Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

Can open access lead to wide dissemination impact

February 22nd, 2009

According to the results from research carried out at the University of Chicago, by James Evans and Jacob Reimer on Open Access and Global Participation in Science the answer is No for the 1st world and Yes for the developing world.
It is being reported that they found that on average when a publication was made available online in an open source format, it increased the citations of that article by about 8 percent but when articles are made available online in a commercial format citations increase by about 12 percent.. A situation which reverses for poor countries where open access articles are much more likely to be cited.
Further insight from one of the authors, James Evans is in this video below :

I’ve been thinking about this and what if you could have the best of both worlds Open Access in a Commercial Journal and then I came across Springer Open Choice, which seems to allow for articles to be distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License. I see this used to full effect by authors in this Springer Mobile Networks and Applications Journal: Special Issue on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications.
Which leads me to sign off on this topic with a pointer to GPeerReview, which is a (CLI) tool that allows peers to review articles and then to sign that review …. which is interesting.

Security threats, IPv4 address ownership and P2P traffic

February 15th, 2009

Via Circle ID I picked up on this IBM X-Force(R) Trend and Risk Report for 2008. There’s plenty of insight from the Circle ID and IBM executive summary on the headliner treat items ….. sorry typo I meant to say threat items. What I took from the report was on page 40 and [drum roll, please] the most vulnerable operating systems as per usual is ………… Apple Mac OS X. No hang on, no that cannot be right, please explain this one! (Which was followed in the list by Linux Kernal, Sun Solaris and then well you know who).
I’m still scratching my head, well anyway the other item which has caught out my parents twice in the past year is this Scareware trend in malware which for me is just the lowest of scams and a real pain to remove once a machine has been caught. Unfortunately it looks like a trend that is not going to go away for 2009.
As for the shift to IPv6, well its interesting to see what’s happening in the current IPv4 world and according to this report by Gordon Cook were it is outlined how IPv4 numbers are becoming transferable and consequently property, a case is laid out as to how there is a new opportunity to “own” IPv4 addresses, and the report wonders how incumbent services and infrastructure providers are likely to respond. According to the report it looks like it is the beginning of the end for the current “open Internet”.
Pear-2-Pear by Fab:o Fo:s http://flickr.com/photos/fua/
And finally the percentage of peer-to-peer file sharing traffic on the Internet is between 1.2% to 93%, mostly from your home network … or maybe on an academic campus network … or maybe just inconclusive, who knows?

Mosh, Ovi now which one is which for mobile social networking?

February 5th, 2009

I’m slightly confused …. not unusual but really back in the Oct 2007, I mentioned my testing of Nokia’s Mosh site, which is nearly a year and a half in beta testing. Mosh has no bouncebackability neither in web nor mobile form and now there’s Nokia’s Ovi which has the phone syncing capability and the social sharing again but ……. really will it catch on?

I’s to the Future or eyes on the past

December 7th, 2008

ICT 2008 Lyon banner
The ICT 2008 event in Lyon was massive ….. again it never ceases to amaze me the pure size of this event.
ICT 2008 Lyon Location shot
There was just so much to cover at this event and it is interesting to see it from a number of different perspectives, such as Dave Levy’s entry on ict_2008_lyon and this report on the opening plenary debate of the ICT 2008.
And you can gather a flavour of this event for yourself with a look at the plenary session videos.
Although as with any conference there were networking sessions that were not run very well, and then there were sessions such as the one on Societal and ICT perspectives: the impact of Trust, Security, Dependability, Privacy and Identity, which ran very smoothly (okay shameless plug this session was organised by the TSSG).
There were 11 people from the TSSG including Paul Malone, Mark McLaughlin, John Ronan, Martin Serrano, Jim Clarke, Kevin Doolin, Jason Finnegan, Huaiguo Fu, Keith Howker & Sinead ( I hope I haven’t missed anyone) and I would be interested to hear their thoughts on participating in such an event.

Ready, Aim FIREWeek

November 2nd, 2008

It has been 72 days since my last post …. 72 days since that lovely summer break, its unbelievable how quick time goes by. If you don’t mind I’m going to cover some things that have happened in the recent past.
So there was FIREWeek in September in Paris
FIREWeek Poster
The event started on the 10th of September with the FIRE Launch Event in L’Hotel de Ville Paris. All the slides can be seen off the launch event site
, however for me it was quite interesting to see the perspectives of the American Testbed Initiative and Japanese Testbed Initiative.
On the 11th of September 2008 I participated in the FIREworks Strategy Workshop, which I must say was excellently run.
I was asked to give a few words around the topic of “Resource description: The cornerstone of federation” and my presentation can be seen on SlideShare (and below if embedded correctly).

