Write-ups

Less than a week ago I moved for work to Doha, Qatar. I was rather worried, I have to say. The reaction from my colleagues was mostly negative: affectionate, but negative. The reaction from my friends was mixed: some found it excellent, other congratulate me, others said they'll miss us (and me to them!)

My first impression of Doha, is that I do not have a first impression ;-) So far I've only picked small clues about how things will be. Probably many of them are wrong. I write them here to laugh about them later.

The first things is that it is ridiculously hot, 40 Celsius during most of the day, and everybody says this is just a small preview of what is about to come in the next months, where it will go to 50 Celsius and "you won't be able to stand in the sun for 5 minutes".

The cats hated to travel. They spent 12 hours in the cages, with 6 of them flying. When they were "delivered" to me, I found them alone next to the luggage belt. The good thing: they still had water in their dishes, meaning they were not moved so much. The cats were weird after the trip, they did not want to eat and were searching for Fabiola, but now they are easier, eating and wanting to go to the backyard. That, I will let them do it later on when they are more used to this place. For now, Panterita and Trufa are a big chunk of my social life.

I was assigned a house in a gated community where there are mostly people related to education/universities, many families with kids. The community has its own pool and gym. The house looks huge compared with what I've experienced in the last years: Rome (a studio of 16 sq m) and Barcelona (flats of 48 and 64 sq m).

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This week I am starting a new adventure in Doha, Qatar :-) I feel very sad about leaving Barcelona, so I started remembering some random things that happened to me during this time:

• I used an entire box of 500 staples.
• I was expelled from Spain with 15 days to leave the country ... thanks to a good lawyer and efforts by other people I was able to solve this.
• While naked I met some people I knew at the beach ... fortunately, in the water.
• I worked in a beautiful train station, in the best job I've had so far.
• I made many friends, and I had time to loose a few ones.
• I went to China, India, Germany, Poland, France, etc.
• I often went to work on a longboard.
• I was able to publish a lot and be very productive.
• I walked four hours a trail of one hour (lost).
• I went to the gym for the first time in my life, and I am still going.
• We went every year at least once to the Netherlands and once to Rome.
• I saw Italy loose some of its brightest people.
• I went from suffering by paper rejections to feel almost indifferent.
• I burned a mother board and I learned that yes, you can plug the power source the wrong way.
• I dropped a speaker on top of my corporate laptop after less than one month of having it, and I payed the mistake.
• I discovered an rsa token can not stand a 5-stories fall.
• I understood sangria is the way Spain punishes turists.
• I drank at least half a cubic meter of beer.
• I had liters of vermouth poured by Robert de Niro.
• I spent great afternoons in Part de la Ciutadella and found out the sun is a luxury.
• I arrived with 29 years and now I am 35.
• I bought for the first time lotion to avoid hair loss and found out how useless it is.
• We adopted three cats and saw one of them die.
• My grandfather died. My grandmother died. My brother in law died.
• I enjoyed having the baker, the guy at the minimarket and at the bar greet me.
• I was surprised when it started to happen at my branch in the bank.
• Colleagues proved me wrong often, but always respectfully.
• I did body pump and aerobics ... in the middle of the Rambla.
• I had dinner at Palau de la Musica.
• I had delicious calcots and artichokes.
• I got addicted to Pimientos del Padrón and Patatas Bravas.
• I removed kilos of tuna fish from green salads.
• I met tons of crazy cat ladies and found out it is marvelous to be married to one.
• I learned to speak much louder than what is comfortable for a Chilean.
• I felt very ashamed about how some Chileans treat Peruvians when I was treated as some Europeans treat Chileans.
• I went to Suede, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Groove Armada, Viva la Fete and Arctic Monkeys.
• I was addressed often in Arabic and people won't believe I was Chilean.
• I learnt Catalan watching Doraemon.

Of course there is lots, lots more than this. Paraphrasing Douglas Adams: "So Long Barcelona, and Thanks for All the Fish!" See you soon, friends! I hope to come back to enjoy this beautiful city and the wonderful people it attracts.

Decision-making procedures in online social networks should reflect participants' political influence within the network.

Direct-democracy voting in large online communities may not be the best choice. The degree of commitment of different participants in online communities and collaboration systems varies greatly. In a community in which there are a few core members with long-term commitments to the project, and many other members joining and leaving the project rapidly, egalitarian democracy is neither expected nor appropriate. Thus, the decision-making mechanism is often meritocratic.

In this work, we propose a middle-ground between direct democracy (citizens vote on every issue) and representative democracy (citizens elect representatives that decide on their behalf on every issue). Our proposal, a type of delegative democracy, allows them to express their opinion directly or to delegate their power on a proxy.

Proxy delegation can be transitive: a proxy can delegate in another proxy. However, as our vote travels farther away through a delegation chain, we would like to introduce some reluctance in the way the power is transferred to other people we may not know directly. In that sense, we include a dampening factor (like PageRank does) to reduce the amount of power delegated through long chains. Technically, our system of viscous democracy is a system of transitive proxy voting with exponential damping.

Details appear in the virtual extension of the June 2011 issue of Communications of ACM: Viscous Democracy for Social Networks, by Paolo Boldi, Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo and Sebastiano Vigna.

These are the slides from our paper [pdf] on creating teams automatically. It was presented last week by Aris Gionis at CIKM'10 in Toronto, Canada.

This research is about creating and assigning teams on-the-fly as a stream of tasks arrives. It is particularly useful for "horizontal" organizations where there is not a single control point deciding who gets to do what. The algorithm we present tries to balance effectiveness (allocating the rights teams to each task) and fairness (dividing evenly the workload among people, even if they have different skills).

Aris Anagnostopoulos, Carlos Castillo, Aristides Gionis, Luca Becchetti, Stefano Leonardi: "Power in Unity: Forming Teams in Large-Scale Community Systems" [pdf]. Proc. of CIKM 2010, pp. 599-608.Toronto, Canada. ACM Press.

(Versión en castellano en Ecosofia.org).

The struggle between species on Earth is, for now, settled. In the quest for evolving new and better ways of surviving and replicating, we have found a powerful and general adaptation. Our brains are able of creating technology to manipulate matter, energy, and information, at a scale far beyond our physical limitations as primates. This adaptation puts us well above the other animals on Earth.

We are a remarkable species that over a few hundred thousand years has been consolidating its position as the dominant species. We have become formidable predators, and while there are still many ways in which the rest of the terrestrial biota can kill us, we are able of sterilizing vast areas of the planet, leaving only the flora and fauna that fits our interests.

But the key to our success, our brain, is not only a tool of survival and replication. Our brain can do many other things that are well beyond the interest of our genes for multiplying themselves. A human can decide, against its reproductive drive, to take contraceptives. A human can decide, against energy efficiency considerations, to spend a great deal of his life creating music, poetry, dance.

A human being may also decide to switch sides. Obviously a human can not stop being a human. But he can decide to advocate for non-human interests, for the interests of the other beings in our ecosphere. He can decide that he does not want its own species to continue growing and dominating the other species in the way they it has been doing it.