mitcho.com » presentation

WordCamp Boston 2010

mitcho — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 02:02:01 +0000

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.

(I invite you to also check out more photos below as well as my full WordCamp gallery.)

My first talk was “Getting Into The Loop,” which gives a quick taste of The Loop which is a central programming construct in every WordPress application. (SlideShare, SpeakerRate)

My second talk was an Ignite talk on the importance of beta testing plugins. Ignite talks are five minute lightning talks with 20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds. (SlideShare, SpeakerRate)

The videos for both talks will ultimately go up on wordpress.tv.

The event was a huge success and I’m looking forward to help organize WordCamp Boston 2011 as well!

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Mashing up the browser in Maine

mitcho — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:00:32 +0000

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.

Mashup the Browser with Ubiquity and Jetpack

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Report from SIGIR Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World

mitcho — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:42:27 +0000

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.

The keynote speaker was Ralf Steinberger of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, presenting the European Media Monitor family of applications. EMM is a suite of different applications all based on a core platform which aggregates news stories from a variety of sources around the world in a few dozen different languages. The system uses various CLIR techniques to then cluster stories by event, regardless of language or source country. Large news agencies and organizations, as well as the European Commission itself, use the system to track upcoming news stories as well as health concerns. In the European Union which has over a dozen different “official” languages, there is a great need for this type of service. The applications are available to the public so I invite you to play around with them at the EMM site.¹

The workshop’s paper presentations were quite diverse and all interesting. Elena Filatova presented an interesting approach to measuring the “trustworthiness” of statements in Wikipedia entries, by comparing the overlap in content statements between different language entries (more overlap => more trustworthy) which can be used to create inverted pyramid summaries. Perspectives from different use cases were also examined through presentations on news analysts and health organizations, patent searches, and medical information for personal use, as well as discussion of the need for CLIR for historical and religious texts.

One interesting thread throughout the day’s sessions was the issue of loanword processes and the possible use of romanization as an interlingua. Cross-language named entity recognition is a major problem in CLIR. Many novel words and names (common in news articles) go through processes of loanword adaptation and transliteration and are hard to identify and also are not in the systems’ dictionaries. A few of the talks touched on these problems, including a great talk by Kashif Riaz of the U of M on the salient (and great) differences between Hindi and Urdu. Frederic Gey described a number of different approaches to comparing strings via a romanization interlingua.

Another interesting thread was the idea of the target user. The needs of CLIR applications can vary greatly depending on its use case and the users’ savvy. The needs of a patent search office, where many professional searchers are already multilingual, is clearly different from the needs of an executive hoping to stay on top of the world news related to their organization. It was brought up, however, that in this age of open data and API’s, if a CLIR resource provides a good API, it need not necessarily supply the perfect interface for every type of user, as different third parties could also develop such targeted interfaces.

While most of the presentations and research interests in the room were on users accessing resources in various languages, I presented on Ubiquity. The talk was intended to highlight the idea that the opposite problem of users with different languages getting at the same kinds of information and getting equally powerful user experiences is also a different but worthwhile problem. Below are the slides from this talk. As a web archive of all the papers will be set up soon, I believe it’s safe to put up my paper as well, so please check it out. It’s a good short (four pages) overview of the innovative approaches we’ve taken to build a localizable natural language interface.

Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface

“Ubiquity: Designing a Multilingual Natural Language Interface.” Presented at SIGIR Workshop on Information Access in a Multilingual World, Boston, July 2009. To appear in a proceedings. 240 kb - pdf

Unfortunately, there is no public API available for these resources. We asked. ↩

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Presenting in Boston at SIGIR Workshop

mitcho — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:10:25 +0000

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.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Notes from BarCamp Tokyo 2009

mitcho — Mon, 18 May 2009 05:40:54 +0000

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.

I also led a brief afternoon discussion on open ideas: the approach of working in the open, making the thought process and decisions public, not just the results. Here are the slides for that one:

My impetus for doing this discussion is probably clear to many—as I go back to academia this fall, I’ve been recently wondering about whether I could apply the open process used at Mozilla to my own academic work, blogging frequently about little thoughts and discoveries, even if they turn out to be wrong or dead-ends. For those who are interested, Brian Lockwood caught some of my slides and the discussion on video.

I also found a great photo from the discussion—I’m right there on the left edge.

CC-BY-SA LostInInaka

Sun’s facilities had a combination of different styles of rooms (lecture/presentation, this large seminar-style, a small-group one) which was very nice for different styles of sessions.

I really enjoyed meeting the Yokohama International School IT department folks who had an interesting presentation (video) on how they live stream their department meetings every week and try to be open and benefit from (and give back to) an ed-tech community larger than themselves. Other highlights for me included Mitch Altman’s session on hacker spaces and “hacking” of all varieties and sorts, Karamoon’s very knowledgeable longer session on security (video).

Finally it’s good to point out that my friend Kim Ahlström open-sourced his website jisho.org. You can now get that entire repository on github. He also demoed the Cereling library/wrapper for various parsers and morphological tools which his company will be open-sourcing in the future. Happy hacking!

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Talking Ubiquity in Japan: 拡張機能勉強会にて発表

mitcho — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:29:30 +0000

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。

Mozilla Ubiquity の国際化と次世代パーサ

mar of Japanese SuMo fame (not that sumo) presented on his foray into the development of an improved Japanese parser based on Jono’s. One interesting approach his parser took was to split up the input on delimiters like commas and parse each “clause” and then combining the arguments for one execution. This allows certain types of fronting constructions. For example:
```
...を   送って、 dynamisに
...-NOM send, dynamis-to
```
“To dynamis, send …”
This type of input, aside from being pretty natural in Japanese, has the advantage of offering the parser an unambiguous argument parse within each clause, cutting down on the possible ambiguities.

mar’s discussion, however, also naturally touched on the limitations of the current NLParser implementation, making localization of individual commands and the suggestion of verbs quite difficult.
Hitoshi SASAKI of the Sasaki Lab at Takushoku University discussed some possible applications of Ubiquity in an educational context. In particular he demoed a `hiragana` command which takes some sentence in kanji and rewrites it in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic alphabet. What’s more, the command lets you specify the appropriate grade level for the substitution, making it appropriate for elementary school kids and non-native speakers alike. Sasaki thought the ability to access this kind of functionality right from the content page was of great benefit to this application.

Thanks to dynamis for supporting my Japanese presentation and making this happen! ^^

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.