Small world -- again!

One should track the small world events that happen...for example, the recent ones in my recollection:

- My prof., Dr. Michael Best who does work in ICT4D mentioned Dr. Eric Brewer the other day. Eric Brewer was the CTO (I think) for Inktomi back in the day. I spoke at a conference in which he was a keynote (Digital Hollywood 2001 - http://www.digitalhollywood.com/SJAgenda.html). Odd, especially since now Dr. Best and Dr. Brewer are in talks since Brewer is doing work as a prof at Berkeley in the ICT4D realm. Perhaps even more 'small worldish' is the fact that Rob Guyton, one of the co-founders of Inktomi was on the board of my company at the time, Pathfire (aka Video Networks). Rob, at the time, was a partner at the VC for Monarch Capital Partners in Atlanta.

I believe it was within a couple years of this particular event when things went way south, and Rob had to sell his jet and get a real job...but that's just my fuzzy recollection talking.

Oh, and if that's not a small enough world...

- Buddy of mine, Jim Pitkow, has been running a company Moreover Technologies for a couple of years. Great guy, good company. anyway, they recently were acquired by Verisign (way to go Jim!). We could go down the Verisign path (another buddy of mine recently left there to start an RFID company, go Mealling ((way off the beaten path, but Michael Mealing, Jim Pitkow and I had made a business plan that we sent to the Yuri Rubinsky literally days before his untimely death (http://www.darwinsys.com/history/yuri.html) -- cheers to Yuri)), Mealing had been working within Verisign's R&D for a couple of years -- parallel to that, Mike Cannon, one of my colleagues and co-co-founders of nuBridges -- well his wife worked for HO systems out of Savanah, which was purchased by Verisign a number of years ago). Okay, back to Moreover...yet another buddy of mine went to work for a local 24 hour news company and happened to mention Moreover as an interesting company -- small world.

Tiny, tiny world...

Small world

In the 'it's a small world' category...

I'm currently digging into the use of location information captured over time. This information can be used for a number of things by discerning patterns, building models, and predicting future activities. Several researchers have used this in the area of ubiquitous computing and assistive technologies to help disabled or just people in general to go about their daily tasks.

The same basic idea, but extended greatly, has been suggested could help with national security (see DARPA) by analyzing such things as maritime vessel location information.

Whilst reading existing literature, I found an author who had done some interesting work in the field. Kentaro Toyama is the fellow. After having several email conversations, he agreed to share his data set which he had used to produce his research. This is a great thing, as having existing experimental results will allow me to do some validation using different approaches.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I discovered that Kentaro is helping lead the new Microsoft Research Center in Bangalore, India. And of all things, he also does work in ICT4D, or as they call it, Technology for Emerging Markets. This lines up nicely with the work I'm doing in international technology development.

Further conversations actually linked my professor, Mike Best, with Kentaro -- they apparently have done some work together in the past on ICT4D. A conference that Kentaro pointed me to () is one in which Mike Best serves on the conference committee, and a co-editor of the proceedings.

Go figure...