ICEIS 2008: Slow afternoon and Moira Norrie

This afternoon has been quite slow. My path 340, 348, 495, 612, 193, and 467. The key slower of the afternoon has been the fact that for each of the session there has always been a missing presenter. May be because it is a Saturday afternoon in Barcelona, but then I check the rest of the parallel tracks and it seams quite endemic it. Anyway, I run into an interesting talk about how to map workflows onto multicore architectures—paper 340. It was just a talk that lead straight to scheduling problems of direct acyclic graphs. I ask about the cyclic cases and their approach was to break the cycle and use the acyclic schedule. Mmh. I also found myself how they plain to make those schedulers a reality without messing with the underlying OS one. Another paper that cough my attention was paper 193, where they were focusing to fraud risk reduction. The interesting twists there were that (1) it is, by nature, an unsupervised problem, and (2) they were trying to do both detection and prevention. Unfortunately the only evolutionary computation related paper— paper 306-–had no presenter… A total different story has been Moira Norrie keynote speech. She has presented their research efforts on paper & the digital world. A very interesting presentation covering from basic technologies—Anoto-–and latest digital paper products—Livescribe-–to their research on interactive paper. The basic idea, paper that allows you to interact with the content—for instance multimedia one. Their research involves from clicking on paper, to gestures, to the infrastructure (iServer) their cross-media information server, and their plugins—such as iPaper. Active components (no, not the Microsoft ones) are the bridges they build to control media from a paper and digital pen. Of course, they can also record annotations, whiteboards, audio, or also support collaboration via multiple pens usage. Other interesting usages of the digital paper was information search and proofreading to mention a few. You can find more information on Moira’s home page.