WWW2006: Day 2(Through Taowei’s Looking Glass)
by Taowei Wang
W00t! It’s sunny out today, though the weather forecast foretells rain and cloud. The main auditorium is opened an opening ceremony. A pair of bagpipte players and traditional dancers led the organizers and guests in. Wendy Hall and Sir TBL both gave short talks. The opening key note was given by David Brown, CEO of Motorola. According to him, the next few years for mobile computing on ‘devices known formerly as mobile phones’ will see a convergence of macro, micro, and socioeconomic ramifications of these devices. The ubiquitous connectivity will be raised to a new level. Additional (context-sensitive) services will be on demand.
Side note. As internet gaming has been taken to a new level, multiplayer games have become very popular. Many Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) have millions of subscribers (see World of Warcraft). Currently many of these games offer the content through computers where both the graphics and display hardware allow full color saturation and dynamic 3D environments. A gamer who wants to continually build on his character cannot do so on-the-go (for connectivity and hardware issues). A thought to ‘feed’ such need is to allow cell-phone powered gaming into the same game, but simpler content. Allow minigames that increase the attributes of the virtual characters using less-powerful mobile medium while the gamer is on-the-goal can be … profitable.
Back to the conference… attended the IPTV (TV over IP) workshop for a few presentations. The first paper introduced better P2P streaming paradigm (parent-finding in a DAG network topology) with regards to video quality. They also have a GUI that allows user to define weights of preferences. These weights then are used to adjust the viewing sizes of each of the simultaneously viewed channels. Good idea. Bad UI. I never thought watching TV would be so complicated after watching the demo. Research in Bell Lab brought content-embedded service. For example, visual notice of incoming phone call (and show caller ID) on TV. Would also use relevant information as ‘who is watching’ to show appropriate to select useful services . While VoiP has been fairly positively received, I have my doubts about IPTV. Do people really like watching TV stream that comes from the tube? I’d rather pick out just the programs I’d like to see instead of browsing aimlessly on TV. Cable companies may want to bundle all their programs together, but they’ll have to compete with the iTune-like model. Select bunch of programs that seem interesting, download for viewing later, or stream to watch now… So, what’s the point of IPTV?
On the other hand, I’d like a remote for my PC…
Attended the Identity and References on the Web. It had the most animated discussions of all talks I’ve attended here. At least half of the people there wanted to have a ‘new standard’ to separate meaningful dereferenciable URIs and those that do not. Meaningful being what humans can consume in this setting. Hmmm… doesn’t seem like an overhaul of the URI system would take place anytime soon, though. And it’s not just because of people’s philosophical differences, but also each party’s vested economic interest.
A talk on trust was presented in this workshop as well. It was about how to make sense of trust in different situations (work, romance, etc.), and what a trust system do to not confuse them. The presenter made references to both of Jen’s trust projects.
[pictures to follow]
