Yahoo! Research Projects

• Yahoo Machine Learning
  http://research.yahoo.com/Machine_Learning
• Computational Advertising
  http://research.yahoo.com/Computational_Advertising
• Search Technologies
  http://research.yahoo.com/Search_Technologies
• Log file parsing Engine - Pig is an Apache incubator open-source project: http://incubator.apache.org/pig/
  http://research.yahoo.com/node/90

The Next Generation of Neural Networks

Aspect Oriented Programming: Radical Research in Modularity

Externalizing web Service Documentation

Dr. Eric Ackerman, director of MS program at NSU was able to capture some amazing images of total lunar eclipse today. Check out the photos here especially the ones with the ray of green light; this is what he had to say about it.

"You can see a couple of images where I caught the momentary ray of green light from the Southern pole of the moon which is extremely difficulty to catch.  I was shooting at 6 frames per second during this exact time and the images with the rays of green light were caught in a couple of frames out of 300 images taken"

Great work doc!

'05 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein (A Must Read - Hilarious!)

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp

A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming
Simulating a Swarm Algorithm in C#

Design Patterns in Dynamic Programming

Improving Face Recognition

Model View Controller (MVC) vs. Model View Presenter (MVP) (aka. no resemblance with AVP)
MVC or MVP Pattern – Whats the difference?

I’ve recently completed the following two articles for The Code Project. These are mainly based on my CalState Fullerton SoCal Code Camp talks.

Exploring WCF 3.5 Tools - WcfSvcHost and WcfTestClient
Disucssing use of WCFSvcHost and WcfTestClient for Service hosting and testing.

Publishing RSS and ATOM Feeds using WCF 3.5 Syndication Libraries
This article focuses on using the WCF 3.5 libraries namely System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace to create and publish an RSS and Atom feed from the same code base.

Enjoy!

I've recently purchased an space upgrade to my picasa account and the checkout process was, not surprisingly, based on Google checkout. Google using its product internally might not make headlines but it reinforced one of my long time established beliefs in software development about eating-one's-own-dog-food. If you don’t find value in your <T> (software as an example) to use it frequently and rely on it, you should not expect others to find it fascinating.




This is one of the problems I have with Microsoft Live i.e. I believe the main problem lies in the core of the search algorithm and results which turns people away. I was recently looking for Juval Lowy’s WCF 3.5 article published in the MSDN Magazine and here are the results from both Google and Live with the same search keywords. One brings me the pertaining and relevant info in a clean and concise way, the other does not.



That’s why I think YHOO purchase would not significantly give Microsoft an edge in the search space because its core competency in search R&D is not as strong as its largest competitor. Two mediocrities do not create one greatness IMHO. This further trickles down to other sources of revenue which heavily rely n search technologies nowadays such as web advertisements. And like my buddy Nauman said "Google could be the beneficiary here as this could start a mass exodus of talented developers if the deal go through."

Few days ago I’ve received INETA’s certificate for San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group on completing its two year’s.



This is a great honor for us and I’d like to thank everyone who has helped us through this journey. It seems like yesterday when Rob Walling and I started discussing about having a user group for San Gabriel Valley developers community in mid 2005 and with the help of Bernard Wong and other fellow community members, our first meeting took place in January 2006. It has been a wonderful ride since then. I’d like to thank our user group committee members and attendees for their help and support during these two years and hopefully we will be able to provide this service to the community for a longer period of time. Special thanks go to our committee members and patrons including but not limited to Antony Chhan, Neal Hardesty, Richard Trinh, Vipul Shah, Ben Pirih, C.J Wang, James Lin, Greg Cannon and David Wells.

January 2008’s meeting with Reza Madani on SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence was our 23rd meeting and we have a great line up for 2008 including Mark Miller from INETA, Gerald Walsh, Lynn Langitt, and Woody Pewitt to name a few.

Thank you all and have a wonderful 2008!

