New Social Gaming Company?

Techcrunch has an article about a new social gaming company called Tiny Speck. I think social gaming will be huge: We will all be constantly connected, we will carry around various intellectual prostethics, and we will have time to spend as the checkout line at the grocery store. It will also be interesting to see how games adapt once our attention span for a game is only five minutes? To sample what's out there check out the various games at Zynga (social games) or Kongregate (online flash games, many for the five-minute attention span).

Teaching a Foreign Language In a Virtual World

The New York Times has an article yesterday about an interesting type of game: A Virtual World where children will learn languages. Unfortunately, Wiz World Online is all in Chinese so I could not play it, but this is definitively a development to watch, and I would love to hear from people who have played it to understand how the virtual world works. I think that games have great potential to be used as a teaching tool where we can use AI and machine learning to personalize the game and learning experience without the personal attention of a teacher.

PS: When I just made a small modification to this entry, Google showed me an add for "Learn Chinese online with Beijing's best teachers."

Demo of CAT (the Cornell Anonymization Toolkit) at SIGMOD 2009

At the recent SIGMOD conference, we presented our new tool for limiting disclosure in data publishing: CAT, the Cornell Anonymization Toolkit. While there has been a lot of interesting work on different algorithms for privacy-preserving data publishing, there are few tools that combine them with a usable GUI that visualize what these algorithms achieve. CAT has an easy-to-use interface; it guides the user through the process of preparing a dataset forpublication while limiting disclosure through the identification of records that have high risk under various attacker models.

CAT currently implements l-diversity and t-closeness.

Below are a few screenshots of CAT; the code is available here. We welcome feedback from users about features that you would like to have and what aspects of the tool you think work well and which need improvement.

Blackboard buys TerriblyClever

Blackboard, the company that (among other applications) sells the course content management system that Cornell uses, has purchased MobilEdu, a company run by undergraduates from Stanford that developers university-centric services (such as GPS-supported maps, a directory, bills, courses, etc.) for the iPhone. Congratulations to the founders! I can only hope that this will have impact on Blackboard beyond new apps on the iPhone; the interface of the version of the Blackboard course management system that I have used has no Web 2.0 features and is very clunky. In addition, management of assignments and submission of solutions does not work well.

MayBMS demo at SIGMOD

MayBMS demo was presented at the 2009 ACM SIGMOD conference in Providence, RI. This was the first MayBMS demo after its official release on Sourceforge earlier this year. As part of the demonstration we showed two web applications built on top of the MayBMS server. The first one was a human resource management application that uses what-if analysis to aid managerial decisions, and the second one showed how random graphs and social networks can be modeled and queried as probabilistic databases. See the conference poster here.

Bulding an OS for netbooks with two developers

Techcrunch reported on July 8 that besides Google, French company Jolicloud is building an operating system for netbooks. They seem to be building on Linux, but what impressed me most is that their team consists of just two developers. I found this encouraging for us at a university where we are always limited by just working with a few selected graduate students. It is the idea and the people that matter, not the size of the team!

Ashwin's thesis recognized

Cornell DB group alumnus Ashwin Machanavajjhala has won the 2009 ACM SIGMOD Doctoral Dissertation Award honorable mention. Congratulations Ashwin!