AI expert calls for e-defence for the UK

The need for the UK military to develop e-defence so that it can compete with the rest of the world will be highlighted by Professor Nigel Shadbolt next week.

His call will be made when he delivers the British Computer Society (BCS)/Royal Signals Institution (RSI) annual lecture 2005 on Web Intelligence at the National Army Museum, London on Wednesday 9 March. Professor Shadbolt, who is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, will focus on how Artificial Intelligence is being woven into the World Wide Web and he will review how these developments are likely to shape future military capabilities.

He will claim that the UK military is lagging behind what many of the rest of us routinely experience in terms of software and IT capabilities. Lengthy procurement processes means that from an IT perspective the equipment and software being used is often out-of-date. This is particularly acute in the area of web services.

He commented: ‘The military will have few options but to take advantage of the huge investment that the commercial and research sectors have made in web service solutions and architectures.’

Professor Shadbolt will demonstrate how the developing Semantic Web could provide web services for the military which might change how it operates.

For example, through developing information sets about locations, military units could access instant information about the geology, geography, customs and cultural and religious structures of a location before entering. Much of this content exists in various web accessible sources. Deployed military personnel often face problems when dealing with foreign languages. Web services are under development to support high quality speech and text translation. Increasingly services for diagnosis, image recognition, planning and scheduling can be delivered on the web.

Professor Shadbolt commented: ‘The UK military is starting to use this technology and indeed the concept of network enabled capability is accepted, but it lags well behind the US. The adage that information is power has always applied in military as well as business contexts. At the moment, it is hard for the military to change fast, but it needs to if it is to attain a position of information superiority.’

20 Year Usenet Timeline

Google has fully integrated the past 20 years of Usenet archives into Google Groups, which now offers access to more than 800 million messages dating back to 1981. This is by far the most complete collection of Usenet articles ever assembled and a fascinating first-hand historical account.

Among the list, First mention of Microsoft, First review of the IBM-PC, First mention of Michael Jordan, First mention of the term 'search engine', First mention of Google and many interesting topics are mentioned. It is a good collection and stories house to retrieve the history!

Google Scholar

Google announced his free beta service, Google Scholar, which allows users to search for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports, the Mountain View, California, company said. Google, this information industry's giant, made great strides on its technologies and applicaton once more. Will he stand on the scholar giants' shoulders?

As far as I knew, the related work has been performed by Citeseer for many years. And the works is very successful. It seems that the technologies which they applied are very similar (or maybe exactly same, not sure). Do they have any connections each other? But what attracted me most is how Google started to do things like Google Scholar, and what technologies they applied, finally what the ultimate goals they are ready to achieve based on the current technologies.

Here, I am not ready to enkindle the arguments war on two organizations. Whatever Google Scholar or Citeseer, if they really can 'stand' on the scholar giants' shoulders to provide services to the running researchers and scientists, it is the real to achieve those giants' beautiful dreams.

Presidents and Ontologies

Of Presidents and Ontologies, this paper attracted me by the ontologies in its title. At the first glance, I could not find any relation between Presidents and Ontologies and thought for a while.....:) Then, after reading the first section of the article, I knew that the Presidents are surrounded by the ontologies through the expression of RDF and some relevant technologies:) Very interesting combination!

No Topic

Success without passion is just luck! Professional research needs passion, not luck!

This is a word from Sir David Brown, Chairman of Motorola Ltd. UK, who made a speech, Engineering in the Information Age In the University of Southampton on 20 October, 2004.

GMail Drive -- A New Network Drive on Your Machine

GMail is not just email box for us from now. Can you imagine that GMail can be used as a network storage medium accessed through your local machine if only you have GMail account and network. That is just easy!

It is GMail Drive that achieve this great job! It adds a drive in your Windows Explorer or My Computer. You can use it just like using the C, D...local drive on your machine. 1000MB is a relative huge storage for normal user. Probably sometimes you think that how many letters I need to fill up this huge 'tank'. Now you've got an idea?

GMail Drive is a shell namespace extension which creates a virtual filesystem on the top of your GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail, even to create folders on this virtual drive, but folders will not appear in your GMail box. In your GMail box the files are still organized as emails. Folders are just a kind of virtual organization structure on your machine.

Detailed information can be gotten in the GMail Drive's website.

Google's technologies always shock people, which injects a shot of special and creative energy to the development of Internet technology. Also, it also attracts more and more developers who are willing to dive into the Google's technology. This is Google's Environment!

