This past weekend I gave a couple talks at the inaugural WordCamp Boston. WordCamps are local, community-organized events for WordPress users and enthusiasts. We had about 400 people at the Microsoft Cambridge campus.
Last week I was invited to give a talk at the TechMaine annual conference in Portland, Maine.
Being a longer time slot than I previously have used to talk about Ubiquity, I decided to dedicate a good portion of the talk to Jetpack. Being outside of Mozilla for the past few months, this gave me an opportunity to get reacquainted with the Jetpack APIs. I myself was impressed by how easy it was to develop a quick Jetpack. I ended up preparing two to live-code during the talk: one called Helvetica which, with one click, replaces all fonts on the current page with Helvetica; and You Are Here which uses an open API from IPinfoDB to display the physical location of the domain you are currently visiting in the status bar. Both are now on the Jetpack Gallery.
Unfortunately there was a bit of a snowstorm leading up to the event, but there was still a nice turnout and I got to meet some fantastic people there. Ken Shoemake of slerp and quaternion fame came up to me after my talk and said “the Ubiquity parser reminded me of the dancing bear… it’s less surprising that it works well as that it works at all.” 
I also enjoyed the other great presentations in the technology track, covering the virtues of REST and basic iPhone development.
Yesterday I participated in and presented at a workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World at ACM SIGIR in Boston. The focus of the workshop was on cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). Cross-language information retrieval systems enable users to retrieve relevant information across different languages for a certain task or query. Even if you have a budget to translate some documents from a foreign language to your language, how do you find the relevant documents to translate in the first place if you don’t speak (or read) that source language? This is the type of problem that CLIR aims to solve.
I have been accepted to present a short paper entitled “Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface” at the ACM SIGIR Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World in Boston on July 23rd. I’ll probably be there in Boston a few days before or after as well in order to find an apartment for the fall. If anyone is in Boston at that time and would like to meet up, or if you’re near Cambridge and looking for an apartment-mate, please let me know. 
If you would like to see a preprint of the paper, please contact me at x@x.com where x=mitcho.
This past Saturday was Tokyo BarCamp 2009 at Sun’s Yoga offices. I of course gave a presentation on Ubiquity and our recent localization efforts, including Parser 2. As you can see, I signed up quickly:
CC-BY-NC iMorpheus
Here are the slides I used in that session. There are two “demo” sections in the slides… the first was a simple demo of Ubiquity 0.1.x showing off the translate, map, and edit-page commands. The second demo was of Ubiquity Parser 2 and showing off how little code it takes to add your language to Ubiquity with Parser 2.
Yesterday I presented on Ubiquity internationalization and the new parser design at the Mozilla Extension Development Meeting (Japanese), a community event organized by some extension developers in Japan. There were a couple other Ubiquity-related “lightning talks” as well, so I’ll summarize some of the interesting ideas from those talks below.
昨日第11回Mozilla拡張機能勉強会で Ubiquity の国際化と次世代パーサについて発表してきました。色々鋭いコメントをいただき、僕も良い勉強になりました。^^ スライドの方をslideshareに載せたので、是非参考にまた見てみてください。ライトニングトークでも Ubiquity の話で盛り上がったので、そのLTの内容で特に面白いと僕が思ったものを下に英語でちょっとまとめてみます。