WWW is always an interesting conference. The range of relevant topics is quite wide, from cache-and-network type stuff for optimizing performance to speculative artificial-intelligence-type ideas, to sociological analysis and theory of what people actually do on the web. And so, going from one poster to another, or slipping out of your usual track into some other talk can be surprising, with the sometimes benefit of jolting you into a new idea.

The other interesting thing about WWW is that it does represent, in some ways, much of the brainpower at the center of web developments. Many of the people involved in standards and so on are there, and many of today's papers will be tomorrow's hot new ideas. On the other hand, so much of what happens on the web and affects it for regular users makes no appearance among the pointy-headed types at all. Some of it is just secretive (e.g., Google is well-represented at these things, but they never talk about what they're doing) and some of it just pays no attention to research papers (e.g., most ecommerce, publishing, and daily stuff that people use).

The tension here appears all the time, for example in the contrast between all the cool research ideas people have for search and data extraction, and what people actually do every day. Or the contrast between what WWWers hope to do with the semantic web and the reality of how much attention span most people have for such complexity. Or in the way that search engine response time and ease-of-use has basically eclipsed many clever ideas that would be too costly to add.

If pressed, I'd say this kind of contrast appears in many areas of computer science, the tension between what researchers can think of and what people actually will/do use. But it's all much more obvious at WWW, perhaps just because it's so widely used and develops so quickly and seems more like a force of nature (or, at least, an organic entity like a city or a nation) than a human-designed artifact. A lot of the time, we are just trying to keep up with its relentless development.

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

-- Vannevar Bush, 1945

(quoted by Udi Manber at www 2004, and by many others)

themes at www2004: semantic web, learning/information extraction, search.

New Scientist: Smart glasses detect eye contact

Now this is an interesting idea. Though even aside from the laughably ugly glasses, it only works within a meter -- and if you can't tell if someone is making eye contact with you from a meter away, you need more help than smart glasses can provide.

My research group at Intel had a paper titled Mining Models of Human Activities from the Web in WWW 2004. I gave the talk at the conference on Friday. Here is the powerpoint.

Udi Manber, formerly of Yahoo and academia, now running Amazon's search engine offshoot a9. His topic was "Customer-centric innovations in search and e-commerce". He made some observations about search in general, talked about some Amazon and a9 projects, and ended with some what-ifs.

[...regarding a paper on figuring out how novel articles are in comparison to previously seen articles, for the purpose of presenting users with the maximally new information...]

Don Patterson: I don't think this is a real problem.
Mike Perkowitz: whys that
Don Patterson: Because news is almost all the same.
Mike Perkowitz: true
Don Patterson: Tons of places just repeat what others say.
Mike Perkowitz: but what about a story breaking over time and you want to catch the scoop

The first talk this morning was from Rick Rashid, of Microsoft Research. His general theme was"Empowering the Individual". Highlight of the talk: a 1994 Microsoft promo video clip about "digital convergence" to the tune of "Surfin' USA" (with badly rewritten lyrics, believe you me). Anyway he had three basic themes: democratization of information, getting your life back, and bending things around you to your will. Though his talk came across more like a laundry list of MSR projects, with some themes perhaps detectable.

I've added Don Patterson as a thinking machine co-blogger. He's a grad student at UW CSE, and we've worked together on activity inference at Intel Research. I'll let him make any additional introduction if he likes.

Rendezvous IM with Donald Patterson
Mike Perkowitz: i dont think i buy this semantic web
Donald Patterson: It's hard to pin down.

TBL, as always, gave the conference keynote talk. He focused on a couple of things: top-level domains/namespace, and the semantic web.

Greetings from WWW 2004. I'll try to make notes about anything interesting as it happens. At the moment, I'll just note that Mayor Bloomberg has declared today, 5/19/04 to be "World Wide Web Day" in NYC.