Recent blackout
Hello all, sorry for the recent blackout. The server crashed badly yesterday while doing a reboot and we just restored the webserver and the database. Sorry for any inconvenience!
Posted by abarrera 2008-05-22 17:30:16
New Call for Papers wiki
It's been a long time since the last time I updated this site, but I'm still here. I'll be developing other projects but I have a bunch of articles I'll upload here pretty soon. Some days ago I found a very interesting website called WikiCFP. It's a wiki where you can see all current call for papers of the most important conferences around the world. Each call for paper is grouped inside a category (Natural Language Processing, Linguistics, Databases, AI and Communications are the current categories) so you can see just the ones you are interested in. Apart from that, you can contribute to the wiki with new additions, new categories, etc. The best part is that they have a feed that you can use to subscribe to one of the categories and keep yourself updated. I've updated the links section with this resource and a couple more.
Posted by abarrera 2008-01-29 16:38:17
Old wisdom
I read some pretty old articles recently and I was shocked to see how much truth they hold and how few people actually follow them. It's incredible how we keep tripping with the same problems our fathers and older collegues had already tripped with. This is true for both, AI and security fields. So I'm uploading two articles, the first one is titled "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity" by Drew McDermott. The article is from 1976, but it's a priceless jewel. It makes a great reading for all Academics and PhDs out there. The second article has to do with security, more exactly with password schemes. It's the historical paper from Robert Morris and Ken Thompson from Bell Labs titled "Password Security: A case history". It's the case study for the current password security schemes we find in any Unix. Worth reading, specially if you are into Security Engineering fields.
Posted by abarrera 2007-11-25 20:00:38
Large scale simulations
Large scale simulations of neural and AI models are more and more common every day. It's clearer everyday that intelligent behavior is a byproduct of neural activity at a macroscopic scale. Nevertheless, being able to simulate large models is quite expensive in terms of raw computing power and not many people have the resources to do it. That's why the latest paper from Dr. Dharmendra Modha titled "Anatomy of a Cortical Simulator" is so interesting. In it you'll find several solutions and hacks to the problems you can encounter when simulating very large cortical systems. You can also read Dr. Modha's FAQ about the paper here. Beware that the simulation was just to test the technical issues of simulating such a huge model and not about the actual network dynamics or cortical circuit connections.
Posted by abarrera 2007-11-25 19:33:10
New blog, new RSS url and updates
Finally some news. I have been a little bit sloppy with the site lately and I'm sorry about it. But I'm back with some new articles. First of all, the site has experienced some growth in terms of hits per month and there are quite some RSS subscriptors (thank you all!). I'm changing the feed url to this one at feedburner so I can monitor the RSS better. Please if you are an RSS subscriptor and you could re-subscribe to the new url it will be great. Ok, now lets get on with the news. I've recently started a personal blog where I talk about broader topics, if you are interested, you can take a look here. The latest post talks about Powerset's semantic search engine technology, so those of you interested in real commercial technologies might be interested in reading it.
Posted by abarrera 2007-11-25 19:06:29
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