Financial Markets Data

Financial markets react in different ways to every day events. Relating how this happens, i.e. how market trends are influenced through news, has been the domain of traders in a number of financial institutions. Australian-based SIRCA is now taking data from Reuters and making this available to academic institutions and other financial companies. They provide the TAQTIC engine to aggregate, summarize and publish financial data -- often leading to very high data volumes. A very interesting use of large scale data Grids.

Europe's top 100 from Red Herring Magazine

There are two tech./business trends magazines whose opinions I truly respect -- Wired and Red Herring. Recently, Red Herring revealed it's Top 100 European tech entrepreneurs. A very interesting collection of companies -- ranging from news categorization company Newstin to Rummable -- a location based "social discovery" tool.

How does Google make money?

According to a report released on April 21, 2008 from Millword Brown Optimor the total worth of the worlds top 100 brands is 1.94 trillion US dollars in 2008. Most interesting of all, the world's top brand today, worth over 86,000 million US dollars is Google! A brand that has now surpassed world leaders such as Coca Cola, Microsoft, Nokia, Marlboro, McDonalds and GE. What does this mean? Well, today, Google makes more advertising revenue than mainstream UK television channels such as ITV. According to a report from the UK Times Newspaper, Google generated over £325 million of advertising revenue between July and September 2007 -- surpassing that of ITV (even when taking into account advertising revenue from sporting events such as Rugby). Do these statistics indicate a potential future change in the way individuals interact with media? Is on-line the future of information dissemination and mass marketing?

Life in 2000 frames per second

Ever realized what a single second would seem like if we were to capture it in 2000 of its constituent parts. That's what high speed cameras are capable of doing today -- capturing 2000 frames in one second. Watch the yellow balloon exploding video below. Watch how the water holds its shape when the balloon is burst -- before gravity pulls it apart.

"They Work for You" -- analysing voting record of MPs

Members of Parliament often vote on new bills in the House of Parliament in the UK. Ever wonderered how your MP has been voting? Has he/she been a "rebel" or voted with their own party? Now you can find out. The Web site They Work For You allows an individual to find out who their MP is, details about how to contact their MP, and also analyse how their MP has been voting. See also the related site Public Whip -- both use the Hansard database. A true example of democracy -- whereby the public (you and me) can find out about our MPs!

Afro-Cuban and Latin Jazz

A beautiful recording from Omar Sosa with over 21 musicians bringing together a combination of African, Latin/Cuban and Jazz sounds on one recording called Afreecanos. Omar Sosa's sound is very much influenced by the electronic Jazz guru Steve Arguelles. This has to be world jazz at it's absolute best! -- note the music textures introduced through background electronic instruments on "Why Anga?" -- a tribute to Cuban percussionist Anga Diaz.

Clothes that Change: Sensor networks and art

A highly creative London-based company called "Cute Circuit" brings together expertise in sensor networks (both sensing and actuation), art/design and textiles, to weave together a range of clothes that enable people to hug each other via Bluetooth (Hug Shirt), a dress to change patterns based on the mood of the person wearing it (KineticDress), and clothes that change shape and colour depending on the time of day (Mystique). A really good demonstration of art and technology.

Geekologie

Not sure about you -- I spent many a long hours trying to solve Rubik's Cube (shows my age!). Here's a rather interesting robot created with Lego Mindstorms for solving Rubik's Cube. Check out more such interesting but useless stuff at Geekologie.

Interactivity from LM3Labs

Interacting with large scale displays, and making interaction and user interfaces more intuitive is the wonderful work being undertaken at LM3 Labs. Their aim is to bring user interfaces to surfaces we deal with everyday, such as tables, floors, walls, etc. Some wonderful work -- reminds me of Minority Report.

"Fairy Tale: A Horror Story to Prepare Children for Newspapers"

In "The Curtain", Milan Kundera writes: "Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable ..., stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of non-truths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal." Can we really distinguish today between truth and non?

Major news networks today have a particular bias when reporting the news. Even major networks such as BBC and CNN have a particular viewpoint. Do institutions like these define the "reality" that we see around us? Whether it is the reasoning behind the need for taxation or the reason for a war? A number of independent news media have come to fill the gap -- most accessible via the Web -- examples are Media Lens, Spiked On-line, Open Democracy and The Real News. Not that these are totally free of bias either. But somewhere between the "institutional" view of events and news from such Web sites lies reality! Judge for yourself.

Social networks on Wireless Devices

The SOCIALNETS project is investigating how wireless-enabled devices can directly share data with each other when they come into range, and then pass it on to another device. This approach takes into account how humans physically interact and mix with each other. As often human interaction is the basis for bringing portable devices into range of each other. Social networks with friends, colleagues and contacts can be used to transfer and acquire electronic data, information and knowledge -- such as photos, music files, etc. This project provides a radical new way to form social networks based on geographical proximity. My colleagues Roger Whitaker and Stuart Allen from Cardiff lead the project.

Geo-referencing photos

Ever wanted to reference the photo you took to a map. Panoramio enables one to do just this. It is a mashup of Google Maps and user supplied photo content. There is also an API that one can use. Here are some photos of Cardiff.

The World -- Synchronized

Since 2005 Japanese art director Jun Tsuzuki has been running a project he calls Synchronicity. Jun asks people all over the world to take a picture of what they are doing at a pre-determined moment in time. These pictures, along with a brief explanation of the time and place they are taken, are then displayed on the Synchronicity website as a portrait of the world at that exact moment. See what the world was doing at a particular point in time.

Jonathan Harris tells Stories on the Web

What happens when you combine a story teller, an artist and a Web developer into one person -- you end up with Jonathan Harris. Here is someone who uses social network analysis to tell the stories using data from the Web. Watch his fantastic video on TED from July 2007. Check out the Web sites that he talks about in the video -- We Feel Fine and Universe. His social network analysis can be used to tell many stories about todays heros and heroins, and the social buzz of those who contribute content (text and photos) to the Web.

Service Level Agreements

With the emergence of infrastructure such as "Cloud Computing" (Google's DFS, Amazon EC2 and S3, IBM's "Blue Cloud", etc), it is now becoming clear that Service Level Agreements will play an important role in the future of such infrastructure. SLAs enable a client to establish a relationship with a provider in the context of a particular service provision. This is especially useful when services need to be integrated from a variety of different sources -- an example being the photo sharing site SmugMug.com utilizing Amazon's S3 service for storage (more on programmableweb.com). Wolfgang Ziegler, Philipp Wieder, Ramin Yahyapour and I are organizing a workshop alongside the IEEE/ACM Grid 2008 conference focusing on the use of SLAs in Grids. Deadline for submission is end of May 2008. Workshop takes place towards the end of September 2008 in Tsukuba, Japan.

European Grid Showcase

Various projects are currently active in Europe in Grid computing. The European Grid Showcase event alongside the IEEE CCGrid 2008 conference will bring together a collection of presentations highlighting work taking place in Europe. There is still time to submit! -- details on the CoreGrid site.

Open Source and Social Networks

How can one improve the trust in artefacts that are developed by the open source community? Surely, lack of trust remains one of the key barriers to the take up of some of the wonderful projects that are currently being undertaken by Open Source enthusiasts -- within the commercial context. We address this in a new paper that will appear at the "International Conference on Computer Mediated Social Networking" (http://www.business.otago.ac.nz/infosci/Conferences/Isn2008/) -- taking place in Otago (New Zealand) -- June 2008. Anas Tawileh has played an important role in shaping some of the ideas in this paper.