Personal Blog

At DIG, we are experimenting with FOAF - the "Friend Of A Friend" project that makes it possible for computers to link, merge, search, sort web information about people.

The geeky side of me revels in the idea of FOAF, imagining the web of connections rapidly building across the ether. I'm imagining the speed at which I could do certain kinds of research and the ease of finding people whose last names I can't remember. Soon we can all play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in earnest. And, we'll find out if we're actually connected by 6, 3.6, or some other number of degrees of separation.

I've already posted my own FOAF 1.0, which will provide a thread from people I've met at CSAIL to a couple of other technical people I know. I think of it as if they're the first guests to arrive at a party at my house.
. . .

Then the questions start to seep in. Can the people I know marginally (or don't care for) invite themselves to my party? What do I do when someone like that puts me in their FOAF? Can I make them take it off the web? Can I somehow override (overwrite?) their FOAF?

The lawyer part of me raises the ante on a coworker's privacy questions. I'm envisioning people being "FOAFed" -- the internet form of "outed" -- having relationships revealed that they hadn't intended to make public. What about companies mining my FOAF to market to everyone in my group? And, what about the access FOAF provides the government to association information that might otherwise require a subpoena or warrant to discover?

I haven't had a chance to think about this enough to decide if these issues are analagous to those raised by writing about someone else in my blog or having someone write about me in theirs.  I would appreciate getting other people's opinions on this question. 

In the meantime, I too will limit my FOAF to people who've given me permission and who I think understand the potential ramifications.

I thought I'd have a little fun and post my thesis as I draft it. I couldn't find any other example of someone doing this and I thought it would be interesting to try. There should be a lot of changes over the next three or four weeks, so check back often! The draft is posted under the "Professional" tab and you are invited to post comments there.

We’ve hit the halfway mark of the program! It’s a bit of anomaly. We’re finishing our third of four semesters, but we are completing the sixth month of our year. In theory, then, the second six months should be easier. We’ll see…

November was a months of ups and downs.

On the exciting side:
• On one fabulous evening, I went to a happy hour with the women MBA’s; a cultural function put on by the MBA’s from India (though I stood in line between a Korean student in an intensive English program and a Mexican friend who’s a London School of Economics student visiting MIT and cross-registering at Harvard); and a tour of the glassblowing lab from an Australian classmate (where I met Macarthur “genius” grant recipient who’s a full professor at 23 and his father who is now artist-in-residence at the Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence Lab).
• One of the people who couldn’t make this year’s class came for a visit. She’s a dynamic IT executive and I think we convinced her this is a program she can’t live without!
• We learned that our class’ international trip will be to China and India! We’re going to Shanghai, Beijing, Kangmai, Delhi, and Bangalore.
• Through a small seminar, I met Jim Champy, (http://www.jimchampy.com/bio.htm) the Chairman of the MIT Corporation (it’s Board of Trustees). He’s an extremely accomplished, but for me he offered a special delight. I discovered that he had been responsible for Technology Review, the alumni magazine, during the late 1970’s when I used to read my father’s copy. It had been very readable for a teenager and provided some of my first insights into applied science and technology policy. It also offered a wonderful page of puzzles, a tradition that’s been abandoned to my chagrin. I’m sure its vibrancy and unlocking of life’s mysteries is part of the reason I’m at MIT today. It’s not often that we have the opportunity to thank someone for influencing our earlier life.
• I gave a presentation at the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC. The talk was entitled “Granular Access: Information Sharing in a World of Complex Laws & Policies” (there’s a link to my PowerPoint under the “Professional” tab on this site, but all the fun was in the anecdotes!). The best part of the day was hearing the other presentations (http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AdvancingInformationSharing_DiverseDigitalCollections_HeterogeneousSensitivities_11_08_05) and meeting many fascinating new people: Doug Oard (http://www.glue.umd.edu/~oard/), Sonia Siglar (http://www.cataphora.com/about_us/management.php), etc.

On the up and down side:
• This was the month in which I had to finalize my thesis proposal. I am grateful to the professor who told me that the fourth idea is likely to be close to right. Those who know me, know I don’t lack for ideas. For me it’s a challenge to come up with a narrow enough topic to be appropriate for a thesis. Serendipity took its course and Professor Oard gave me a lead on a marvelous idea. Stay tuned!

On the very down side:
• We lost Glenn Mitchell, my brother-in-law on the Sunday morning before Thanksgiving. He was a talented radio reporter known to the Dallas community for thirty years. I hope you’ll take the time to read about his life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Mitchell; http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisemac/archives/2005/11/power_mac_g5_qu_1.html) and listen to his work: (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5023735).

The fall semester is now in full swing and I’ve learned what the MIT expression “drinking from the fire hose” really means.  It’s not about classes – they limit how many credits you can take.  It’s about the massive number of other things you can do or see on any given day at any given time.  There is so much buzz here, the place seems to have its own harmonic!

