Semester's Final Remarks

As the end of the semester approaches, I would like to summarize what I've learnt over the past semester. The main focus of my research at the Tetherless World Constellation was about an initiative that I started to explore with the intention explore how/why/what/where presenting information about oneself in a social context. My ideas are put together in this ppt.

The process of the Who am I (wAi) project, as I called it, began from an idea, which developed into researching the intricacies of building an application of this magnitude, to attending my first hackathon (sponsored by Facebook). This was the perfect opportunity to explore in depth Facebook's platform and its Graph API, and how the objects could be accessed for wAi. In addition, I wrote several queries using FQL , a SQL-style interface to query the data exposed by the Graph API. Unfortunately, that night due to some technical problems on Facebook's platform I could not check whether they worked in-situ. In brief, I became more knowledgeable about the table names, and object names, and how they're normally implemented in most systems.

In any case, this served me to simplify the scope of the project, at least in terms of my self-understanding. And helped me to define more exactly, and clear what and where I could go with wAi. So, I created a set of flowcharts that helped me visualize these ideas. Furthermore, this lead me to begin creating a Database model/diagram. Looking at the big picture within TWC Lab, all my intention was to represent this project in the best manner, so that in the long run when I understood how semantic technologies are applied, I could easily convert it....

Unfortunately, this great idea started to become a bit ambitious to be accomplished without

devoting much more time than the one I had in my hands. Also, given the remaining time frame, the scenario began to look even more daunting, since I really was the only one on board for my new project...

But in any case, thanks to Patrick, Tim, and John I could redirect my lab research at TWC into a somewhat similar field: online activism. Had I have more time, I now know what I would truly like to research on. And I think this is the most important lesson I get from TWC, where my interests lie if I ever want to research on a more full-time basis. Therefore, next time someone in the lab asks me whether I'm more of a synthetic person, or analytical; I'm clearly into the analytical aspect.

As a final note, I would like to also mention the discovery of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at RPI, which I discovered during the Social Media Forum. Their research closely relates to social media analysis.

Online Activism - Middle East Protests

Given the circumstances of the scope of wAi project, I decided to move towards another field, not too far away from it, but perhaps more on the analytical side of already published works in the field of online activism. Thanks to Tim Lebo and Patrick West at the TWC Lab, I ended up with a deeply interesting piece of work written by past researcher at the lab, Devin Gaffney (link to original pdf.)

In the last decade it has been become a topic of discussion what online activism is, its impact, how we can analyze it, in what context it occurs...etc.

Some of the conclusions that I understand from the analysis made by Devin, which focused on the Iran election, challenged the manual "curation method" for leaning only towards qualitative analysis. In his paper, he uses quantitative analysis instead, which in the case of online activism is fairly new. His method shows very interesting data findings that directly address issues such as whether a "Twitter Revolution" is occurring in the Middle East since 2009 aiding physical revolutions to actually develop. Currently, if you search for "curation method" one sees that it's predominant in the biomedical/bioinformatics arena for most of it.

If you think of it, the fact remains that since the Moldova civil unrest (2009) a series of other protests followed: the Iranian elections (2009-2010), Tunisian revolution (2010-2011), Egyptian revolution (2011). Among all the factors which may explain why these revolts took place and spread across the Middle East, Twitter should be taken into account as, perhaps, the primary medium to coordinate the protests.

Not only these four revolts represent the impact, but also an incredible wave of Middle East demonstrations (see this interactive map for latest news). In addition, similar coverage is given by a wide variety of world newspapers or news channels such as the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC news, NPR, among some of them.

This is real! And therefore, even more interesting is whether thanks to Twitter, these revolts were seen as a victory, inciting so surrounding countries under repressed societies to rise up against their dictators to form a revolution.

Many questions may be answered by showing the evidence of Devin's quantitative analysis methodology, especially in the current context of the Arab World Uprisings.

On the other hand, ethics is another issue to spend time thinking about, and should be considered analyzing if further study wants to be done.

Your Facebook Profile Reflects Who You Are

It seems that Reppler has been putting up together a very nice mashup of the ideas I had in mind.... All those who were following my WAI project milestones, Reppler represents my project ideas....

