Information Technology Research Update by Diomidis Spinellis Department of Management Science and Technology Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/ Volume 2 Issue 4 July 11th, 2002 A free periodic newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on information technology research brought to you by the Information Systems Technology laboratory http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr In this issue: - Electronic product tracking used as an anti-theft measure - E-Commerce Journals - Content-Based Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval - Personalisation - Free Software/Open Source Software, Conference Report Electronic product tracking used as an anti-theft measure --------------------------------------------------------- (reported by Monty Solomon ) Razor burn: Runaway popularity of Gillette's Mach3 creates a sales bonanza for thieves Gillette is taking steps to stem the flow of stolen Mach3 products. Perhaps the most important, Szynal said, is a pioneering antitheft technology consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sponsored by Gillette, Procter and Gamble, and other large consumer-products companies. The MIT scientists are developing a microchip that, once embedded in the packaging of the Mach3 and other products, would allow the product to be tracked from factory to warehouse to retailer and everywhere in between. The chip, which began a one-year field test in Oklahoma in October, will allow Gillette security officials to scan products for sale at a flea market and determine where they came from. [Excerpt] http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/089/business/Razor_burn+.shtml E-Commerce Journals ------------------- A recent article appearing in the Communications of the ACM (P. Bharati and P. Tarasewich, Global Perceptions of Journals Publishing E-Commerce Research CACM 45(5):21-26) contains rankings of journals used as e-commerce research outlets. In terms of perception the first four are the Communications of the ACM, MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and the International Journal of Electronic Commerce. In terms of quality regarding e-commerce content the first four are the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, Electronic Commerce Research, Electronic Markets, and Journal of Electronic Commerce Research. Content-Based Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval ----------------------------------------------- The web, interactive television, digital cameras, personal video recorders, and multimedia messaging are some of the technologies that stress the importance of indexing and retrieving multimedia data. Multimedia messaging - the ability to send sound and image messages from one mobile phone to another - is considered by some analysts as the next mobile phone killer application. The "TV of the future" report that appeared in a recent issue of The Economist magazine touted personal video recorders (such as the TiVO) as the next disruptive consumer technology. Their ability to selectively skip over advertisements is already making waves in the US courtrooms. Digital cameras are making inroads into the lives of more and more people, while web applications such as Google's image searching capability are demonstrating the practical possibility of multimedia retrieval. The IEEE Multimedia magazine (Vol. 9, No. 2, April-June 2002) had as its issue's theme "Content-Based Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval" and explores the technological and research forefront of these technologies. Some interesting articles include "Unifying Keywords and Visual Contents in Image Retrieval", "Tracking Scale-Space Blobs for Video Description", and "Semantic Annotation of Sports Videos". Personalisation --------------- The May issue of the Communications of the ACM had "The Adaptive Web" as its theme, but all the featured articles were, unsurprisingly, about personalisation issues. All nine articles had as an adaptation strategy either the content selection, or the presentation, while almost all the adopted user models were based on a combination of interests, preferences, context, and knowledge. Many of the application areas are related to research projects being undertaken by EU IST projects: tourism, e-commerce, education, and information retrieval. Free Software / Open Source Software, Conference Report ------------------------------------------------------- (reported by Nikolaos Th. Korfiatis, ISTLAB research assistant) The Working Group G4 of the http://www.ebusinessforum.gr project in collaboration with GRNet, organized a two day conference on Free Software / Open Source Software and its future in Greece and the European Union. The Conference took place in Athens on the last week of June 2002 (Thursday & Friday). The conference was a small surprise for the Greek - rapidly growing - Open Source Community, because of the well-known speaker panel. I was lucky to attend the speaking of the founding father of Free Software, Richard Stallman. Stallman is the founder of one of the most visible free software projects, the GNU Project. He is/was the developer of the Emacs editor, the GNU C Compiler and many other tools that GNU Project provides today to the free software/open source community. RMS (Stallman's nickname) began his speech by providing some information about how GNU project started. The GNU Project (acronym of GNU is Not Unix) started in 1982 and it mirrors Stallman's philosophy about writing and distributing software. This philosophy is advancing the idea that people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects - such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline - in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. The GNU project believes software users should be able to make use of it without any restrictions provided by software companies and organizations. After this introduction Stalman presented the route of the "GNU" operating system. He outlined, all the efforts that took place in early 80's for providing to the community a better Operating System based on some useful ideas of UNIX, such as pipes and multitasking. The basic premise of his talk was the confusion of Linux as an operating system. Although Linux is known as a UNIX like operating system, that is a big mistake. In early 90's Linus Torvalds built a kernel (the software that handles all the Operating System processes with systems hardware) to replace the original UNIX kernel. Torvalds put the GNU tools and libraries (that were the 95% of GNU's OS) and made up Linux. According to RMS, when Torvalds announced the creation of Linux and it's distribution under the GPL (General Public License) GNU was ready to announce the creation of the new operating system. Of course the only thing that was missing was the kernel ...So for Stalman there is NO Linux but the GNU operating system with the Linux Kernel (GNU/Linux) Another surprise was the presence of the "Mr Mozilla" Scott Collins (chief developer of Mozilla open source Browser project). Scott talked to us about his professional experience in Netscape where he was chief software engineer for Netscape's version for *NIX systems. He presented us the new version of "Mozilla" (current stable release is 1.0 RC1) and it's futures such us the powerful mail client and download manager. Scott also talked to us about the future of web technology and gave some guidelines about contributing software to Mozilla's anonymous CVS directory. After the talk your correspondent asked Scott about the economics of open source and how Mozilla.org has survived Microsoft's antitrust war. Scott replied that Mozilla is a non profit organization that works with volunteers from more than 80 countries. For Scott the future of open source is not the mass production of software but the configuration and redesign of current software to complete all the IT industry's requirements. One other prominent person of the open-source community also attended the conference. Mathias Etrich the founder of the most known *NIX window desktop,the KDE gave a speech about "Business models and open source". The heavy cost of software in combination with the .com crash forced the industry to find ways to reduce their operational costs. The KDE Enviroment offers to many business professionals the ability to have a free computing environment that satisfies many of the industry's requirements for personal productivity software. Mathias presented some case studies of companies like Trolltech who turned the 90% of their IT activity to open source and the KDE Enviroment to reduce their cost and earn benefits such us stability. Like Scott, Mathias talked to us about the configuration management of the open source projects and the ability to find and fix a bug in a short time after the software release. He also presented technologies such as CVS and Bugzilla in order to demonstrate how open source software is growing and technically becoming many times better than other not open source software. To understand this Mathias gave us the following example: It took Microsoft 11 years to produce an environment like windows 3.1. The first KDE release came out four years after the creation of KDE project and for Mathias it was 200% better than Windows 3.1. [Editor's note: the technological infrastructure and the user requirements for the two systems were different, so the comparisson might be unfair.] Mathew Lackage application developer of EAZEL (The GNOME Project) gave a tutorial about integrating web and desktop applications. Mr Lackage presented us the PHP/GTK+ development process. PHP is a rapidly growing HTML embedded language for writing web applications. Mathiew presented us how PHP in combination with GTK+ (GNOME's Libraries for graphical applications) work to deliver the administration of web applications such as Content Management Systems (CMS),through GNOME's window environment. At the end of the conference Ioannis Korovesis (NCSR-Demokritos and head of the G4 group of the eBusinessforum) thanked all the attendants for their presence and gave his promise for organizing a second conference in October with a more technical agenda.