Innovate 2011 : August 8th - 11th - Software Everywhere

IBM Rational is holding the Innovate Conference for Software Developers and interestingly there's a "Developer Rock Competition" as part of the event. Quite an unusual thing for a "developer conference" to host...

The event is opportunity for developers to

- Get  more than 15 hours of studio time and get some music tips from Bangalore's best Rock band, "Thermal & a Quarter".
- Compose and record a song of their own.
- Play the recorded song in front of more than 1000 plus people at Innovate2011.
- There are some cool prizes and awards for the winners.

To know more : http://innovate2011.ocmail2.in/t/r/14921/6178/10/22

Event management gets easier with Eventbrite

I got an invitation to join a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Networking event in Pune and I registered to join the event that is happening on 23rd July - to represent Green Hills Group. To my surprise, I got the tickets to the event online with Eventbrite - an Online Event Management Software (as a Service).. An interesting use case, wonder why such a thing was not made in past.. Or may be it was, just that I did not come across one.

SMS/Emails and Jokes Forwarding - A sure shot way to detect informal and strong networks in an organisation / society

A colleague of mine forwarded an email with a bunch of charts - humorous and tickled the brain.. The moment I read it, the first thing I wanted to do was forward it to my colleagues and personal network. A couple of things that can be derived from this-

• What kind of person I am and what kind of content do I like the most. Of course there are people who forward everything they get where as there are some who seek relevance / appropriateness of the content and send it to their network..then there are some who rarely forward, lazy bones like me..
• The quality of content - the content, that a person who normally does not forward and does the forwarding, is probably best of the content - of course other way to check the quality and relevance is purely measuring the number of times a content is forwarded or the number of nodes that the content has reached.
• These forwards can also... interestingly, help derive a social network very easily, if analyzed one will probably detect strongest of the personal networks in an organization. Needless to say, it is not only emails, SMS OR Instant Messaging too will help detect these networks.

In my assessment, it will still leave large part of networks unearthed - for eg: my colleague who sits right next to me and not a great forwarding agent... but great friend of mine will never be spotted on the "forwarding" network.

BTW, Here are a couple of the several interesting graphs that my colleague forwarded...

Opinion Mining

Opinion to a Machine is a Quintuple (an object made of 5 elements) - (O, f, SO, H, t)

• O - the thing in question, 
• f - the feature of O, 
• SO the Opinion value, 
• h the opinion holder, 
• t the time at which the opinion is given.

Source : Bing Liu in NLP Manual (slide 9 of 21 on http://www.slideshare.net/mcjenkins/how-sentiment-analysis-works)

Campus Net - IBM Remote Mentoring Project : Part I of II

IBM University Relations runs a program called "Remote Mentoring" (Now called "Global Remote Mentoring") where an IBMer mentors a bunch of college students to complete their academic project. The name remote comes from the fact that the students do not come and work at IBM premises. They use their own personal / college computing resources to work on the project. The project is jointly mentored by a faculty at the college and one or more IBMer. Interestingly, the program runs round the year and the duration depends on number of students, scope of work, academic requirement and several other factors. The project statements most often come from the IBMer who acts as the mentor and intent is to produce something useful for IBM resulting in an asset, white-paper, developerWorks article, patent etc. etc. The IBM software that is required as part of the project is made available through the Academic Initiative website that allows the student / college to download the software from the IBM website.

I proposed a project last year along with my college Amit Kumar (more popular as Amit Kumar33, as his IBM ID is Amit Kumar33/India/IBM.......... :--) ) where we wanted to build a solution on top of Lotus Connections (now IBM Connections) which will accelerate the adoption of Social Software in an Academic Institution. As part of this effort the 5 students from Cummins College of Engineering, Pune developed widgets that had following use cases / functionality implemented

1. A Survey
2. A poll
3. A Calender / Time Table (lectures, practicals, holidays.. etc.)
4. An Election
5. Campus Placements
6. A Quiz

The students used the Lotus Widget Factory to develop the iWidgets and a VMImage with Lotus Connections installed to test their code. In the next post of the series of this article, I will elaborate a couple of use cases and also share some of the lessons we learnt during the course of this project.