Is vlog the next big thing after social networks?

When the like of MySpace and Facebook came into existence, social networking was a new buzz word and potential technological and commercial venture. Some even hailed the new technology as the new definition of socialism for the 21st century.

Nowadays, social networking sites are like corner shops springing everywhere. As they replicate each other, some decided to specialize to create their own niche market whilst others forced into it. For example, as a computer scientist I find LinkedIn to be must useful. However, I doubt a pop artist would do, instead Bebo would provide a good outlet for the artist to reach potential young audience on the social network whose users' average age is 16 or so it seems.

Bebo is an example of age group oriented social network. Others, like Google's Orkut, Friendster, and Netlog, either lack orientation or becoming more of regional or specific activities oriented social networks. The point is that social networking sites became part of the social activities like clubs and social gatherings. One cannot help but to wander where is the next explosion of this technology based socializing?

If we compare what happened in the cyber world with what happened in the physical world, one expects pictures to follow text, which had happened already, and as technology becomes available, video to follow pictures. That may be where is out next stop. This thought came to me as I was surveying video sharing sites.

Youtube is the first one comes to mind, with its flexibility, Google's backing, first in the market, and so on. But is there potential competitors? Looking at Blip.tv, the variety of questions and issues to be asked and answered in this field jumped out. First, vlogging will never kill social network sites or textual blogging, so the best thing is to integrate that. Second, vlogging has elements of music showcasing that appear strongly on MySpace and Last.FM so an ability to showcase is very important. As a result, Youtube single channel needs to change; Blip.tv advertising income share strengthen the idea of showcasing similar to Last.FM; these are examples.

The vlogging and vodcasting may be the next socially burgeoning technology as technology becoming accessible to users and benefits become clearer to commercial users in particular. However, it remains unclear if there will be similar growth in services providers in this area, will remain limited to handful of providers, or will be incorporated service within existing social networking sites with vlogging or vodcasting as another tab on the menu? One decisive factor in this is availability of technology to vlogging providers, i.e. codecs, streaming, and ontological tagging.

Maya 2008 changes

Anyone who uses Maya, Unreal, and similar large software, whose development is fast pace, will find each version is different from it's previous one. Moreover, tutorials that come with the software, let alone hundreds available online, are often out of date and lack behind. As Maya concerned, here are few changes we found, in the labs I run, when using Maya 2008 from main tutorials often used.

Whenever 'Edit Polygons' menu are mentioned you can change that to 'Edit Mesh' menu. Similarly, whenever 'Split' is required you can use 'Detach Components' in the 'Edit Mesh' menu. As for 'Extrude' there is a menu entry for it under 'Edit Mesh'.

There are obviously more changes in menu names but those we have found so far. My advice to my students is always to look at what the tutorial tells them to do and not necessary at how the tutorial tells them to do it. This may be of help to those working with Maya and other fast paced software where tutorials do not necessary keep up with the changes in the software.

From Swarm Sensors to Emotional Modeling

I will be giving a talk at University of Lincoln on 5th Feb 2009 in which I will be combining two projects. They may seem to be unrelated. Here is the abstract with some related publications.
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The talk will cover briefly two main research areas. The first part of the talk will look at current work undertaking to use swarm intelligence in optimizing sensor networks. The work considers static and mobile sensors. The mobile sensors case is the more interesting and difficult since it implies dynamic topology. We show how GA and PSO can be applied to optimize energy consumption in the sensor network and to maintain and re-organize the topology as sensors move.

The mobile sensors could be viewed as a crowd of people (e.g. carrying mobile telephones and participating in social networking). However, human swarms, unlike other swarms, are influenced in their behaviour by many factors such as perception, emotions and social relations. The second part of the talk will focus on emotions modeling. Emotions modeling reported in literature had often relied on threshold representation of emotions. In our work we start from psychological theories of emotion and develop computational models. This part of the talk will give a brief summary of the work done so far covering Darwinian / Ekman basic emotions, Millenson 3D model of emotions and Scherer wheel of emotions.



Some related publications
1. Blewitt , W.F., Ayesh, A.: Modeling the Emotional State of an Agent through Fuzzy Logic With Reference to the Geneva Emotion Wheel In: Bertelle, C., Ayesh, A. (eds.): European Simulation and Modelling (ESM'2008) Conference. EUROSIS, Le Havre, France (2008) 279-283
2. Blewitt, W., Ayesh, A., John, R.I., Coupland, S.: A Millenson-based approach to emotion modelling. Human System Interactions, 2008 Conference on (2008) 491-496
3. Al-Obaidy, M., Ayesh, A.: Optimizing Autonomous Mobile Sensors Network using PSO Algorithms. International Conference on Computer Engineering and Systems (ICCES'08). IEEE, Cairo, Egypt (2008)
4. Al-Obaidy, M., Ayesh, A.: Energy Efficient PSO-based Algorithm for Optimizing Autonomous Wireless Sensor Network In: Bertelle, C., Ayesh, A. (eds.): European Simulation and Modelling (ESM'2008) Conference. EUROSIS, Le Havre, France (2008) 201-206
5. Al-Hudhud, G., Ayesh, A.: Real Time Movement Coordination Technique Based on Flocking Behaviour for Multiple Mobile Robots System. Swarm Intelligence Algorithms and Applications Symposium (SIAAS'08) - AISB 2008 Convention, Vol. 11, Aberdeen, Scotland (2008) 31-37
6. Ayesh, A., Stokes, J., Edwards, R.: Fuzzy Individual Model (FIM) for Realistic Crowd Simulation: Preliminary Results. Fuzzy Systems Conference, 2007. FUZZ-IEEE 2007. IEEE International. IEEE, London (2007) 1-5
7. Ayesh, A.: Emotionally Motivated Reinforcement Learning Based Controller. IEEE SMC 2004, Vol. 1, The Hague, The Netherlands (2004) 874-878 vol. 871
8. Ayesh, A.: Perception and Emotion Based Reasoning: A Connectionist Approach. Informatica 27 (2003) 119-126