Alex Wright

notes on the O'Reilly conference

May 15, 2002

Now that I have to foot my own conference bills, I've become a lot more selective about these things. In fact, I've pretty much skipped conferences altogether for the past year (except for the occasional freebie speaker registration). But the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference looked like a decent bet, and a local one at that - so I decided to plunk down for a one-day pass and a glimpse of current hoopla. happily, no regrets - this was one of those rare conferences where the attendees seemed to be in the same stratosphere as the presenters. and how often do you get to brush past Jeff Bezos washing his hands in the mens' room?

a few raw notes from some of yesterday's panels:

Tim O'Reilly


In the morning keynote, the father of all those godawful duotone lithograph animals talked about the importance of "participatory architectures" - ie, architectures that are not only open in and of themselves, but also open to other, possibly competing architectures. Talking about Web services, he gave one of the better real-world scenarios I've heard when he talked about O'Reilly's desire to gather competitive pricing and sales data from Amazon. Currently they write their own custom "scraper" programs to cull the data they want, forcing development costs and ultimately an inefficient mechanism. O'Reilly suggested that he (and, presumably, other publishers) would be happy to pay for that kind of service if they could open a direct query line to Amazon using SOAP calls or some such. Sounded reasonable to me - will be interesting to see if Mr. Bezos (who was in the audience) bites on the proposition.

Bob Morris, IBM Almaden Research


The current poobah of IBM's west coast research group talked mostly about advances in storage and the move towards "automonic" computing - software that is, in his words, "self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing and self-protecting." He used the example of telephone switching networks - which diagnose and recover from errors, and improve themselves as they go - as a good working model. I might put Google in that category as well.

Joseph Paradiso, IBM Media Lab


By far the best of the demo-ware, Paradiso showed a grab bag of research projects on potential applications for remote sensing devices:

• "Smart Flooring" that can track the precise movement of, say, a dancer, generating audio and video responses (such as musical accompaniment and motion graphics) to the "tune" of a dancer moving on the floor.
  
• "Phantom Planet" controllers. Named for a shlock 50s sci fi movie, these I/O devices let you control a device without touching it - for instance, by measuring the distance and movement of your hand above a laser beam. These kinds of non-contact control inputs could be a huge boon for reducing, say, repetitive strain disorders
  
• "Expressive Footwear" - sort of cyborg sneakers, packed to the eyelets with a whole bunch of tiny sensors to measure the exact location and movement of every muscle in your foot. showed another nifty dance demo (showing how a dancer could modulate notes and tones just by jiggling her slippers), and discussed more applied applications in sports medicine.
  
• "Rave apps" - in which a bunch of bleary-eyed ravers are outfitted with transmitters to study their collective movement patterns in relation to changing music patterns
  
• "Self-powered buttons" - that generate their own electricity
  
• "Musical objects" - like a virtual keyboard powered by a set of sensor-equipped finger rings
  
• ... and, would you believe, talking balloons (surprise surprise: American Greetings is a media lab corporate sponsor)
  

Brewster Kahle, The Internet Archive


WAIS and Alexa inventor Kahle talked about his vision for the Internet Archive, his quixotic quest to create an archived "copy" of the Web. The whole effort strikes me as a sort of noble lost cause, given that the Web is seemingly becoming less and less about documents and more and more about personal experiences that ultimately can't be preserved by machines), but then I'm a devotee of lost causes (must be the Southerner in me). And after all, it is kind of cool to be able to time-warp back to Amazon circa 1996

also learned about one way cool thing I hadn't known about before: the Prelinger Collection of public-domain movie reels.

Meg Hourihan


One of the original Bloggers, Meg devoted her talk to looking for real-world Web services that seemed to deliver tangible end-user value. Not surprisingly, it's still a short list, but a few she mentioned:

• ServiceObjectives - services for address validation
  
• Rate My Professors - an online service for students to contribute and share pooled evaluations of college profs
  
• Southwest Air & Dollar rent-a-car - supporting direct cross-reservations (without apparently using one of the infamous central reservation systems whose pricing largely accounts for the big price differential between discount airlines and mainstream ones - this is actually potentially a very big deal for the travel industry)
  
• the Blogger API, of course
  
• other potential consumer-facing web service apps might include CDDB and IMDB
  

John Ko, Cincro


Ko demoed the latest version of Zanvas, Cincro's "zoomable" interface product that lets you create shared spaces with other users and visualize the collaboration space as a 3-D environment. good demo but I was a little lost when he started trying to put the Web services spin on the product. Given that they started developing the first version of the software in 1997, I can't help but suspect a case of buzzword-driven product positioning. still, the demo was actually pretty nifty - definitely worth a look.

Rick Rashid, Microsoft


The SVP of Microsoft's research group presented a vision for the future of operating systems. While the presentation was predictably a little cagey - ie, not divulging any concrete product plans - Rashid did divulge some compelling thinking about the notion of "probabilistic" environments as opposed to "deterministic" ones. That is, systems that adapt and respond to user behaviors, tasks, and relationships with other users - rather than forcing users to think in terms of file systems, applications, and other command-and-control metaphors. Rashid suggested that programs will give way to tasks; context of use will become the central driver of OS behavior; hierarchies will give way to query environments; and explicit command systems will give way to event-driven behaviors. Also talked about network-aware applications and how, for instance, email systems could generate massive knowledge about user relationships and semantic contexts. Showed a way cool demo of a social network-browser sort of thing, also a _way_ impressive search engine that answers factual questions based on semantic analysis. When asked "Where is Osama Bin Laden;" the system answered "Afghanistan Mountains"; when asked, "What is the meaning of life?" it responded with the probable answers: "Questions," and/or "42."

UE BOF session


At the end of the day, I enjoyed sitting in on a BOF session hosted by
Matt Jones on the implications of emerging technologies for the whole craft of UE/IA. A loose but provocative discussion that kind of spiraled all over the place but touched off a few juicy riffs about Web services, user environments, and the change from "fixed" IA to "fluid" or adaptive IA. Among the crowd were
Cory Doctorow and
Matt Webb, plus several other smart folks whose names alas I didn't catch.

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