TAKEPLACE: COMPETING VIEWPOINTS

Sunday, March 27, 2011

COMPETING VIEWPOINTS

I had an interesting conversation with a friend about a recent request to conserve electricity for an hour at 8pm. Now she felt very adamant against it that it was somehow taking a step back to the middle ages or some silly thing like that. She raised her voice and said how dare they ask me to live like, like some person in a 3rd world country.

Now I happened to take a very different view and saw the request as a terribly compassionate thing. That this politician was challenging us to make a sacrifice for the greater good of everyone. A pretty reasonable request in deed, that in fact if we were able to see it and participate in such an act it wouldn't be a step back but a fairly large step forward as an individual, group, and society.

Sufficed to say there was no changing her mind which left me wonder how funny that two people could have such completely different views of the world.

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TakePlace was made with you in mind It's about ideas and innovation, creative perspectives, and solutions. We're advocates for change, because change needs friends. We explore complex systems, adaptive agents, modeling, simulation, artificial life, and complex (information, biological, and social) networks. We especially focus on the Web as a complex information network in which we leave abundant traces of our social and semantic activities: what we do, what we are interested in, whom we talk to, what knowledge we acquire and contribute. Our research spans from modeling the dynamic processes that occur on the Web (how information networks grow and evolve, how individual and collective traffic patterns emerge, how attention bursts are generated and shaped by social and search tools) to designing tools that mine the Web to build better search, navigation, management, and recommendation tools (where ‘better’ means more intelligent, autonomous, robust, personalized, contextual, scalable, adaptive, and so on).