I found this presentation on information shadows by Mike Kuniavsky via Daniel’s site. Given my interest in Symbolic Systems, it really hit a sweet spot. Here’s a short abstract: My presentation, called Information Shadows: How ubiquitous computing serializes everyday things (1.2MB PDF) is my attempt at showing how ubiquitous computing technology is, in essence, turning whole classes of everyday objects into serials, or services, by creating pervasive digital access to the objects’ metainformation, their information shadows. In the process, I talk about blenders, timeshares, Cuddle Chimps, City Carshare, and Exactitudes. I think it’s a fun talk, and I’m really happy to have had the opportunity to articulate these ideas in this forum.

Yesterday Lauren and I went to Semantic Web Austin’s event with Peter Mika of Yahoo! Research. Peter delivered an excellent presentation on getting started with RDFa. I feel like one of the biggest challenges with getting started with Semantic Web is that it’s so hard to get up and running quickly. Being a W3C specification, the documentation doesn’t immediately lend itself to easy practical implementation. It seems that most of the time introductions for beginners dance around specifications, semantics, IETF councils, and theoretical specifications. I think it probably turns off a lot of people actively working to advance the cause. And the cause is worthy!

One of the blessings of living in Austin – and it’s important to remember them this time of year when you feel your eyeballs melting out when you step into mid-afternoon sun – is its legacy of work in machine learning and AI. Here we have a very active interest group, Semantic Web Austin run by Juan Sequeda, who has, over the last year or so, brought some very visible researchers in Semantic Web to town to teach hands-on tutorials. If the concept of “Semantic Web” is foreign to you, let me try to capture its essence succinctly. Presently one can conceive of the Web as a web of documents: presentation and data are represented as web pages.