Looking back 2009 – I like to remember my top 3 happiest moments with my friends in the scientific world:

(1) Spinning around L’Arche de Triomphe in Paris with George and Bernadette.  It’s wild when we were in a convertible on a perfect summer night.   Tres Chic!

(2) Enjoying A Midsummer’s Night Dream in La Scala Opera House in Milan with Gabriella and Gloria (and their hubbies).  I’d never heard such heavenly angelic voices.

(3) Finishing our NYC office move, and did not break any equipments in the process, and inviting our PhD friends over for Christmas party.  I’m so proud!

Who say that scientists and engineers can’t have fun?!

Looking back at 2009, it took me a few months to stop telling everyone that Madonna has become my next door neighbor – yes! she moved into the Upper East Side.  I also went crazy for a few months making decisions for our office move, and it was tough.

Nothing ground breaking in the technological world that I saw or heard.

But I shall remember 2009 as a staging year – a time to catch a breath and to learn – preparing for something great to happen in the new year.

Recently, I attended the Web Intelligence conference in Milan, and I saw Da Vinci’s The Last Supper for the very first time.

I was never a great fan of Mona Lisa – having great disappointment with the very small canvas hanging in Louvre.  As a doctorate student in Paris, I could not understand what’s the big deal of that smile.  Even when I was fortunate to attend a lecture by the director of curator of Louvre, in which she explained in great detail the innovative play of light with the fine drawing — I still couldn’t bring myself to like Mona.  Sorry!

So I did not have great expectations coming to The Last Supper. The fresco has most part destroyed with the use of the tempura techniques – use of egg white and organic material – that did not withstand the age of time. However the restoration effort was quite remarkable.  Christ appears beyond sadness and the relief was coming through pretty sharp – the 3-dimensional mountains in the background and with the apostle Philip almost jumping out of the painting.  But I wasn’t quite in awe as when I saw the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Nonetheless it’s a great feeling to have stood in the same room as Leonardo!

After the visit, I picked up a book “Leonardo’s notebook” and read it during my flight back home.

I was just struck by the way Leonardo described how to become a great painter – First, you have to learn perspective. Second, you have to observe proportion. Third, you have to observe people and things around you and memorize faces to use later.

The guy is just downright disciplined!!! He repeated these steps in a number of different ways and in different context throughout his notes. I was so inspired by his thought process.  He uses mathematics throughout his notes, and recorded astute observations of the human face, types of nose, hands, proportion and physics of light and the scientific description of how things appears in human eyes due to the pupil dilation.

The notes are refreshing reminder of the fun stuff in engineering and sciences.

I admire the voice actors who volunteer many hours reading the entire health care bill — see NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/health/policy/14audio.html:

Listen to the Health Care Bill Read by Professional Voices

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

Published: September 14, 2009

About 60 voice actors volunteered to record the proposed health care bill, H.R. 3200, a 1,017-page doorstop. The reading, available free at hearthebill.org, clocks in just shy of 24 hours.

BUT….Using text to voice technologies, I can easily turn the entire bill into human voice.  While it may not be as nice as the voice actors’ voice, but it’s pretty close to a real human speaking.  And I’m quite sure that one can save many hours of voice editing by using machine generated voice.

A few weeks ago, the smart Dr. Sanjay Gupta appeared in CNN, and looking perplexed as he admitted that he found the bill not clear in many areas after he personally plowed through the 1000 over pages.

I guess when we try to understand something complex, our human nature will, by default, “play back” and “read back” any difficult statements. We’ll read over and over again until we get that aha moment or “OK, this must be what it means!”.  This is like reading and signing a legal document.  We want to know exactly what we will get ourselves into.  This requires both subject matter knowledge and patience to think and reason the relations of actions, probablity of events and consequences.

Turning the text to voice, without any decision aid tools, probably will not make this bill any easier to understand. 

Thanks but no thanks, I will not ipod the health care bill for my gym workout, I may mess up my steps.

As a 9/11  survivor, I’m often asked questions about my escape from the North Tower.

Most people, if they gathered enough courage to ask me, want to know the following:

(1) What did you feel when the plane hit the tower?

Answer: I felt the floor swaying in slow motion 5 times, and then the light dimmed for a few seconds, and then I heard a strange sound of falling sand – everything happened very fast.  But there’s no loud bang or terrifying scenes like that in the  movie. It was not till I left the building that I saw the scary big hole in the tower.

(2) How long did you take to run away?

Answer: Hmm… you don’t run down the stairs, especially with a crowd. I remembered walking down step-by-step,  there were no pushing or shouting, and occasionally we stopped for a few seconds while a fireman walked up with his heavy suit and equipments.  While I was in the stairway, I learned that there was a plane that hit the tower, someone with a cellphone was telling everyone what he heard from his wife.  But we did not know that it was a terrorist attack.