 For example, for tomorrow night, here are a few of my choices:

• the welcome reception for Sloan alumni (expecting large turn-out due to it being 75^th anniversary of Sloan Fellows and 25^th anniversary of Management of Technology program) http://mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni/convocation2005/e-main.php
• a dinner with the folks from the Media Lab to talk about ideas for the campus-wide “$50K” entrepreneurship competition (remember them from earlier email, the people with the concept car http://www.media.mit.edu/events/di-2004-10-22/wjm2004-1022.pdf ) and cognizant robots (http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/robotsandsims.html) 
• a thesis defense on Routing Tradeoffs in Dynamic Peer-to-peer Networks (not for everyone, I know, but it promises to be an interesting discussion of distributed hash tables)
• the weekly meeting of TechLink – the graduate group that links the business students with the tech students
• “The Past, Present and Future of Women in Science” by a distinguished researcher from Yale (author:  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0309065682/102-9839959-3459342?v=glance)
• A partner from McKinsey talking about venture capital

I’ve decided to split my time between the first two.  Today, if I move fast enough, I can see a world-renowned campus designer, followed by the CTO of Sun Microsystems, and attend a meeting of entrepreneurs on a new cell phone service, all within 4 hours!

My classes for fall are terrific.  The required courses are Managing Technical Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Strategic Management (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of-Management/15-902Strategic-Management-IFall2002/CourseHome/ ); and two seminars on Leadership (one where we learn models and talk about our experiences; one where we listen to nationally/internationally successful leaders).  In addition, I’m taking a course that will teach me how to write a proper Business Plan when seeking venture capital.  I’m also supposed to be working on my thesis, but am not quite organized for that yet; should have something interesting to say next month!

For those who knew me as a student in an earlier life, you’ll be surprised to find out that I’m attending all of my classes plus two additional ones not for credit – an Architecture/Urban Planning course on planning/building the university (or any major research institute); an ongoing research seminar in IT management – so far focused on lots of data integration, harmonization, context mediation issues.  

The big news, though, is that I am living my MIT fantasy.  On my hope-to-do list was to meet Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the web.  (No Al Gore jokes, please.)  This is the man who came up with the “www” and “http” concept which make it possible for us to move so efficiently through so many people’s information and who has been knighted by the Queen of England.  Better than meeting him, I ended up with a job working for him!  

His organization, W3C - the World Wide Web consortium (http://www.w3.org/ ) - has one of its three offices on campus.  The next generation of internet is called Semantic Web and, in part, will us to move from searching/retrieving documents to using rules-based logic to grant access to data.  He has started a group that has been joking called the R&D department of W3C at MIT’s Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL: http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php).  He has started a project there looking at how to implement policy rules and how, after the fact, to use automated rules logic to have transparency and accountability for actions taken (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/dig/ ) .  By a stroke of incredible good fortune, someone heard a brief talk I gave explaining work I was doing for the government this year and thought I would be a good fit for the project to look at using these tools for law and government.  So, in addition to being a student, I am now a Research Assistant at CSAIL.

Life couldn’t be better – unless I could figure out how to give up sleeping or to teleport so I could spend more free time with Matt J

Here I am in Boston!  My first week here (last week) was the coldest one in Boston history since the 1890’s.  And, it rained the whole time.  What an introduction.  Nonetheless, I managed to get my apartment furnished and stocked – quite a shock to see what it costs to do that from scratch.  The first week reminded me how annoying academic administration can be…lots of paperwork, lines, and employees in no particular rush.  My classmates are an enthusiastic bunch and, via email, arranged quite a few activities before school began.  I went to dinner in Chinatown, at Cheers, and the North End (Italian); went to a sports bar/nightclub and got a private tour of Fenway Park; and played soccer!  Tuesday was the official first day of the program, but by then I’d already socialized with about 60 or 70 people.

 

The official name of our program is the MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Global Leadership and Innovation.  Our class is approximately 90 people from 22 countries and ranges in age from 32 to 55 or so.  Almost everyone in the program has at least one graduate degree; there are 9 lawyers and quite a few Ph.D.’s.  There are probably more engineers by training than anything else, but I’m not the only undergraduate English major.  My assigned study group includes a doctor from China (who knew Chairman Mao) and is now a venture capitalist; a developer from Cameroon; and a telecom engineer from Japan.  My larger group includes an American engineer who has started and sold a series of companies; a Korean engineer who designed the fairing for the flaps on the 757; and a Chinese oil and gas executive who speaks Chinese, Russian, English, & Indonesian. 

 

This week was mostly leadership exercises.  Most were designed to get us to open up to each other and it worked pretty well.  We were encouraged to talk about cultural issues and it’s already helping us figure out how to work well together.  We even had a one day Outward Bound experience – think 9 people all blindfolded, holding hands, finding their way across a field with trees and bushes to a specific destination.  Academics begin next week, but I’m happy to report that I did well on a few exercises this week.  There was one about surviving after a plane crash and I came in fourth out of the 90 (and talked my group into doing what would help them all to survive).  And, today, we did a supply chain game and my group was the winner – the professor collected $1 from everyone to get them motivated, so I got $13!

 

They tell us we will be insanely busy starting Monday, so I doubt I’ll report too often, but I will try to get out the occasional blog.