When Pain and Loneliness meets Passion and Creativity

After around 2 solid months, this is my blog post. Lots and lots of things to share, but right now, I'm in Yahoo! OpenHack Day, 2011 @ Banglore. Its been really cool(literally and figuratively) here for the last 2 days. Got to see the person who brought this world - JSON and most commonly termed as the Father of the JS - Lord Douglas Crockford.

Gave 3 awesome presentations throughout yesterday evening on Various topics like

1. Server sidedness - Mostly about Node.JS and the design architecture of the system using server side JS.
2. JSON Saga - History of JSON and how he brought it to the world, rather discovered it from the nature - as he put it.
3. Programming Style and Your Brain - Here he talks about programming practices and styles. How to choose a particular programming language for doing something and how not to. Really super cool stuff. My personal fav. of all the three.

Apart from him, there were many Y! Engineers, H/W and S/W enthusiasts. Really rocking dance performances, super cool lunches and dinners. An awesome weekend, if you would ask me.

Coming to what I did for the 24 hours of Hacking?

Like applications you've already familiar with - Team Viewer, Remote Desktop Connection, etc. That enables you to access your remote desktop securely using some of the most secured and the complicated protocols, I do the same. Except with a small difference that you'll be controlling your device (not just computer) remotely via a phone call. Using a special API one can build any application or a service that can access the content on Remote Mobile and execute them on your device.

You can do a test drive now for free (Its in AK Labs now). All you need to do is follow this simple set procedure.

1. Go to Remote Mobile website and register a account for yourself over there.
2. Download the Windows Client (sorry currently only windows service exist, that was what I was able to make in < 20 hours) to your computer and install it, no virus - I swear!
   You'll automatically be re-directed to the download page upon successful completion.
3. Login to the app using the email and password you used during registration.
4. Upon successful login, you can see a Access PIN on the right side of the app, below your Email Id and change password option.
5. Now, its time to add some commands to your profile.
6. Click on Add Command and add any number of applications you want to your profile. I'be added some for samples (see screenshot below)
   
   
7. Once you're done call this number - (040/080/022) - 39411020
8. Enter the Access Code as 6623.
9. Now enter your Access PIN number visible on the screen.
10. The system will read out the commands for you like in any IVRS. Enter the option which you want to execute, and see your monitor, before the call gets cut. You can see the program gets executed in your system.

Well that's it! Do some playing around with the application and the platform. This is an individual hack, and there are many known errors still that exist. A 90 second prototype is to be presented in about an hour here in this hall. So, any feedback on the UX, UI, the system itself is highly appreciated.

User is the King!

While browsing through Yahoo! Labs, i came upon 2 projects, which actually inspired me a lot. So, this is just a brief implication what i've got from them, and use of similar feature in my Research Engine project.

• Keystone (http://labs.yahoo.com/project/59?from=project) - new generation advertising technology. Currently under Development.

The thing that really got my eye is this, "The biggest scientific challenge in contextual advertising is that compared to sponsored search or Web search, user intent is not very clear".

My Question: How on the earth are we to find the context of the user who we don't know or can't see?
Their Answer: The Keystone system works by first extracting "essence" from opportunity - understanding what the content is about and who is viewing it.

More Info: A key difference between Keystone and other contextual advertising systems is that Keystone tries to predict and model user response based on all user context, including page content, user attributes like behavioral and geographical data, referrals to the page (how the user got there), and information about the publisher page.

Read the rest here.

Another project is Motif, from Search technologies group of Yahoo! Research.

• Motif (http://labs.yahoo.com/project/176?from=project) - lets users search for Wikipedia articles with context.

Project Motif is very similar to Keystone (which is focused on advertising), in usage of context. The thing is Motif is more concerned about Query Context, than User Context. Try out the demo here, you'll know what i mean. This is relatively easy to implement and maintain.

I really like Motif for its search relevance, and like to add a similar feature to my Research Engine Search Module. Also, Keystone methodology helps me understand user context, based on which i can search the query context to further grain my results.

Got any similar kinda stuff? Please share!