Hysea Cloud Computing Workshop

Yesterday’s HYSEA event on Cloud Computing (CC) at Google office was very successful. I have presented a few academic perspectives on the usage of cloud computing as well as some research challenges in this area.

For me, there are a few interesting takeaways from this workshop:

• The importance of this area is clear from the very fact that Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun investing heavily into this and the pace at which tools, products, services and applications are being built.
• It appears that the landscape is being filled with various players focusing on their own specific sub-area. For example, Google App Engine serving the developer/programmer community, Amazon EC2 and S3 serving the application development infrastructure, and Microsoft Live Mesh focusing on consumer solutions.
• The need to create new progamming paradigms in cloud computing area is apparent, which includes creation of libraries to adopt existing programming languages to suite the CC style programming and creation of new languages for service descriptions and for monitoring (at the Service Level Agreements and beyond).

I have used the term “Cloud Sourcing” to describe the trend of delegating the software development, production and maintenance beyond the boundaries of an enterprise. It is clear that the CC playground is wide open and it will be interesting to see who will emerge as a winner. Like India emerged as a superpower in outsourcing, someone (country/region/company/…) will become a super power in Cloud Sourcing.

BTW, Hyderabad is buzzing with cloud computing activities – including a barcamp on August 30th at Amazon.com Development Center. Check it out if you are interested.

Summer Activities in NLP/IR

As the summer break is coming to an end, all the SIELers are geared up to start the fresh semester with a sense of accomplishment, I believe. This summer, many of us are busy with various activities such as preparing for TAC and CLEF competitions, participating in summer schools and working on our projects (which is evident from the lack of posts in this blog)

We have submitted three runs for update summary task of TAC and also one for QA task. Let us keep our fingers crossed.

There were three summer events in NLP/IR areas where I gave a few talks:

• IASNLP at IIIT-H,
• NLP-Summer school at IIT Kharagpur and
• NLP-Ontology Summer workshop in IIT Bombay.

Each of these workshops were wonderful and I really enjoyed interacting with the participants. I focused on  IR/IE at IIIT-H workshop with a few examples on building scalable IE systems. My talk at IIT Kharagpur built on previous talk with a focus on recent trends in IE including the trend towards building frameworks. In IIT Bombay, I talked about personalization in IR/IE and IA.

IJCNLP-2008 Conference

Today is the beginning of NLP festival (all conferences are like festivals as we celebrate our research and have loads of fun) right here in IIIT Campus and I am happy to see most of SIELers taking very active part as organizers, volunteers and participants.

There is one paper accepted in the main conference (a matter of pride for all of us) – this is based on Rohini’s work on personalization (many of you might know that U Rohini after graduating from here joined AOL R&D, Bangalore) – this paper will be presented on 10th of January 2008, between 15:30 – 17:00 Hrs in session A3.3 at ISB. The paper is:

“Statistical Translation Models for Personalized Search” – Rohini U, Vamshi Ambati and Vasudeva Varma

If you are participating in the conference, please attend this presentation.

We are also organizing 2nd International workshop  on Cross Language Information Access (CLIA-2008) along with IJCNLP (W4). For more information see the website of the workshop:

http://search.iiit.ac.in/CLIA2008

See you all there - and we will be looking forward to hear your experiences.