Archive for the 'Future' Category
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
Article Review: The Faceted Navigation & Search Revolution by Steve Papa
This was an assignment that was fulfilled by Yu Shuli and myself, and we were to review Steve Papa’s “Faceted Navigation & Search Revolution” article. In summary, faceted means having many “faces” - you know, like some Gods and Devils in religions and mythology. Every matter or content in the world has a set of distinct values - for e.g. you may have eyes that are brown, and hair that are black. It is these characteristics which define us. Similarly, contents like this post too has facets: Its genre is in Technology, while it is being authored by a Singaporean.
These are the unique qualities which ease the typical user’s life, without being necessarily interlinked. He is able to search articles which have been “faceted classified” using “faceted navigation”, without having to know too much about what he wants to look for. In the case of using a person as a content, you can think a matchmaking content browsing system this way: You may want a wife who is a teacher, stays near you, and has long hair. It does not matter which one you specify first - at the end of the day, you can list your criteria in any order, and the matchmaker’s IT system should just narrow down for you - it just makes sure the list of results meet your needs. Most importantly, this will save a lot of the end user’s time in formulating a search.
Faceted Navigation is not just about doing advanced search. It is also about defining facets for contents like a “wife”, and allowing others to search a whole massive repository of content through clicking on these facets and nodes within it. You can visit the below link to see what I really mean.
Hierarchical Navigation:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/nobelprize_facts.html
Faceted Navigation:
http://orange.sims.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/flamenco.cgi/nobel/Flamenco
Clearly, browsing the 2nd page(faceted navigation) is much easier. You are no longer required to clutter down a list in a hierarchical manner, which requires you to know the very “top” and “root” quality of a certain person. Now, this may seem to be a simple and real idiot proof concept, but this idea of bringing down a taxonomy with faceted navigation is only beginning to sink in to the heads of many enterprises. Indeed, this looks pretty much to be the future, as IT continues to power business and media needs.
I will end off this post with 3 deliverables: The link of North Caroline Library which recently implemented Faceted Navigation - http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/browsesubjects. It is touted as one of the best library interfaces ever by several critics. Don’t believe me? Take a look at other library sites - such as National Library of Singapore. Due to copyright issues, I will not be posting up this article itself. However, I have uploaded 2 files - respectively the presentation slides and the script that is used and which should be useful if you want more information on the article’s content itself. Have fun looking browsing!
*ps* Im kinda shooting myself in the foot writing about all the wonders of Faceted Navigation, because my blog doesnt even support that! 
Or maybe it does, i just didnt know yet. Please leave me a comment if you know something I don’t!
Friday, October 5th, 2007
Voice Biometrics - The future is near
I had the opportunity to work on a Voice Biometrics related project for almost a year in which my team had to evaluate the feasibility and usability, and to implement a work flow to incorporate the use of it in a banking environment. As it appears, there are several vendors from different parts of the world - UK, Germany, Australia, Etc. ABN AMRO has since introduced the technology for their customers in Netherlands (Read More here) and Here (from Ars Technica).
In a summary, ABN AMRO requires customer to first register their voice by saying their preferred PIN 3 times, and thus, they will be required to say the same string later on if they have to be authenticated. This analog phrase is than converted into gibberish numbers and alphabets like this “243ddf333480w-4443043kk0l….” through certain algorithms, and are called voiceprints. The conversion takes into account nasal cavity, soft palette, vocal chords, diaphragm and thus each voiceprint will be unique, just like thumbprints.
Im sure you have got at least one of the burning questions below.
1) Does the technology really works?
2) What if I had a sore throat or the place is noisy?
3) What if someone plays a tape recorder with the string?
4) Is it even reliable and credible?