Haven given the presentation and receiving some feedback it is clear this there are two schools of thought in regards to the Resource description, one on the side of Service Orientated Architectures (SoA) and another towards Ontologies (and the Semantic Web).
All the slides and presentations can be seen off this programme link.
On the 12th of September 2008, I was due to take a day off and visit …… well Paris, however with the very interesting Workshop on Converged Networks happening that day I took in the morning session and made a quick presentation on the TSSG research activities around the “Management Of Future Communication Networks And Services“.

Innovation: Its Changing!

August 13th, 2008

I’ve implicitly mentioned my research on crowdsourced innovations, and here are a couple insights worth a read.
Crowd Image by James Cridland on Flickr http://flickr.com/photos/jamescridland/
One a forum discussion on What is innovation? which is part of discussion being posed by NESTA on : What should an Innovation Index contain?.
Which goes hand in hand with a recent report on The New Inventors: How users are changing the rules of innovation with a full report [pdf].
Although the question always being asked is where is the proof, the report above give some examples … here’s a couple of others
1) The crowdsourced restaurant Elements, which is a concept that has expanded from the original idea for a small cafe to a full-fledged, green-certified restaurant. Members earn points for their participation efforts, and are eligible to share in the profits allocated to members. {As reported in the Washington Post}
2) If you’re going to write a book about crowdsourcing why not get the crowd involved in the book cover design as was the case with Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe. The Top 20 designs that just missed out being the book cover can be seen here, and nicely enough the first 5 Chapters of the book can be seen on the site also.

A perimeter that’s revolutionising mobile communications

August 11th, 2008

The EU FP7 project Perimeter is well an truly up and running now.
EU FP7 project Perimeter
PERIMETER is really attempting to take user-centric strategies to achieve seamless mobility driven by actual user needs, we believe that putting the user at the centre rather than the operator enables the user to control their identity, preferences and credentials, and so seamless mobility is streamlined, enabling mobile users to be “Always Best Connected” in multiple-access multiple-operator networks.
A major part of the TSSG work will be in the testbeds, where we will interconnect with TUB and then help co-create and assess Perimeters middleware components and its integrated applications and services.
Which leads nicely to FIREweek September 10-12th in Paris. An interesting event launched on the 10th with a follow up strategy workshop on the 11th, the week closing out with the 2nd workshop on IMS Enabled Converged Networks: New paradigms for services delivery

What a week at the IETF

August 6th, 2008

How do you describe such a week long meeting …… its just mind shattering.
It started with an excellent new comers presentation by Scott Bradner

There were some highlights from MEXT such as the
The Global HAHA Operation at the Interop Tokyo 2008 & The Design Consideration of Correspondent Router [pdf]
and
RADIUS Mobile IPv6 Support [pdf]
Also from MIPSHOP
AAA-based Handover key for FMIPv6 [pdf]
and Netmod
NETMOD Architecture
But this is just to mention the tip of the iceberg of the many interactive sessions from IETF #72. And I say interactive, as at all the sessions I attended there were questions from the floor towards the speaker, something I’ve not seen before. And believe there were some very strong questions, if I remember rightly John called it a session of feeding someone to the sharks!
For me this made the sessions memorable.
A large number of the IETF 72 Meeting Materials can be accessed from this link provided.
The week ended with an Advisory Council meeting with ISOC. The TSSG are new organisational members to the AC and this was my first opportunity to attend such a session. One eye opener was the presentation by Arnoud Van Wijk, Disability Projects Coordinator, on the Real-Time Text Task Force, this is something definitely worth further investigation.

TridentCom 2009 call for papers

August 5th, 2008

Time just seems to roll around so quickly.[1]
For me TridentCom 2008 hasn’t finished and the 2009 call for papers has already been out for sometime now.
This is the 5th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks & Communities (Tridentcom) which is being held April 6-8, 2009, Washington D.C., USA. www.tridentcom.org/cfp.htm
TridentCom 2009  Logo
The important dates (but always check the website) to hand are :-
Papers due (to be received by): October 1, 2008
Demo proposals due: November 1, 2008
Notification of acceptance: December 15, 2008
Submission of camera-ready papers: January 15, 2009
[1]

Papers from the Google vault

July 6th, 2008

In reviewing some articles for that last post I came across two other interesting areas which are worth a mention.
A list of recently published papers from Google
http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html
And here is just a great paper on the “Cold Topics in Networking
J. Crowcroft, Cold topics in Networking, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 38 , Issue 1, January 2008.
One last item which I didn’t get to use this time was the new “PDF Widget on Acrobat.com“. I had the same concern as the commenter, as I don’t own the pdf I didn’t feel comfortable uploading it to the Acrobat site. But I will try this on some of my own pdfs next time.