A pity, but a relief to see that I wasn´t too crazy after all to have thought about it...

WAI Project-Reputation on Facebook

After rethinking where the scope of this project may lead... I decided to simplify my idea, or perhaps reduce it to a manageable extent, at least for now.

So, what this means? I will focus on what the reputation for a person on facebook is. In order to do that, I selected four main factors that could initially determine this reputation of a person ('s contacts).

These are:

1) Diversity of a user's friendlist (i.e. gender, country,),

2) Amount of user's friends,

3) Frequency of contact (i.e. wall posts, comments)

4) User's activity (i.e status updates)

I will formalize (and normalize!) this flowchart implementing it with MySQL Workbench. This is still a very simple, ugly initial draft version. But I just wanted to conceptualize and visualize what WAI should do...

* Also, important to note, I tried using FQL nomenclature so that we assure the possibility of gathering data exists...

In any case,being the only one working on it, my time as a human is also limited, and I would be very happy if someone is interested in joining efforts on the development side of this project (Please, don't hesitate to contact me!)

Basing this work on the following references: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/

Social Media Club @Rensselaer

I would like to announce the starting of a club in the RPI Community that will help to advance social media literacy, as well as encouraging ethical behavior online, learn from media professionals, and share the lessons they have learned, and also advocate for revolutionary new teach methods utilizing social media.

This is going to be a great network not only for students , but also for anyone interested in Social Media!

Start following SMCEDU@Rensselaer on Twitter and Facebook!!

Hackathon at RPI !

I went to the first Hackathon of my life around 8,30pm! This one was supposed to last until 8 am next day. But of course, being my first time to experience a hackathon on a Saturday night. I could not conceive the idea of programming all night long on a Saturday night. So I left around 1 am ...

Nevertheless, despite all my skepticism (frustration perhaps too!), WAI project did move a bit further than before.

Above all, I learnt more about the intricacies of Facebook Graph API, and discovered that my best bet was to use FQL to obtain the information of each user's friends. Thanks to Bharath Santosh, another finding was Facebook's test console to try these queries.

But there seemed to be a problem with this platform because most of the queries fields came out as "null" values. After a bit of research, I found out that other people were having the same problem, and the conclusion is that this issue was a known bug of the test console.

At least, I wrote down and saved all the queries before I started testing them.

In addition, I started digging a bit more in depth and realized that perhaps my intentions to retrieve all friends of a user might need an "access token" for each of those friends....

In any case, like any other optimistic person, I was expecting to get my whole back-end project done in just a few hours... And that the "hackathon strength" was going to allow me to achieve it!! :) But the reality was different, like always, and so this represents the status of where I left.

For those who don't believe that either I attended, or that there even was a hackathon at all, please visit this album:

https://www.facebook.com/album.php?fbid=1619095961258&id=1352160625&aid=2068218

Courtesy of Mike Pinkowish, facebook representative, RPI grad.

Who am I? wAi Project

This is the idea mentioned on my last post altogether in a draft, small presentation...

And now is time also, to go for the first time to a Hackathon being sponsored by Facebook at RPI.

So, let's see how that goes... ! Hopefully I come up with some results.

Tetherless World Research

From now on, this blog will also serve as part of the findings in a new research project I have started with, called the Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) at Rensselaer.

Even though I still haven't defined the project I would like to join in order to acquire some more depth; I've been lately thinking about the possibility to start my own project, which is closely related to what researchers at TWC do (I think!)

The idea is about presenting information about oneself in a social context.

There are only a few challenges. First, is the programming aspect of it.... So, given my curiosity and determination to actually see if this is may be a suitable project or not in technical terms... Let's get hands on and start work!

LET THE WORLD KNOW and Google's results will follow

It hasn't been very long since I launched my website, and I already achieved my most desirable aim : Appear on a google search!
So, now if you look for my name, my website will be on there. This is great!
I guess that it was important to direct as much traffic (preferably from referring sites ~links) as you can, if you want to show up quick.
Also, submit the website to directories such as OPD(dmoz.org), as well as to all the major search engines (yahoo, google, msn, ask.com, etc).

