SoNet Blog|Social Networking research group in FBK

It took us more than two months of discussions in order to decide which protocol to adopt for procedure calls in Dycapo. As we are trying to extend an existing XML-based protocol, the first solution we took in consideration was to implement a remote procedure call protocol based on OpenTrip. That is, directly passing

IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, another US agency) has a 5 years project for finding “Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness (TRUST) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)“.
The overarching goal for the IARPA TRUST Program is to significantly advance the IC’s capabilities to assess whom can be trusted under certain conditions and in contexts relevant to the IC, potentially even in the presence of stress and/or deception. The TRUST Program seeks to conduct high-risk, high-payoff research that will bring together sensing AND validated protocols to develop tools for assessing trustworthiness by using one’s own (“Self”) signals to assess another’s (“Other”) trustworthiness under certain conditions and in specific contexts, which can be measured in ecologically-valid, scientifically-credible experimental protocols.
(via Bruce Schneier)

One more example of what free availability of data about human activities can produce!
A water utility company in Canada published the above graph, comparing the consumption of water of 27th and 28th February. Why every Canadian flushed the water together on the 27th February?
Well, it seems 80% of Canadians were watching last Sunday’s gold medal Olympic hockey game.
And they’d all go pee between periods.
It is amazing how water consumption correlates with the game!
(via patspapers)

I’ve just finished in re-writing/updating the UML diagrams of Dycapo. We now have an updated version of the models, that are now consistent with those in code. There are three new sequence diagrams useful for using Dycapo: Insertion of a Trip by a driver Search of a Ride by a rider Insertion+Search of a Trip together, with the right time

The second part of my internship has just begun. I spent some hours to think about what will be next in Dycapo development, in a short run. A CS school mate joined the project. He will write a client for Dycapo using Android. Moreover, I will write my thesis on this project. Therefore, there is a strong

Dycapo development resumes from today. I’m going to write a tiny plan to point out the status of the project and what we are going to do next. Meanwhile, a new member joined SoNet and the project, to develop an Android client for Dycapo. Stay tuned for news. Related posts What comes next? Short run roadmap (0) Update:

The fourth public release of Pomodroid brings some new features and corrections: Fixed bug when rotating the device under a running Pomodoro. Pomodoro Activity is forced to stay in portrait mode Bigger Pomodoro Timer Pomodoro.java completely rewritten. Makes use of Handler and Runnable instead extending CountDownTimer Notification system completely rewritten: user is notified through real Notifications, vibrations and Toasts. The

Being encouraged by the 130 downloads nine days after its official release, I’m going to work further on Pomodroid. This release has a new feature: it permits XML-RPC calls on Trac as anonymous user. This is useful if you have XmlRpcPlugin installed on your trac but don’t have the permissions to use XML-RPC for your user.

Interesting statistics based on a web survey with more than 130,000 Wikipedians responding (data from the working draft).

• The average age is 25.8 years: Wikipedia are pretty young! One question could be “do they have already developed the wisdom needed to crystallize all humans knowledge?”
• Less then 13% of contributors are women: this is pretty big unbalance! Again, do Wikipedia reflect a gender-balanced perspective?
• Given the relative young age of contributors, it is interesting to note that 4.59% hold a PhD
• only 30% of the respondents say they have a partner
• only 14% of the respondents say they have a children

Well in fact it is well acknowledged that Wikipedia suffers some systemic biases: The average Wikipedian on the English Wikipedia is (1) a man, (2) technically inclined, (3) formally educated, (4) an English speaker (native or non-native), (5) white, (6) aged 15–49, (7) from a majority-Christian country, (8) from a developed nation, (9) from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) likely employed as a white-collar worker or enrolled as a student rather than employed as a labourer (from a previous survey).

Interesting are also the following facts:

• On average, contributors spend 4.3 hours per week contributing to Wikipedia
• Regarding their motivations to contribute, respondents mentioned as their top two reasons that (1) they liked the idea of sharing knowledge, and (2) that they had come across an error and wanted to fix it. This would suggest the strategy of leaving around small errors can be an idea to improve participation. I wonder the results of such a test: the Wikipedia web server servers, to random users who never contributed, the Wikipedia page with automatically inserted small errors and typos in it and record this. Then by analyzing automatically her history of future contributions it would be possible to check: Does the non-contributor-yet become a contributor? Does she remain a contributor? Is this percentage significantly higher than for users who received “normal” pages?
• I don’t think I have enough information to contribute was reported by 52% of respondents. I am happy just to read it; I don’t need to write by 49%. “I don’t have time” follows with 31%. I don’t know how by 25%.
• For non-contributors, the most important factor that would make contribution more likely is “I knew there were specific topic areas that needed my help”. This suggests that a recommender system suggesting in a personalized way which wikipedia pages might benefit from YOUR contribution can be a useful tool (see for example the paper “SuggestBot: Using Intelligent Task Routing to Help People Find Work in Wikipedia” by Cosley, D.; Frankowski, D.; Terveen, L.; Riedl, J. Anyway I tend to be against this because it will be a strong influence of the machine (the algorithm) on where humans should pose their attention and I think the system is better self-regulated based on the interests of everyone.
• 42% of the respondents who did not donate to Wikipedia say they don’t know how to do it. Then, for them and for you, http://donate.wikipedia.org

(Photo credits: Foofy. Under Creative Commons.)

A tiny update for the (still) alpha project Pomodroid. I added some new Power Management features: When running a Pomodoro, the Android phone is prevented from going stand-by. That is, it will never block the screen and go to sleep. The block is released when Pomodoro Activity looses focus. When running a Pomodoro, screen brightness is set at