www2003 day 2

May 23rd, 2003  |  Published in events  |  1 Comment

After such an intense day of note taking and a very entertaining evening bowling with the guys from ILRT on day 1, I didn’t manage to take proper notes on yesterday’s sessions. I’ll try to fill in some detail during today.


9.00 Extrapolation Methods for Accelerating PageRank Computations
The much-slashdotted algorithm for improving the sort of calculations google does. The speaker notes that this algorithm by itself only gives 30-50% improvement; it needs combining with other techniques. He also notes that this is not “accelerating google”, it’s research work.

09.30 P2Cast: Peer-to-peer Patching Scheme for VoD Service
Using bittorrent-like peer to peer connections for distributing video content, but in a way that allows for streaming.

11.00 W3C Standards for Web Services update
Web Services Architecture, Web Services Description Language 1.2, SOAP 1.2, Internationalization and Web Services
Not much to say – just reports on activity so far, very uninspiring. Like being read company end-of-year reports.

14.00 Plenaries
“Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies”, largely content-free and hyperbolic
“Globalities, Spatialities and it Strategies: New Web Politics and Social Development”, largely incomprehensible. Looked like the slides had some interesting stats, although some of the graphs looked like a game of missile command.

16.00 Application Specific Data Replication for Edge Services
Interesting ideas on exploiting your particular application’s usage patterns when distributing data to edge servers (akamai-style). For example, ad servers don’t need the exact inventory of ads, they just need an ad that matches adequate criteria for display (if your inventory is large enough).

Responses

  1. Kate says:

    May 26th, 2003 at 4:44 pm (#)

    Absolutely. Ad servers don’t need to know about inventory. The decision engine sits elsewhere and pumps out ad IDs to the ad servers after making the decision and the ad servers pick up the relevent ads for delivery. The only machine that needs to know about inventory is the central one which makes the choices based on criteria fed to it by the ad servers.

    Hmm. Wish I’d been at that talk.