Talk: Applying SAT to solve dependencies

Paulo Trezentos presented his work about applying SAT techniques for the resolution of dependencies in the installation process of software components. The case study is the Caixa Mágica Linux distribution. Paulo presented an interesting formalization of the software packages dependency problem.

My suggestion at the talk was to have users upload the dependency problem solutions (and not just the problems) and to use the installation profile - server, desktop, netbook, etc - to help put the solutions in context.

It's not my research area but it was a talk that I liked to attend.

New York Encounter

Included the presentation by Julián Carrón of the second part of the book: Is it possible to live this way? He did a good presentation. I look forward to read the book.

But the most interesting talk for me was by John L. Allen Jr.. You can find his latest articles at http://johnallen.ncrcafe.org/.

Digital Apollo

Presentation of the Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell

An interesting account of the human-computer interface challenges in the Apollo space program, that took Man to the Moon for the first time in 1969.

One of the highlights for me was the book cover picture, available at the book's website. It is a computer graphics recreation of the perspective Neil Armstrong had when he was landing the lunar module. Thrilling!

Sure takes me back to when I was a kid and wanted to be an Astronaut...

One Laptop Per Child

Nicholas Negroponte
MIT poverty week

Programming is the closest a child can be thinking about thinking i.e. learning about learning

More about this talk on Joana's blog.

Googling the Internet and beyond

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, EECS Department, Northwestern University
MIT CSAIL seminar

This was a breadth talk, covering several topics:
- TCP congestion control - removing exponential back-off - paper on ACM CCR 2008;
- DoS against streaming CDN (e.g. Akamai) - how to attack a CDN network, how to leverage a CDN network knowledge of network topology to make better routing decisions - paper on IEEE ICDCS 2008, and Usenix/ACM IMC 2008;
- Googling the Internet - an interesting approach to profiling internet usage by querying google about IP addresses - paper "unconstrained endpoint profiling" on ACM SIGCOMM 2008
- IDNet mesh - identity validation credentials - work in progress

Very lively talk, with some interesting research.

Beyond Google - seeking the un-indexed content

Khai N. Truong, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
MIT CSAIL HCI (Human Computer Interaction) Seminar

The talk was about ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction.

First, the talk was about a diary study that lasted 4 weeks, aiming to capture information needs of people when they are not at the computer - What Why Where What When?
858 needs were reported; 22.5% needs were not satisfied in time; 32.2% needs were never satisfied. More information on the CSCW 2008 paper by Dearman, Kellar & Truong

Next the talk was about the analysis of why people answer in the site Yahoo Answers.
Their main motivation is to help others and not to learn. A similar approach can be used for mobile applications, to try and capture information in context.

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On a side-note, the presentation used a very neat visual technique: small replicas of previous sides on the lower right corner of a new slide, to help the audience recall a previous slide.

John Chambers at MIT

It's not about YOU as Time Magazine stated, but about US, the on-line collaboration communities.

I was at John Chamber's talk at MIT. He is CEO of CISCO Systems.

He did a very good presentation overall. I was particularly impressed with the way he connected with the audience, climbing up and down the stairs, and looking straight into the people's eyes. He was using a lapel wireless microphone. He also used Powerpoint as a complete accessory. Great!

Some of his insights were:

On business...

Understand a crisis 101:
1 - Is it market-driven or self inflicted?
2 - Determine its length and depth
3 - Prepare for the upturn

Time frames:
Vision - 5 years
Strategy - 2 to 4 years
Execution - 12 to 18 months

Organizations are switching from "Command & control" to "collaboration". This change is process-driven and requires a common vocabulary inside a company.


On technology...


We're going from "software as a service" to "everything as a service".

The importance of telepresence, not just teleconference.

With collaboration and tele-presence, CISCO now can keep track of 26 priorities a year, instead of 2 or 3 as before.

In-network processing to perform bandwidth adjustment to destination's screen size.

They have an internal Facebook-like application that enables them to choose the right people for the right job, in a cross-department view. They have a reward engine in place that is based on these kinds of contributions.


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Joana was also at the event and posted about it on her blog.