Here is an interesting site I found called videolecture.net. It has a number of academic videos, sort of like academic channels (e.g. UC Berkeley channel) on YouTube, but this site has academic videos from many institutions and individuals. Also, it seems to have partnered with conferences (e.g., NIPS) and university programs (e.g., OpenCourseWare from MIT) to put together many many academic lectures on-line.  Like YouTube, this site seems to let users post their own videos. I am not sure how (and whether) they verify the (academic) quality of the videos. Here is one of the shortest videos I could find so that you can have a taste.

Artificial intelligence: An instance of Aibo ingenuity
by Michael Littman

It’s been a looooong time since I’ve posted on this blog. I’ve been busy, among other things, playing with my new MacBook Air.

One of the coolest things about the new MacBook lineup is the updated multi-touch. Now I can use 3, or even 4!!! fingers to manipulate within and between applications.

Firefox, my browser of choice so far, has a beta version, Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, which supports multi-touch. So I can use 3-finger swipe motion to go back, forward, top of page, bottom of page, and use two-finger motions to zoom in & out, and piching/twisting motions to switch tabs. All you MacBook users, you MUST try it out!

Try using Google’s new feature, “SearchWiki”, where you can promote or remove a search result. You have to be logged into your google account to do the promotion/removal, and the action will only affect your search results. But your action will show up as part of the community comments when other people view the results you have promoted/removed.

**Alas, it did not work for my Google Korea search results, I had to switch to English Google to see the effect.

Read this google post for a bit more information.

Tomorrow is my birthday!

I would like to urge *EVERYONE* (yes, that’s YOU!!!) to leave me a short birthday wish.

I just want to know who my readers are (though you don’t have to reveal your identity).

There aren’t that many readers, partly because I haven’t been blogging for very long, and I have not been active in visiting other blogs. But lately I’ve been getting at least a dozen views per day, more on days when I make a new posting.

Let’s see if this experiment works.

a friendly photo to encourage comments.

Today is the Presidential Election Day in the US. Since I don’t live there anymore, I feel a little aloof, but I have a strong preference for one candidate over the other, so I am following it very closely.

Here is something the New York Times is doing. “What one word describes your state of mind?” And they tally it up for the three categories: everyone, McCain supporters, Obama supporters. They use visualization techniques similar to tag clouds, where they put the most popular words in big letters, and the less popular ones in smaller letters. For the McCain supporter words, they use red font, for the Obama supporters, they use blue font.

It’s a hint that people outside of research are picking up on the trend of caring about emotion language on the Web. It’s pretty cool, check it out!

What one word describes your state of mind?

This blog will serve as a communication platform for me to have dialogs with myself and with others who may be interested in my musings.

I will try, though I cannot guarantee that I will succeed, to restrict the contents to those related to my research topics. Since they will appear frequently in the form of acronyms, I shall list them here:

AI: artificial intelligence

HCI: human-computer interaction

NLP: natural language processing

CS: computer science

UI: user interface

UX: user experience

IR: information retrieval

I welcome and invite everyone to join me in the dialogs.

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