The Market of Everything IV

This one got postponed for quite a while because of road work outside. There have also been some structural modifications to Traffic that probably needed to be gotten out of the way. I also noticed that there weren't as many performances as last time, although it was as good a market as any prior.

Unlike your regular flea market, there's a lot of unusually artistic and offbeat stuff available here (including, this time, actual Traffic furniture). I picked up a couple of books and some surreptitiously-imported condiments.

I was famished, so I was eagerly awaiting the start of the Boodle Fight. It's apparently some kind of Filipino military dining ritual in which everyone picks and eats food off the same leaf-covered table, regardless of rank. There were hefty portions of fragrant rice, chicken, and many kinds of seafood from which to choose. Yummy.

A very swinging musical atmosphere was provided by Eddie Misk's Swing n' Jive Combo and Alexandra Valls' Gypsy Swing Project, both of which featured the dynamic and dramatic double bass talent of Lakshmi Ramirez.

Cafe Scientifique Comes to Town

If you have science on the brain and live in the UAE, there's some good news for you. Dubai has just seen its first Cafe Scientifique, an event at which scientists, science-minded and science-curious people alike talk about, well, science. But instead of a lecture hall or some other relatively sterile venue, these are held in a discussion format in casual cafe ambiance. Specifically, Cafe Lila in TECOM. The clean, white decor greatly added to the lab-like "scienciness" of the vanue. It's also a 10 minute walk from home for me.

Roberts' journey to the edge

It's apparently an originally British concept, developed to help bring science to the public, and have now spread around the world. Rohan Roberts, a Dubai-based teacher and professional developer at Winchester School, is the organizer of these events, and is known to be a proponent of science in these parts. He actually organized an astronomy art exhibition not too long ago, and his being a teacher of literature while being deeply interested in and involved with science is a prime example of what Cafe Scientifique is all about.

Bidshahri expounds

The first topic of the season was cosmology, specifically "The Edge of the Universe". After an introductory note by fellow teacher Lara Matossian-Roberts, Roberts and one of his students, the intellectually prodigious Raya Bidshahri, began with an imagined narrative of a journey from earth to the edges of the cosmos, aided by slides. This was followed by a brief meet-and-greet, a documentary clip, and a long discussion of time travel, the "shape" of the universe and the speed of light. I think everyone had a great time, as many of us hung around long after the farewell note to continue the discussion.

Bidshahri, Roberts and Matossian-Roberts

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CafeSciDubai

Fridge Score: Katya Apekisheva

This week, I had the pleasure of attending a Katya Apekisheva piano concert. The penultimate show in The Fridge's debut classical music series The Score, it was a breathtaking demonstration of long-honed skill with my favorite musical instrument. We were treated to a few well-known compositions in the first half, a second half consisting of Mussorgsky's Pictures in an Exhibition, and a Grieg encore. The acoustics of the Madinat Theatre were also most conducive to the better appreciation of the performance.

arXiv article on social mobilization mentioned in New Scientist and MIT Technology Review

With the current interest in the idea of the crowd-sourced manhunt after the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, our article at arXiv.org has been featured in an MIT Technology review article and in a New Scientist article (the latter also featuring our veri.ly project for crowd-sourced disaster response)

Rahwan, I., Dsouza, S., Rutherford, A., Naroditskiy, V., McInerney, J., Venanzi, M., Jennings, N., Cebrian M. (2012) "Global Manhunt Pushes the Limits of Social Mobilization", Computer, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 68-75, April, 2013

And to compound the honor of our social mobilization work being published in PNAS, we also had work on a related topic published in IEEE Computer magazine this month. It was complemented in the same issue by an editorial piece "Equal Before the Bar", written by David Alan Grier himself, in which he describes his role in our victory, and why it is significant to the field of study. This one was about the US State Department Tag Challenge, a social mobilization challenge that our lab played a leading role in winning as Team CrowdScanner (web application developed by me for the challenge).

From the article:

Using social media and only the targets’ mug shots, a team competing in the
US State Department-sponsored Tag Challenge located three of five targeted
people in five cities in the US and Europe in less than 12 hours.
...
The Tag Challenge was significantly harder than the
Red Balloon Challenge because it required locating people
in highly populated cities, where the pace of life can help
people “hide in plain sight,”
 and making it much more difficult to spot the suspects than to find large red balloons.
Furthermore, people are mobile, making it difficult to rule
out locations that have already been visited.

Turkish Delights at the STUCK Cast Party

To celebrate the successful staging of our short play, STUCK (written by Kamlesh Acharya, and for which he and I were nominated in Backstage Awards categories for best short play writer and best short play director, respectively), I held a cast party at my place. True to form, I turned it into a culinary exploration opportunity, selecting Turkish as the theme of the night.

For the appetizer, I prepared Pancar Ezme, a beetroot and yoghurt dip, which we scooped up with garlic toasted bread. Definitely the hit of the night.

The soup course consisted of Mahluta Corbasi, a red lentil soup that was similar the Ethiopian Mesir Wat that I like to make.

The entree course was Dolma, a hearty dish of tomato stuffed with a cooked mixture of rice and tomato pulp.

For the main, I made lamb kofta and served it on a bed of fattoush.

And for dessert, I baked Sekerpare, a semolina-and-flour cookie with syrup.

Rutherford, A., Cebrian, M., Dsouza, S., Moro, E., Pentland, A., Rahwan, I. (2013) "Limits of Social Mobilization", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The PNAS paper is finally out, with me as third author. All of us are elated, of course, as PNAS is one of the top scientific publications. This project has also been the subject of a 2012 NetSci conference presentation and a 2012 WIDS workshop poster, so our team has been into it for a while now.

Masdar Press Release:

Abu Dhabi-UAE: 18 April, 2013 – Time-critical social mobilization is the ability of social networks to mobilize rapidly to address challenges such as disaster response or finding a missing child.

While social media is a very effective tool for mobilizing volunteers, it still has its limits, according to a research paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) journal, considered the second most-cited scientific journal in the world.

The scientific paper is a result of two years of research at the Social Computing and Artificial Intelligence laboratory, led by Dr. Iyad Rahwan, Associate Professor and Head of Computing & Information Science at Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.

The first author of the paper is Dr Alex Rutherford, post-doctoral fellow at Masdar Institute and member of Dr. Rahwan’s lab. The other co-authors are Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Dr. Manuel Cebrian, from National ICT Australia, Sohan D’Souza of Masdar Institute, and Prof. Esteban Moro, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

We also got got coverage at LiveScience.com and Phys.org.