Adrien’s blog
Stuff I like, stuff I do, stuff I make

Le projet ECLORE vient de diffuser son comparatif de logiciels de gestion de références bibliographiques, parmi lesquels: zotero (mon préféré), endnote, bibtex, bibus, et nombreux autres! Il est possible de comparer plusieurs d’entre eux sur de nombreux aspects (description, installation, bibliothèques, références, vocabulaire, filtres d’importation, exportation, connexion, styles, ergonomie…) après avoir choisi des facteurs discriminants comme le système d’exploitation, le prix et le type de license (propriétaire/libre).

ECLORE : Evaluation et comparaison de logiciels de gestion de références bibliographiques
Cliquez sur le lien pour accéder à la page d’accueil puis sur base de données ECLORE.

Today’s thought: How to keep the context of a URL shared by a contact when bookmarking this URL? By context, I mean: meta-information that describes why you might be interested by the shared URL, who sent it to you, when, and also gives you a way to reply/annotate/comment this sharing after consumption.

Confused? Okay, let me give an example use case (which happened to me this morning):

1. A friend sends you an email saying “you must watch this amazing documentary, it gives constructive criticism of your research approach i think: http://youtube/giheughe, what would you reply to the question at minute 16.22?“
2. You already have several emails in your inbox with links to lengthy videos to watch. You would like to make some space in your inbox, but you don’t have time to watch these videos right now.

…and possible solutions to clear your inbox and keep a reference to URLs for later consumption:

1. Solution 1 (no context): you “bookmark” these videos in a personal “todo-playlist” in order to watch them later. But if you do that, you lose the context of these shared URLs (i.e. for the definition of context, read above). Thus you don’t know in which mindset to watch the video and where to put feedback responding to your friend’s email.
2. Solution 2 (webmail): if you use a good webmail (i.e. each email has its own URL, e.g. gmail.com), you can bookmark the email of your friend. This solution makes it possible to archive the email to make some space in your inbox, and to keep the context of shared URLs.
3. Solution 3 (social-networking style): you bookmark the videos’ URLs in your “todo-playlist” (which you could also call “TV” btw), and, when you watch them, the user interface shows you the context of this shared video. E.g. the web page that embeds the video displays a frame with the name and photo/avatar of the friend who sent you this video, along with his recommendation message (e.g. the content of his email), and a link (or even a textbox) to respond. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Just a thought I wanted to share: have you ever been frustrated of not being able to bookmark a file of your computer on delicious? …to find the URL of a file (e.g. an image) you downloaded, in order to share this URL instead of sending the file? … or event to be able to work seamlessly on any document from any computer, with or without installed software? and I won’t even talk about synchronization of files between people, computers and devices… (is that the actual last version of the document?)

If feel so, you’re just like me! Wouldn’t it be nice that we only work with URLs instead of OS-specific and computer-specific local file paths? That way we could leverage thousands of cutting-edge tools available on the internet, in order to better manage, annotate, visualize, share and thus better browse through information!

Of course putting everything on the internet is scary because we’re not always online, and because some stuff sometimes disappear from the web (e.g. older versions of software which are not free anymore)… But what if we “cache” our web-stored information on our computers instead, and assume that the web-hosted version is the reference of the resources (with an Unique Resource Identifier… URI!). This URI could lead to several hosting spaces, including private storage (e.g. computers, devices, portable hard drives), that would keep synchronized.

I promise that, if such a system exists (and works well of course), I would never have to keep downloaded research papers on my computer any longer!

Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham highlights an important shortcoming of typical structured knowledge management and collaboration platforms (e.g. intranets):

For questions like ‘What’s going on in the project?’ we could design a database. But whatever fields we put in the database would turn out to be what’s not important about what’s going on in the project. What’s important about the project is the stuff you don’t anticipate.

Last week, my PhD supervisor and 2 fellow PhD students (Julien Subercaze and Johann Stan, also under his supervision), participated to two seminars. The first seminar was in Universität Karlsruhe (Germany), and the second seminar was in Universiteit Twente (Enschede, the Netherlands).

In the frame of these seminars, I presented some slides on my current PhD work: Awareness Without Overload.

This presentation introduces existing approaches for improved enterprise communication and collaboration (including social web platforms and research works on Computer-Supported Collaborative Environments), which motivates a convergent framework of real-time contextual notifications based on employees’ work context. The framework is presented and current research issues (work in progress) are introduced.

