Twitterology + Latourology

I just came back from WebSci - the "Web Science" conference. Papers were sane, keynote were plenty and of very high quality, the organisation of the conference was amazing.

Papers were mostly quantitative. One critical thinker unfairly criticized these papers to be Twitterology, and proposed to fix just that with additional work, which, others argued, manages to do Twitterology and Latourology  (after Bruno Latour) at the same time - a mixed approach so-to-speak :) Unfortunately, only few papers were qualitative. I hope we will see a more balanced programme in the future - so, CHI & CSCW folks,  please consider submitting your work ;) Well-grounded qualitative work is badly needed in this young community. Tip: I would use grounded theory...

p.s. For Laturologists: EU is financing a new project. If you understand Latour (some don't) and want to help him, please refer to this video (that's where EU taxpayers' money is going)

digital brand jam@brunel – Horizon curated thing

quite surprisingly excellent - lots of interesting mixes of tech-aware media folks and media-aware tech geeks etc

 

some thoughts - evidence resistent theories about brands abound

 

politics is branded just like businesses - belief/trust failures are common in both

 

just being big eventually makes you "evil"

 

viral marketting doesn't (hardly ever) work...

 

page rank is ethical - auctioning advertises on search, social etc isn't.

 

crowdsources business models (financial and cellphone data plans) is cunning...but eventually they will revert to type...

 

I suppose there will be a formal output of the workshop...

 

social media folks have better slidepacks than tech/geek people:(

IFIP Networking 2012 conference

I can't really write a lot about it as I was only on the last session which was a celebration of the 40 years that Working Group 6 has been doing networking - quite impressive - I really didn't realize how joined up all the early thinking was - there was a great set of keynotes, especially by Dina Katabi (preview f some of her SIGCOMM 2012 work) and Pablo Rodriguez (some really insightful observations on extracting happiness from location data in cell phone logs- yes, privacy controversy was discussed and some of the excessive political power wielded by the big Cloud Gangs, surprisingly in a very impassioned talk by Louis Pouzin (the guy who invented datagrams, no less!). Good time in Prague, city of Robots and Golems:)

E-Energy 2012

I´m at this 3rd e-energy conference in Madrid

http://events.networks.imdea.org/content/e-energy-2012/technical-program

Won´t see all the sessions, but some standout papers in session 2 including DTNs for dealing with intermittent energy (from UMass) and a solid comparison of VOIP v. PSTN energy efficiency (VOIP sucks, but you can do lots of smart enerfgy proportional work and duty cyling and eventualyl get it slightly better than an old PBX:)

plus a very nice paper from Wisconsin (Paul Barford´s group) on modeling power grid from 5 min spot price market for whole area ' LMP landscapes over time ' v. good stuff...

Standout session for me was Session 5 where more Waterloo work on why peak load pricing in canada is still too cheap to make energy storage worthwhile (paper 1 in this session= and teletraffic models of power (paper 4 in session 5)

Lots of other solid work on protocols (TCP over energy/rate proportional links, IP over lambda switches with duty cycling etc= and on optimisation...couple of ok game theory papers...mainstream stuff

 

Talked to lots of folks here from Waterloo (see ISS4e lab there!):http://blizzard.cs.uwaterloo.ca/iss4e/

Also, there was a chat from EU folks aboiut funding in this area, which is plentiful in next calls in summer (50MEu)

 

My keynote went down ok - some good questions about managing user demand for CDN content...

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/talks/e-energy-keynote-merge.pdf