(3) Did you see the building falling?  You must have heard the South Tower falling?

Answer: No, I did not see the building falling.  I was smart enough to know that I need to get away as soon as I can — in fact I only stayed around for 10 mins once I got out the building and then I decided to start walking back home a hundred blocks away.   If there’s any noise, it was when we were  getting on the bridge to cross from North Tower to the World Financial center, I heard big bangs, and I thought that was the sound of the building debris.  But later, I was very sad to understand that the bangs were from the falling human bodies.

The above may be tough to read.  I understand people are not just curious, but they are gathering data to think if they can survive if they ever encounter similar attacks.  And I don’t believe that any advanced information technologies or intelligence technologies could have helped in understanding the human experience.

I remember 9/11 morning a beautiful morning as I walked out of the subway heading towards the North Tower.

We were attacked and we survived. We are stronger.

We recently decided to renovate our apartment in New York City. Steve, our take-charge no-nonsense contractor gave a tour of our living room, and suggested that “Linen White” is the color to paint.

Having absolutely no idea of what linen really shows as “white”, I decided to research a little and play with the color palette.

I have no idea what I got myself into! There are more than 5000 colors to choose from. The grades of white easily presented more than a hundred options. Now the rules of color sound straight forward: choosing a color requires coordination between cool and warm tones. Colors in the same family of spectrum are “friends” i.e. they have hues that complement each other. While opposite colors “attracts” and they just naturally look good next to each other – for example red will look great with green.

When I asked Steve why he suggested “Linen White”, he explained that this is the most popular color in United States. But this is not a good answer – popularity does not necessarily equate the best – at least for me.

Wishing for a color that is truly personalized, and deciding that we are the “cool” folks, we went for blue. Then as a novice with the color chart, we try to imagine if the color works with the furniture color and other rooms, which proved not to be simple. I spent hours matching and simulating the different colors with a software.

The experience of choosing a color is a decision management problem – there are business rules (i.e. the rules of complementing colors), multi-criteria (many options and the need to satisfy competing objectives), and most importantly, personalization (we prefer cool but not warm white as most people). Hiring a color specialist can help in my renovation project; there is a role for experts with knowledge and understanding of the color spectrum.

Now, I got to run… I’ve to use my iPhone to catch some colors and develop a truly personalized “taste” for my kitchen.

Inc.com just published an interesting slide on The Best Industries for Starting a Business Right Now – http://www.inc.com/ss/best-industries-starting-business-right-now

Perhaps chocolates serve some neuropsychological cravings our brains require to function in current economic crisis, Candy is the first suggestion of making it big as a business. According to the slide, the list of promising ventures are:

1. Candy
2. iPhone Apps
3. Health-Care Technology
4. Self Improvement
5. Software as a Service
6. Home Health Care
7. Yoga Products and Services
8. Technical and Trade Schools
9. Fast-Casual Dining
10. Green Construction
11. Niche Consulting
12. Education Technology
13. Temporary Staffing Firms
14. Government Services
15. Accounting Services
16. Repair Services
17. Energy

I do not know how inc.com measures the top 17 industries. By job creation? demands and supply trends? or simply counting the number of small businesses that are successful.

But it’s comforting to see that technology seems to be good winning strategy for starting a business.

Now if candies are doing well in bad times, then I wonder how the gym business are doing these days?

This poll shows overwhelming agreement on what needs to be fixed in current economic crisis:

http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/37901/sxwau

What needs to happen to kick-start new housing construction?

Can we use Einstein’s special theory of relativity – the speed of light is the same in all reference frames, irrespective of their relative motion — to describe the “speed of data” in a flat world of global internet economy?

It’s 130th Anniversary of Albert Einstein’s Birth!

For all his fame and glory, the man was true to his passion towards science and research — Einstein’s “miracle year”– when he published four papers that would alter the course of modern physics, happened while he was working as a clerk in a patent office.

With our worldly distractions, how many engineers and scientists will choose to pursue creativity and ideas with such selflessness?

In the center of our economic crisis, the marketing concepts used in realty advertisements are adjusting to the mood of our real-estate market. In the article published in New York Times:

Adjectives Get Evicted
By TERI KARUSH ROGERS
Published: March 1, 2009
The new broker advertising vocabulary does not include “luxury,” “prestige” or, heaven forbid, “trophy.” Brand names that used to convey cachet have also fallen out of favor.