As usual , I’m happy to welcome your comments

My homepage needs some freshing up but I have so many ideas (sometimes conflictual) that I don’t know where to start!

Firstly, I must define what I understand by “homepage”: it must be the web page that I will spread around to represent my identity on forum/email signatures, on wikis, etc… So, it must provide some personal introduction and links to several facets of my identity (e.g. the researcher, the musician, the technology enthusiast…) on the web.

I considered using one of my existing public social profiles (netvibes, friendfeed, my lab profile, my wiki, or even this blog) as homepage. But:

• those public profiles are either too specific (representing only one of the facets of my identity) or too messy when too general (e.g. netvibes);
• my homepage is very well referenced on Google, so I’d better leverage that;
• …and I would like to manipulate some code!

So, let’s share some thoughts on what I’d like to make:

• The homepage must be nice looking on a computer and adapted for easy navigation on a mobile device => should I make a WAP version or use some generic HTML instead?
• I would like my page to be machine-understandable, by adding some semantics (RDFa, FOAF…)
• I want to be able to edit quickly and precisely (no WYSIWYG please!) the content of my homepage directly on the web.
• The content must be backed up on every change, so that I can revert a change, either accidental or malicious.
• I want the page to be lightweight and respectful of W3C standards.

Err.. this sounds like a neat semantic wiki, doesn’t it?

And now, some more precise ideas I’ve had:

• In order to have a self-contained homepage for all the facets of my identify, I’m thinking of a unique HTML file with fragment anchors for each facet (e.g. http://joly.adrien.free.fr/#music would only display the “music” part of my homepage). It would be nice to display a menu/tabs to switch from a facet to another, without having to load another page. The nice thing about this solution is that legacy web browsers (including MS Pocket Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile “smartphones”) that do not support modern javascript will still be able to render the full page and leverage anchors.
• I want to include some lifestreaming on the page. For that I could deploy Noserub to federate my feeds, or simply embed a friendfeed gadget. The possibility for visitors to comment lifestream entries directly on my homepage (incl. through Facebook/Google friend connect) is a plus.
• EditArea seems like a great way to make my page editable online.
• Concerning the semantics, I see two possibilities: the simple one is to embed some RDFa and/or microformats directly in the HTML code and to have a separate FOAF file that I would have to maintain separately; the geeky solution is to store the content of my homepage (mostly links, anyway) in a FOAF file (in RDF) and to render it as HTML pages using stylesheet-based transformations (e.g. XSLT). As a geek I obviously prefer the second option! However it is also a quite heavy solution, and I’m not sure that its complexity is worth the result, and it might not comply with all the requirements I expressed above…

Do you have any thoughts to share on this?

Intending to share my current works on my PhD thesis, I’m regularly twitting my advances and issues using the #mythesis hashtag. Feel free to follow this feed, and to react to updates, if you’re interested!

On this blog post, Ori introduces current works of the MIT on augmented reality. Instead of having to wear goggles, the originality of their approach is to project the display directly on walls, hands or objects. Check out this video:

Dans un souci de transparence et de sollicitation d’idées, je viens de partager mon sujet de thèse sur mon wiki. Vous pouvez y accéder à l’adresse suivante: http://adrienjoly.pbwiki.com/ThesisSubject

Formulation fonctionnelle :
« Exploitation du contexte des utilisateurs pour faciliter leur interaction sur leurs sites de réseaux sociaux »

Formulation scientifique :
« Filtrage intelligent des interactions sociales basées sur le contexte »

Contribution principale : Moteur de filtrage en charge de :

• Sélectionner et diffuser des informations du contexte d’un utilisateur qui pourraient être valorisées sur son réseau social (en provocant de la communication)
• Filtrer et agréger les interactions du réseau social de cet utilisateur de manière à donner un ressenti de son état actuel, de manière plus ou moins pertinente par rapport au contexte actuel de cet utilisateur, en fonction de la granularité d’information souhaitée.

I’ve just watched an amazing video about the advances on brain signals analysis (Brain Power Video - CBSNews.com). Current research allow paralized people to communicate and control wheelchair movements by their thought! Monkeys can control a mechanical arm thanks to implants directly connected to the neurons of their brain! This looks like science fiction!

Watch CBS Videos Online