Suggested Speakers 2013
Speaker (or topics) suggestions here
Trond Trosterud:
Creating and maintaining an open source infrastructure for language technology and language learning.
Trond's homepage:
http://www.hum.uit.no/a/trond/
(He can also talk about more specific subthemes, such as "Sami language technology" or other specific languages, or more detailed about specific parts of the infrastructure, such as how to build disambiguator technology.)
Karthik Jayaraman:
Karthik Jayaraman can talk about his current research: "Moving from closed products to open platform ecosystems - challenges and opportunities".
Companies are moving away from closed products to open platform ecosystems as seen in the case of Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon. The shift from products to platform centric ecosystems brings about various challenges and opportunities. This talk aims at uncovering the role of platforms in innovation by examining existing platforms and the key challenges and opportunities developers need to consider while choosing between products versus platform centric ecosystems.
About Karthik: https://fscons.org/2010/users/karthix.html
Cristian Prisacariu:
I can present about a new project that I am starting to work on. This project idea came after I saw two presentations last year at FSCONS. The project is about Terms of Service and automated tools that would empower the usual person to read, understand, and check that their predefined expectations/profile/properties are met by the ToS. In very brief, this project wants to give the people the power to not ignore the many ToS that they are subjected to, while they are online, like when shopping or using a service. An automated tool would take care of reading these ToS agreements and only signal to the user when the ToS breaks the user defined set of properties (i.e., the user's profile of expected minimum privacy/security requirements from such ToS). To get this there is quite some research needed, related to natural language processing and to logics that would be used to make the computer understand the meaning of the various terms used in the ToS texts. I am interested in this theoretical aspects. But there are also many implementation and design issues.
I would give you more details in a few days, if you think this would fit in FSCONS.
In my opinion, this project is of much interest to FSCONS because its purpose is to free the normal users (i.e., those without legal knowledge) from the trap that ToS are. As one of the presenters from last FSCONS said, ToS are so long that it would take too much time only to read the texts (72 working days!?); ToS use legal terminology that is much beyond normal people's comprehension; and one has no choice than to agree with the ToS in order to have access to the service, and there is no alternative ToS.
There are many aspects of this project that I could talk about; for example, there is the notion of automatic negotiation of such ToS; or the idea of human experts helping the logical system behind (this logical system can never be perfectly autonomous); or the many implementation issues.
So this project may also have to do with the economy aspect of a society, or with the freedom on the Internet, or with the legal aspects of the electronic society that we are becoming, or wherever you think may fit best.
Cristian Prisacariu, member of PMA group (Precise Modeling and Analysis) at Dept. of Informatics, Univ. of Oslo http://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/forskning/grupper/pma/index.html , home page at http://www.ifi.uio.no/~cristi
