Web Authentication with Selective Delegation using SRP
Bryant Cutler and Devlin Daley developed a methodology for adding selective delegation to relationship-based identity systems. This afternoon I presented that work at WWW2008. The talk went well. There were probably about 40 people in the room. There were some good questions afterwards, so all in all, I'm pleased. Here are the slides (PDF) if you're interested.
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Tyler Close: Using Promises to Orchestrate Web Interactions
Tyler Close answers questions after his talk(click to enlarge) Tyler Close of Waterken fame presented a way of using promises to produce succinct JavaScript (and Java) code for doing multiple asynchronous requests with a Web server. The idea of promises in asynchronous systems was developed by Barbara Liskov in the late 80's. Tyler has a tutorial online. I also found this description from Brian Lothar of Web calculus which discusses promises in that context. Very interesting stuff. I think this was my favorite presentation of WWW2008.
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WWW2008 Conference Dinner at Great Hall of the People
Great Hall of the People (click to enlarge) We just got back from the WWW2008 conference dinner at the Great Hall of the People, China's parliment building and center of state ceremonial activities. How the conference got permission to have the dinner there, I don't know. I do know it wasn't cheap. Extra tickets were $150 and they said that was cost. In any event it was quite an event. The banquet hall was huge, the food was first rate and quite varied, and the entertainment well planned. I enjoyed the whole evening. I've posted some pictures of the
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Computational Advertising
Andrei Broder of Yahoo! Research(click to enlarge) I'm in a talk by Andrei Broder, a Yahoo! Fellow and Vice President of Computation Advertising on, what else, computational advertising. I was drawn to the talk by the title. Find the "best match" between a given user in a given context and a suitable advertisement. Context could be click stream, page content, or something else. Key ideas: The financial scale is huge. Small constants matter. Advertising is a form of information Finding the "best ad" is a type of information retrieval problem. Classic advertising falls into one of two camps: brand
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Taking Search to New Frontiers: Dr. Harry Shum (Microsoft)
Harry Shum(click to enlarge) The Web can be divided into three components: content (pages, images, videos, blogs, feeds), people (readers, writers, creators, commenters), and actions (queries, clicks, pageviews). Current search engines have taken advantages of "keywords" to link those three components together. But the keyword model has reach it's limits. One phenomenon that's challenging keywords is the explosive growth of content. Multimedia content is especially difficult The scale requirements are huge. Another challenge is that the Web is becoming more dynamic: people want to interact. Search engines have a long way to go to satisfy user needs. To make
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Trust-Based Recommendation Systems
Reid Andersen from Microsoft Research is talking about trust-based recommendation systems (PDF). To build a personalized recommendation, you need a trust graph among users. What system should you use to determine the recommendation? The researchers use an axiomatic approach. The context of their axiomatic system is social choice theory (see Arrow's impossibility theorem for voting systems from 1951). More recent treatments are Webpage ranking systems (Altman, Teeneholtz, '05). The details are fairly complex, but the basic idea is that by proposing axioms until you get an inconsistency in the axiom set and then backing off and exploring other axioms
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Cloud Computing: Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google
Main hall where keynotes were held. I love the red slip covers on the chairs. They were more comfortable than your standard hotel chair. (click to enlarge) The opening keynote at WWW2008 is Dr. Kai-Fu Lee of Google. Before the keynote, we were treated to a presentation that featured dancers in blue Spiderman uniforms, a dancer in what I assume was traditional dress, and a guy with a "Welcome to Beijing" banner running through them all. Somehow, it seemed to fit perfectly even though it was the first of it's kind at any tech conference I've been too--especially one
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Exploring Beijing
Parking attendent(click to enlarge) I'm in Beijing for WWW2008 which starts tomorrow. I came out early (last Saturday) because I find conferences much more enjoyable when I'm not suffering from jet lag. I'm pretty well adjusted now and I'm looking forward to the talks tomorrow. In the meantime, I've taken some time to explore Beijing a bit. Sunday I was quite tired and other than going to church, a fun experience in Beijing, stuck close to the hotel. It was rainy both Sunday and Monday, so the weather wasn't up to outdoor activities. Because of that, I decided that
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