In any case, good news for me, since my intention was to appear on google rather than having to send the website to people.

New Website

So.... After several weeks spent in the idea of creating my own website, I AM DONE!!
I invested lots of hours and effort, but now, let's move on. It's time to think of marketing my name on the net...
Probably I will start making more use of the blogs: read, follow, post, read, follow, post etc... And discover new environments on the web.


PS: www.diegoregules.com

WIX--Web Design

This has been a great discovery... I am creating my first website, and I don't need to study the coding part of it. It may be helpful later on, but for now, to create website has become a piece of cake thanks to Wix.com.
Creativity is another story....

Times have changed

After a year since Lehman Brothers went down, and the whole economy collapsed.... Now reviewing my last posts... I have changed my mind.
Well, in reality I don't know very sure where my career will actually take me. It's clear to me that important IT opportunities are going to lie in the gap caused by the lack of IT regulation. Regulators and attorneys will have to turn to study IT law, but does it really exist? If so, is it commonly known to the public?
In any case, great thoughts or maybe not so good, since I don't think I have the right skills to be an "IT attorney".
We will see where I end up... I am confident that my future's uncertain for now, and probably, hopefully, forever as well.

IT AND FINANCE

Possibly the other day I changed my life in a very meaningful way, by rethinking what I wanted to lean towards in my future professional career.
Finance seems a very good way to go actually...

http://technology.inc.com/managing/articles/200710/metcalfe2.html

Nokia N97

For anyone who didn't believe me with my last post. Here's the definite Smartphone that will say "bye bye" to Apple's iPhone.
We will see next Spring 2009, what will happen...

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2008/gb2008122_820144.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (Nokia Tube)

I WANT TO ANNOUNCE THE NEW IT REVOLUTION AS REGARDS CELLPHONE/SMART PHONE DEVICES. IT'S NOT THE iPHONE AS EVERYONE WAS EXPECTING, IT'S EVEN BETTER ---> Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.
A much better device than the "untouchable"phone of Apple!!

And what is more important (since I come from Spain) is that Nokia chose Spain to be the first European country to get the device.
After my little Marketing speech, I will leave my readers to judge for themselves. I think my preferences are quite clear, when talking about smart phones.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2008/gb2008102_473486.htm

http://noknok.tv/2008/11/12/nokia-5800-on-sale-dec-1-in-spain-official/

AS A FINAL REMARK: "It's a fact that Nokia has much more experience than Apple."

LAST QUIZ -INTRO TO IT CLASS

Personally, I ran out of time trying to finish this quiz. I think that many other classmates felt the same way, and as the teacher said :"this one was tough". So, I should not feel as bad, since I know that I knew the content of the quiz. That's what is all about in this life: knowing and learning...

Given the already publicly recognized American recession, here's an article that may ease our feelings in general as IT students, or IT professionals of the future.

http://cio.com/article/466869/Wall_Street_s_Losses_May_Be_Computer_Sciences_Gain?source=home_ts

IT and individual privacy=conflict!

Here's an intense paper that I wrote about some of the information technologies that present CLEAR threats to our privacy

http://www.box.net/shared/di0lsnph3q

Information Technology definition

Since IT continuously shapes his definition, this document will try to also reflect that accordingly.

For this reason, the document will be updated more than one time.

And I will appreciate if you could contribute with your comments for a better definition.

** To visualize it properly Open the file instead of using the preview feature.
http://www.box.net/shared/aar4lr5uju


Thank you!

HEURISTICS

Now that we discussed in class the heuristics for user interface design...

Here's a little essay that I've written about a similar topic we all should be aware of.....>>the big impact that UCD should have on IT professionals.

Here's the link:
http://www.box.net/shared/poaafi6n1d


Please post your comments/suggestions or critiques, I'd really appreciate them!

CCNI

Last Tuesday's visit to CCNI dissapointed me in the way that we actually didn't get to see and TOUCH THE SUPERCOMPUTER!!

Anyway, this type of field trips and guest speakers are a very dynamic aspect of this course, which I am thoroughly enjoying.

Some good IT news of the week:>
http://www.cio.com/article/462349/Dr._Google_Sees_You_Now?source=home_ln