Wednesday, July 16, 2008

VisualVM 1.0

VisualVM is a visual tool integrating several commandline JDK tools and lightweight profiling capabilities. Designed for both production and development time use, it further enhances the capability of monitoring and performance analysis for the Java SE platform. Using it,

Application Developer can monitor, profile, take thread dumps, browse heap dumps.
System Administrator can monitor and control Java applications across the entire network.
Java Application User can create bug reports containing all the necessary information,












[source: https://visualvm.dev.java.net/]

Monday, July 14, 2008

I am a 'little' part of AAAI

Today, I became a part of apparently the most active Artificial Intelligence group i.e. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). I was eligible for the Student Membership costing 35$ per year for students in US/Canada. Following are the officially listed benefits associated with a typical membership:
  • AI Magazine: Included in your basic membership
  • The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Members receive substantial discounts on registration fees
  • The Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence: Members receive substantial discounts on registration fees
  • The online AI Directory: Included in your basic membership
  • Sponsored Journals: Members receive substantial discounts on subscription fees
  • The Spring Symposium Series
  • AAAI Technical Reports: Members receive discounts on technical reports
  • AAAI Press
  • Access to expanded world wide web services: Members receive password access to controlled portions of AAAI's web, where they can find full-text versions of the latest AI Magazine, along with other members-only materials.
  • AAAI Workshops
  • AAAI Affiliates

Sunday, July 13, 2008

A Proper Push-Up!

  1. Lie chest-down with your hands at shoulder level, palms flat on the floor and slightly more than shoulder-width apart, your feet together and parallel to each other.
  2. Look forward rather than down at the floor. The first contact you make with the floor with any part of the face should be your chin, not your nose.
  3. Keep your legs straight and your toes tucked under your feet.
  4. Straighten your arms as you push your body up off the floor. Keep your palms fixed at the same position and keep your body straight. Try not to bend or arch your upper or lower back as you push up.
  5. Exhale as your arms straighten out.
  6. Pause for a moment.
  7. Lower your body slowly towards the floor. Bend your arms and keep your palms in fixed position. Keep body straight and feet together.
  8. Lower body until chest touches the floor. Try not to bend your back. Keep your knees off the floor, and inhale as you bend your arms.
  9. Pause for a moment. Begin straightening your arms for a second push-up. Exhale as you raise your body.
[source: eHow]

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Is the OntologyWorks Knowledge Server a Database?

I was looking for companies that are working with technologies related to Semantic Web. I noticed that a few members in the RIF (Rule Interchange Format) workgroup at w3c are from OntologyWorks.

They
define themselves as,
".. a product company offering a broad suite of semantic technologies including deductive information repositories (our Ontology Works Knowledge Servers), semantic information fusion and cost effective semantic federation of legacy databases, ontology-based domain modeling, and management of the distributed enterprise."

It wasn't unusual for them to justify their existence, considering the fact that there are a number of disbelievers as far as the ability of Semantic Web concerned. One question that they answered was the thing that whether their capabilities were any different from companies offering typical database management system based services. Following is their
justification:
"Our information repositories are called Ontology Works Knowledge Servers to distinguish them from traditional database management systems or “databases” as these are usually called. Our Knowledge Server Family of ontology-based deductive systems do all that a database does but also do so much more that. They are a change of state in database technology, as from water to steam. We also apply our semantic technology capabilities to other information management systems, e.g. semantic legacy database federation, semantic enterprise mission management, semantic enhancement of existing databases and other applications.

In essence, traditional databases contain models of the world that are truncated and mute on many issues. They do not do inference over the model and cannot handle 3-place and higher relationships as our systems can. The emphasis in traditional databases is on storing lots of data and getting some of it out fast when needed. They were built so that users could ask for something, not about something. Traditional systems are brittle, expensive to maintain, and can't provide the answers the modern enterprise needs.

At our end of the semantic technologies spectrum we can describe the knowledge domain you care about with full descriptive power - with temporal understanding, n-place relationships and a powerfully descriptive controlling logic that allows complex inference over the model.

The genius of Ontology Works is that we can instantiate this complex, expressive model (ontology + controlling logic) of a knowledge domain in a deductive system - the eXtensible Knowledge Server (XKS) that gives excellent query performance for complex query whose answers have very high value to the enterprise. Our Knowledge Servers give the user real knowledge discovery, not just data retrieval.

The question then is not, “Is it better to have these highly expressive information systems or go back to mute data models?” The question is, “Yes, this expressiveness is an undoubted good, but is it efficiently computable.” With Ontology Works the answer is “Yes, it is efficiently computable.” Consequently, the economics of implementing our systems is very favorable."