Profession and academia

The folks at the Website SlideShare.net picked my presentation at ACM Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) as the slideshow of the day, and are featuring it in their home page ;-)

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Every few months, Yahoo! runs a "Hack Day", a day in which any team of Yahoo!s can submit a quick "hack" --a simple program-- using Yahoo! technologies or data to a world-wide or regional competition. PhotoSoup was the entry of our team in Barcelona last year in the European Hack Day, and we won the coolest hack award ;-)

PhotoSoup is a visual word puzzle generator that allows users to create word search puzzles with tag-photo pairs taken from Flickr. The tag is hidden in the puzzle, and only the associated photo is shown as a clue. The objective is to find all hidden tags in the puzzle before you run out of time.

The hack is described in detail in this blog entry at next.yahoo.com. ¡Enjoy!

Spammers is a card game for 2 to 6 players in which each player tries to maximize profit by luring unsuspecting users to answer scam e-mails. The scams come in four flavors: sex, internet, money and free stuff. I haven't played the game but the topic seems hilarious

FreeBase.ORG, a kind of "Wikipedia of data" started it operations today in public alpha (before you could only enter with an invitation).

FreeBase is a web application to maintain collaboratively a set of data. Each datum can belong to one or several types, and types are organized in a hierarchy. Users are free of adding and updating data, and of creating new types, or edit the types they have created.

All the data that is managed through freebase is distributed under a Creative Commons License. The idea is to make it easy for developers and others to include data in their applications. For instance, if you need a database of postal codes, of chemical elements or stock ticker symbols, you can download (or contribute corrections) the dataset freely.

FreeBase.ORG, una verdadera "Wikipedia de las bases de datos" comenzó a operar hoy en versión alpha abierta al público (anteriormente era sólo con invitación).

FreeBase es una aplicación web para mantener y administrar colaborativamente un conjunto de datos. Cada datum puede pertenecer a uno o varios tipos, y los tipos se organizan en una jerarquía. Los usuarios son libres de agregar y actualizar datos y de crear nuevos tipos, o editar los tipos que han creado.

Todos los datos que se administran en FreeBase son distribuídos con licencia Creative Commons, la idea es hacer más simple para desarrolladores y otros el incluír datos en sus aplicaciones. Por ejemplo, si necesitas una base de datos de códigos postales, de elementos químicos o de símbolos bursátiles, puedes descargarla (o contribuir correcciones) libremente.