Photo by Flickr user Mr. T in DC
Remember how South Sudan had that peaceful split from North Sudan? Yeah… that might not be so peaceful anymore.
Politicians had fun poking fun at each other on Saturday night at the Gridiron Club Dinner.
Think you might be owed money? Check out this site!
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Sendai, Japan after the earthquake. Image by US Navy Imagery
As you’ve probably already heard, Japan suffered a massive earthquake and tsunami on Friday. The death toll is in the hundreds, thousands are displaced and several nuclear reactors might have a meltdown. And as if that weren’t enough, a volcano in Southern Japan started erupting yesterday.
On top of all that, some people on Twitter and Facebook have been posting that the tsunami was payback for Pearl Harbor. Thankfully, the statements were quickly denounced by others, who pointed out that the U.S. wasn’t exactly innocent, seeing as how the country dropped two nukes on Japan in the 1940s.
That’s a lot of bad news, but please don’t feel discouraged because there are things that you can do. If you’re interested in helping out any way you can, here is a list of ways you can do exactly that.
]]>So recently there's been a lot of flame directed at this guy, and it's getting kind of boring. In an effort to move past these dead end discussions, I brainstormed some possible things to talk about on myUMBC:
Pervasive, context-aware computing technologies can significantly enhance and improve the coming generation of devices and applications for consumer electronics as well as devices for work places, schools and hospitals. Context-aware cognitive support requires activity and context information to be captured, reasoned with and shared across devices — efficiently, securely, adhering to privacy policies, and with multidevice interoperability.
The AAAI-11 conference will host a two-day workshop on Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages focused on techniques and systems to allow mobile devices model and recognize the activities and context of people and groups and then exploit those models to provide better services. The workshop will be held on August 7th and 8th in San Francisco as part of AAAI-11, the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Submission of research papers and position statements are due by 22 April 2011.
The workshop intends to lay the groundwork for techniques to represent context within activity models using a synthesis of HCI/CSCW and AI approaches to reduce demands on people, such as the cognitive load inherent in activity/context switching, and enhancing human and device performance. It will explore activity and context modeling issues of capture, representation, standardization and interoperability for creating context-aware and activity-based assistive cognition tools with topics including, but not limited to the following:
There are three intended end results of the workshop: (1) Develop two-three key themes for research with specific opportunities for collaborative work. (2) Create a core research group forming an international academic and industrial consortium to significantly augment existing standards/drafts/proposals and create fresh initiatives to enable capture, transfer, and recall of activity context across multiple devices and platforms used by people individually and collectively. (3) Review and revise an initial draft of structure of an activity context exchange language (ACEL) including identification of use cases, domain-specific instantiations needed, and drafts of initial reasoning schemes and algorithms.
For more information, see the workshop call for papers.
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