Adnan Masood

President & Co-Founder
San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group.

The slides, sample source code and links can be downloaded from here.

 
WCF 3.5 Code Samples, Links and Presentation Download

ASP.NET MVC Code Samples, Links and Presentation Download

ASP.NET MVC Presentation Videos (Jeff’s part of the talk)

From the user’s comments, it seems that my WCF talk was well received. It’s reassuring when seen from an independent observer. I’m planning to do a follow up on it in the San Diego code camp. Also, if any user group in the area wants me to deliver this or any other related talk, feel free to drop me an email.

Eric Simons, our director of QA and Offshore Development is visiting India right now and he is blogging about his experiences while there.

Interesting stuff! You can read it over here or subscribe to the RSS* Atom here.

*That strike through is a tongue in cheek little-endian war exclamation. Some may disagree with reason and I respect that.

With the WSDM 2008 coming up, I’ve been reading up on recent writings in the social networking arena related to data mining. Following are some related papers I’d like to share.

• Recommendations in taste related domains: collaborative filtering vs. social filtering Georg Groh, Christian Ehmig; November 2007
  GROUP '07: Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Conference on supporting group work

• Efficient search ranking in social networks
  Monique V. Vieira, Bruno M. Fonseca, Rodrigo Damazio, Paulo B. Golgher, Davi de Castro Reis, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto; November 2007
  CIKM '07: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management

• Measurement and analysis of online social networks
  Alan Mislove, Massimiliano Marcon, Krishna P. Gummadi, Peter Druschel, Bobby Bhattacharjee; October 2007
  IMC '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement

• Formal analysis techniques for gossiping protocols
  Rena Bakhshi, Francois Bonnet, Wan Fokkink, Boudewijn Haverkort; October 2007
  ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review,   Volume 41 Issue 5

• Gossiping in distributed systems
  Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Maarten van Steen; October 2007
  ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review,   Volume 41 Issue 5

• Searching for experts in the enterprise: combining text and social network analysis
  Kate Ehrlich, Ching-Yung Lin, Vicky Griffiths-Fisher; November 2007
  GROUP '07: Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Conference on supporting group work

• Improving the classification of newsgroup messages through social network analysis
  Blaz Fortuna, Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, Natasa Milic-Frayling; November 2007
  CIKM '07: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management

• A constraint-based probabilistic framework for name disambiguation
  Duo Zhang, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li, Kehong Wang;November 2007
  CIKM '07: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management

• Impact of social influence in e-commerce decision making
  Young Ae Kim, Jaideep Srivastava;August 2007
  ICEC '07: Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Electronic commerce

I’m doing the following two sessions in the upcoming Fullerton Code Camp on Jan 25 and 26th.

.NET 3.5 Enhancements for WCF :: Syndication and REST Support

ASP.NET MVC Framework - An Introduction

Code Camp is Free! Feel free to come and join the geekiness.

Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition (AIPR-08)

International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems and Web Technologies (EISWT-08)

International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking and Communication Systems (HPCNCS-08)

International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP-08)

International Conference on Theoretical and Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (TMFCS-08)

Promote Research

Server in the Sky

First ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining WSDM 2008, February 11-12, 2008, Stanford University

SVD Recommendation System in Ruby

MIT OCW Data Mining Course

How to Design Programs – MIT Press

How to Be a Good Graduate Student

Idle Scanning et al

Security and Hacking Documentation for Vulnerability Analysis

Recieved it couple of days ago...

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C# 2005, Second Edition by Jeffrey Hasan have also purchased Workbook to accompany Anatomy & Physiology Revealed Version 2 CD by Robert Broyles. For this reason, you might like to know that Workbook to accompany Anatomy & Physiology Revealed Version 2 CD will be released on January 11, 2008.  You can pre-order yours by following the link below.

Interesting, isn't it? :)

“If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.”

-Albert Einstein

vs.

"I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle