished, some mailing also (and some is to do) in those short intervals of time I seldom have (what else one can expect?:-) that are not very occupied. So, now I can drop few words of those memories I still have.

Organisation if the forum was very good. Some mess in the beginning (quite typical for such big events), but then – everything went smoothly and nice, great thanks to organisers, particularly to the Region of Southern Denmark.

I've attended to the Track F - Technology, Platforms, Standards, Interoperability. There were many interesting presentations, e.g. about Hydra Middleware Platform, I2HOME User Centric Design approach (worth to consider!), NetCarity, MPOWER, OASIS, PERSONA projects, etc. I consider the universAAL project presented by Joe Gorman from SINTEF, Norway, to be an important achievement of the ICT community (even behind the AAL domain). Many of well-known software platforms from given domain – that were developed under FP6, FP7, and AAL programmes – are considered in this project.

With a purpose to invite community's attention and involvement to their work, universAAL became to be a biggest founder of AALOA (AAL Open Association), which was presented by Francesco Furfari. AALOA is an open and free-to-join non-profit community for discussion of and contribution to AAL development in general and ubiquitous computing in particular. The community is not very big yet, but its ideas are so important that it have all the chances to grow. They have introduced the AALOA Manifesto that has so essential ideas and thus attractive ideas that those. If you are about reducing a number of fragmented and overlapping solutions and saving resources in development of technology platforms for serving people, the AALOA is something worth of attention at least.

It was also a pleasure to hear a speech of an inventor & futurist Ray Kurzweil: progress is exponential, it can be linear only on a short period; what will be a world when you finish a project?; revolutions to come; a role of a community and individuals, Singularity University… A slide-set is available at:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/pps/KurzweilPowerPoint/

 

Intel and Nokia – a big breakthrough into a future of 3D and virtuality

A significant step towards to a future of mobile has been officially taken at MWC 2010 when Intel and Nokia announced a merge of their Moblin and Maemo into MeeGo – probably the most promising of the existing mobile platforms. And now, just before an official presentation of Nokia N9 – the world's first MeeGo phone, this great news came up:

http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2010/08/23/intel-and-nokia-create-first-joint-laboratory

http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/08/24/intel-and-nokia-virtually-engaged/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NokiaConversations-Posts+%28Nokia+Conversations+-+Posts%29

 

Yes, Visual Computing, 3D interfaces and 3D Internet have to be available to any web-enabled device, and – essentially – to mobile devices as well.

Periodic Table of the HTML5 Elements

A nice table developed by Josh Duck I've found recently:

http://joshduck.com/periodic-table.html

And the most recent version of the HTML5
W3C Standard (currently it is the Working Draft) can be found here.

Old comment at MWI Team Blog

There aren't many tracks of my online activity since there is not much of it due to my busyness – but some still exist. Surprisingly found today that my old comment at MWI Team Blog is still alive:

http://www.w3.org/blog/MWITeam/2008/05/10/mobile_web_initiative_what_s_next

Nothing changed much since time of that comment as for its matter. Despite an effort of the W3C and other authorities, a fragmentation of devices and solutions has even been increased. Google´s Android is a rapidly growing platform that is intended to a large variety of devices, not to (smart)phones only. Microsoft as it seems does not recognise that desktop OS is not intended to tiny devices while their Windows Mobile 7 is far not revolutional. Browsers war continues (there is not any single browser exists at these days that can work properly with a content of 100% sites), and HTML 5 will not have a strong affect on it (since this is not the only technology used for web site development). Even more, in order to solve all the known problems (including those described here) it will require an effort from all the Web stakeholders and coordinated or "followed to the same direction" innovations in Web architecture and device development.

Many new interesting documents released by W3C groups as for the matter (just look above on the same page, then visit Incubator Activity and check deliverables of those groups). A special interest is a result of work of the Device APIs and Policy Working Group, the Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group, and also the Geolocation Working Group.

Year 2009-2010 retrospection

Just because I study for so many years that I don't even remember, i still use to count years not by calendar but by educational years. It is also convenient in a sense that by been on summer holidays, one may have more time to revise his projects, activities and information (even that for which there wasn't time during a year).

Thus here's a very short work-related overview of the past year (educational year 2009-2010).

First of all, my laboratory changed to be the Pehr Brahe Center for Industrial and Services ICT. We have also updated our website design:
http://www.pbol.org/
What is important, we have successfully accomplished one of our projects. Then, we also have got a funding for the other one – the same research area; we call it the Ubiquitous Home Environment. There will be something to do for the next two years.

Beside that we expanded our interest to the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) programme EU activities. Here's our poster:
http://www.aaliance.eu/public/aaliance-conference-1/papers-and-posters/19_poster_oulu-university
presented at AALIANCE Conference. And just recently we have submitted a joint application under the AAL Call 3.

Like always there were many visits to conferences, workshops and meetings, and interesting discussions with many of those people who pushes progress forward, as well as with those who take a part in such the push.

For the first time in my life I kept a small presentation as an invited speaker (my gratitude to you, Philippe Le Parc) – that happened at a regional annual research conference in AberWrach (Bretagne, France). The presentation was about a future of Web.

For the first time I was invited to be a reviewer of one of the international journal's article through Scopus by using EES, Elsevier's online submission and peer-review system.

What was exceptionally interesting in my studying – I've got acquainted with a futurism. This is something I'm excited about – a future anticipation. Now I understand more a spirit of Ray Kurzweil.

Then, plenty of other studies, including essentials of programming for Android, QT (the best available development platform IMHO), and participating to The 1st International UBI Summer School 2010 (Oulu, Finland):
http://www.ubioulu.fi/en/UBI-summer-school-2010
There was an excellent team of invited experts who kept speeches, tutorials and workshops. Thanks to you all, and particularly to you, Timo Ojala, and your team – for organising this school, and to you, Anind Dey – for your great input to our Real World Context-Aware Systems workshop and to me personally.

As for my teaching activities – I introduced to my students an updated program in both of my courses, Java Programming and Mobile and Embedded java Programming. Then, two of proposed self-study courses were accepted for the next year: Introduction to Semantic Web, and Intelligence on the Web.

I’m back

By been on holydays, I've found a news on some changes in LJ user account management. That has forced me to log into my account there: http://sciagent.livejournal.com/

and make some posts. This all has happened exactly at the time I thought to (at small degree) return back to an online life.

Since the second biggest group of LJ users is Russian-speaking (English-speaking is the largest, but I don't remember a source of that info), I decided to keep all my posts in Russian there.

Thus here I'll continue to post from time to time something in English. I have also an idea of a large project – to retrieve info from my email communications and publish publicly-allowed parts of it. Well, the same and the biggest constraint I have – time – may restrict my performance in such the project.