Computational Biology ----- Biology is flying with IT

Biology underlies all the life sciences, but historically it has been more of a descriptive than quantitative science. Today, however, computational approaches dramatically increase the potential to learn and understand the complex relationships within and between the subsets of biology (biological response, biodiversity, genetics, medicine, etc.).

Computational Biology represents the marriage of Information Technology (IT) and biology, and spans many disciplines, such as bioinformatics (both genomics and post-genomics), molecular modeling, bioengineering, biosimulation, clinical informatics, medical imaging, and many others. While genomics research brought a face to Computational Biology, it also brought with it a set of new and more difficult challenges such as:

• A collision of paradigms giving rise to data overload,


• Data interoperability problems, and


• The need for widely distributed data and computing resources to solve certain problems.

Continue to read 'Computational Biology: the Marriage of IT and Biology' , which bring a new face for the computational biology in relation to the Sun technologies. I think that it will give you a practical review about computational biology.

Sun also has Communities of Interest for Computational Biology, which provide a open platform for researchers, scientists, and partners. The most valuable part in this platform, I think, is Partnerships Program which is composed of three parts: Centres of Excellence, External Research Office and Asia Pacific Science and Technology Centre. It gives out large loads of information, developments, trends, and resources of computational biology with high-advanced Sun technologies.

Got GMail Account!

Recently Google announced the arrival of 1G GMail email system. Because it is still under the stage of beta testing, the registration of accounts are not available to everyone. The persons who want to get the account must get the invitation from the GMail user. Many people include me tried to look for the invitation sources and expected to get one account. My purpose is to attend the testing phrase of Google, providing useful and practical feedbacks to Google about their new email system as I was attracted deeply by the technologies of Google. Eventually I got two accounts thanks to friends Brennan Stehling and Taylor Simpson.

Next, there is a problem put on the table directly and clearly after getting the GMail account. That is, how to import the other email accounts, such as Thunderbird, Mozilla, Hotmail, Outlook and so on, into the GMail email box. Google's GMail did not provide such tools to implement this function. I 'google' GMail on the Web and found this solution for this problem, which solved most of my required problems! Based on the instructions published on that site, Microsoft Outlook PST file is still under development. I believe it will be available later time!

Currently I have 6 invitations for the GMail account. If interested, you can email me and of course I hope you can give me satisfactory reasons!

Duke Surfing Screensaver

I have never seen this kind of screensaver from Sun before. Although not fabulous, like 3D effects and real background sounds as many popular screensavers, it opened Java developers a new window in the development fields, I think. You can download it from Java.com, which just need you to answer three simple questions like normal registration in the common BBS.

Wish to enjoy it!

Using NewsGator to public the Blogs through email client--Microsoft Outlook

This is great news for me, a newbie to RSS technology. Through searching the web, though there are many RSS readers available nowadays, after testing I found that two readers fitting me well, one is free RSS Reader, the other is NewsGator, which is not free of charge, but you can find the cracker on the web to crack it to make it work normally. I prefer the first one because it is not only simple but also flexible. Many websites introducing the basic knowledge of RSS advise the users the most common and popular RSS reader, SharpReader. But I think the users should not limit their eyes only on this kind of introduction, but look for more and appropriate readers fit yourself well.

Every reader has its own advantages. RSS Reader can import and export the XML format for your feeds, and also provides you a directory storing the business, news, technology, science, health, and many other kinds of feeds. NewsGator is run embedded in the Microsoft Outlook. It provides many plug-ins which will extend the functions of this tool. You can obtain and download them directly from the website of NewsGator. I use one of them, Blogger plug-in, which will make the users of Blogger.com write, edit and publish their blogs in the Microsoft Outlook offline or online. It is very convenient! I selected NewsGator actually just because of this advantage of NewsGator. Though NewsGator also provide the function of import and export, the format is very particular, not common like that of RSS Reader. I think that this will be the obstacle of the NewsGator’s development in the future unless this format will become the standard of this field used by most of the RSS reader.

In summary, I think that the primary principle of selection of RSS readers is you-feel-comfortable-about-its-functions-and-interface. It is really difficult to say which RSS reader is the best. But we can find easily by the investigations which reader is the most popular! This site will provide you the popular RSS readers.

This blog is edited and published using NewsGator in the Microsoft Outlook.