Computational Culture

I am very happy to have a talk about the next generation of recommender systems. Are they possible? How much explicit but very intimate user data is required to build such systems? Maybe it is a matter of sociological and philosophical problems to reach a next generation of algorithms to cope with the application of Uber-recommenders.
I try my best at this year’s CEBIT2008 Future Talk including a panel discussion with my friend and well-known german blog sociologist Jan Schmidt.

Sunday, 9th of March, 1pm - 2pm:

Future Talk Area

Halle 9 30A

We - the Music Information Retrieval geeks- have been eagerly waiting to see what Brian Whitman has been hacking out at Echonest. Few days ago they launched a bunch of impressive demos based on their audio analysis tools. As a frequent reader of Paul’s and Elias’ blogs I stumbled over their postings after having been offline for some while. As always Brian and his guys included an excellent sense of humour! Their webservice is a most to check out! But if you dont want to depend on services you have to do it on your own. My brandnew master thesis student has to go ahead!

Martin Memmel is currently working on ALOE, a Social Resource Sharing Platform combining informal and formal metadata. For this reason he was invited to join Metadata2.0. An event organised and hosted by Erik Duval at KU Leuven. There is already some buzz in the blogosphere about it!

Tomorrow I have my talk at the University of Alberta. Randy Goebel was so kind to make this possible and I am really looking forward to have it as part of the Artificial Intelligence Seminar. So far I had excellent discussions with all the people here; including Sandra Zilles -our DFKI-colleague- being an incredible hostess during my stay here. We discussed a lot about the challenges for Incremental Machine Learning methods if applied to the emerging Mobile Socio-Semantic Web.

Tough challenges, save rocket science!

This will affect the Social Web development dramatically. The Data Portability Work Group is working towards maximum cross-appplication access for users to their social media. Wow great news! Walled gardens will be history soon …
Via: TechCrunch

John Maeda, design guru for decades at the MIT medialab and my personal source of inspiration for long years, is the new president of RISD. Here the most interesting Q+A from the interview at Business Week:

What sorts of new relationships with corporations might you cultivate at RISD, if you are interested in doing so?

Corporations today, by their razor sharp focus on the “bottom line” and quarterly earnings, have lost their ability to innovate. You folks at BW talk about it all the time. But no solutions are proferred. People think that mixing design school mentality into a business school might work; or maybe mixing business school mentality into a design school might work. Add technology, shake, then stir. Voila! What do you have? Essentially a nice mixture of oil and water that, with the progression of time will naturally separate back to the oil and the water. What is needed is a more integrative approach to engaging business-thinking with creative-thinking. How this will be done? What a great challenge to work on. That’s why I’m headed to RISD.

Thanks to the guys of the Repository of European Association for Semantic Web Education (REASE) my talk of this years Summer School Semantic Web is online now for free access for educational purposes. If you are interested to spend 1 hour of your valuable time, go here:
Video recording about the Social Web.

It is more fun to watch than to read! The C4DM guys dont hesitate to stream and record the seminar talks. What a great service for the audience being online in the net but “kind of offline” in the real world. Follow the link to see it all, including my talk (shameless selfpromotion done!).

UPDATE: Paul commented that it would be helpful to have the Slides.pdf.