A few thoughts and questions come to mind reading this article.
1. Is Value = Recession? That is people search for value only during a recession?
2. Is Trophy = Bull Market?
3. Can I describe an apartment both as Trophy and Value?
4. I think that a trophy apartment is generally also a value apartment because you can resell easier.
5. The word Value does not sound to me depressive, so we are not in depression?

To most people, a fireplace in New York City makes a trophy apartment, but to the couple cited in the article, a fireplace is a “value”. Different words, same apartment.

Amid all the negative news, this “recession” article make me feel good and positive about the future of our economy!

IADIS International Conference 2009
Algarve, Portugal.
25 – 27 February 2009

IADIS – International Association for Development of the Information Society is a non-profit association.
See http://www.iadis.org/

A new paradigm is sweeping the society, organisations and the business environment. In fact, society and business world alike are moving from its tangible bases to intangible ones based on knowledge and information systems (IS) to support its management, use and sharing. In this emerging paradigm, terms like information, communication, knowledge, and learning have acquired a critical relevance to the understanding of the nature of contemporary business. This led authors such as Drucker (1993) to state that “we are entering the knowledge society in which the basic economic resource… is knowledge”.

In fact, since the mid-1980s, there has been a sudden avalanche of a new kind of vocabulary. Corporations, which so far had been economic entities, are being described as ‘information-based organizations’, ‘learning organizations’, ‘knowledge-creating companies’ or knowledge intensive organizations. Instead of product-market strategies, the fashionable business discourse invokes core competencies, intangible assets, knowledge-based capabilities, intellectual capital, knowledge management etc. Consequently, in this 21st century of ours, terms such as intellectual capital, knowledge management, and knowledge mapping have increasingly become part of the corporate landscape.

However, none of this apparent revolution would be possible without the underlying technological support provided by IS. The IADIS Information Systems Conference (IS 2009) aims to provide a forum for the discussion of IS taking a socio-technological perspective. It aims to address the issues related to design, development and use of IS in organisations from a socio-technological perspective, as well as to discuss IS professional practice, research and teaching. A set of key issues has been identified (see below). However, these do not aim at being prescriptive, or set in stone, and any innovative contributions that do not fit into these areas will also be considered.

Key issues in this conference will focus on:

IS in Practice, Technology Infrastructures and Organizational Processes

- Power, Cultural, Behavioural and Political issues

- New Organisational Forms

- Dilution of Organisational Boundaries

- The centrality of IS and IT in Organisational
Processes

- IS Management

- Information Management

- Knowledge Management

- IS and SMEs

- Innovation and IS

- Innovation and Knowledge Management

- IS and Change Management

- IS and Organisation Development

- Enterprise Application Integration

- Enterprise Resource Planning

- Business Process Change

IS Design, Development and Management Issues and Methodologies

- Design and Development Methodologies and
Frameworks

- Iterative and Incremental Methodologies

- Agile Methodologies

- IS Design and Development as a Component-Based
Process

- IS Design and Development as Social Negotiation
Process

- IS D Design and Development as a Global and
Distributed Process

- Outsourcing in IS

- Outsourcing Risks, Barriers and Opportunities

- IS Project Management

- IS Quality Management and Assurance

- IS Standards and Compliance Issues

- Risk Management in IS

- Risk Management in IS Design and Development

IS Professional Issues

- Ethical, social, privacy, security and moral issues
in an e-society

- The role of information in the information society

- Myths, taboos and misconceptions in IS

- Practitioner and Research Relationship, Projects and
Links

- Validity, Usefulness and Applicability of IS Academic
Research

- Industrial Research versus Academic Research Issues

- Industry Innovation and Leadership and Academic
Laggards

- IS consultancy as a profession

- Organisational IS Roles

- Communities of practice and Knowledge Sharing

IS Research

- Core Theories, Conceptualisations and Paradigms in
IS Research

- Ontological Assumptions in IS Research

- IS Research Constraints, Limitations and
Opportunities

- IS vs Computer Science Research

- IS vs Business Studies

- Positivist, Interpretivist and Critical Approaches to
IS Research

- Quantitative vs. Qualitative Methods

- Deductive vs Inductive Approaches

- Multi-method Approaches and Triangulations in IS
Research

- Design Research and the Sciences of the Artificial
in IS

- Multidisciplinary Views and Multi Methodological
Approaches

- New and alternative approaches to IS research

- Examples of experimental research designs in IS

IS Learning and Teaching

- Patterns of Demand for IS Teaching Provision

- Fads, Fashions and Fetishes in IS Curricula

- Pedagogic practice in Teaching IS

- E-Learning in IS

- Instructional Design for IS

- National Cultures and Approaches to Pedagogy

- Multiculturality ad Diversity Issues in IS Learning and Teaching