Web 2.0 Pattern Mining Workshop @ TOOLS  2008 Europe

Web 2.0 features are now commonplace—blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and the like are almost everywhere you look online.  Now that these technologies are maturing, what are their common problems and challenges? How are these problems being solved? What similar challenges do Web 2.0 developers face, and how can they leverage the most common solutions?  Here’s your chance to gather with other professionals facing the same issues and work together to identify solutions.

Call for Participation

We invite you to participate in a pattern mining workshop aimed at Web 2.0 systems. Its goal is to identify, extract and distill proven solutions to the problems typical to Web 2.0.  The workshop will consider these problems and possible solutions without anybody having to disclose proprietary intellectual property.

Workshop Focus Areas

The workshop's focus areas include (but are not limited to):

·         User experience—What are the user experience traits of successful Web 2.0 systems?

·         Scalability—How do you design an application that could have 1 million users within a month of  its launch?

·         Testing—How do designers verify the usability, scalability, and availability of Web 2.0 applications?

·         Social media and social networks—How do Web 2.0 systems leverage them?

Method and Expectations

Patterns are harvested, not invented. Consequently the workshop will examine several Web 2.0 applications, pre-selected  by the program committee as representative of the focus areas outlined above. The workshop participants will identify the problems that these applications pose, analyze their solutions, identify their commonalities, and extract patterns. To achieve these goals the participant selection process will identify and select system experts, domain experts, and pattern experts.

·         System experts will bring along a Web 2.0 system and:

1.       Start with an overview of the problems that your system is facing

2.       Provide an architecture overview, emphasizing the parts relevant to the focus areas

3.       Examine how the typical problems of the focus areas have been tackled in your system, what alternatives have been considered, and how the solution has been chosen

·         Domain experts will:

1.       Guide the conversation and focus it on key, common problems

2.       Provide background about these problems, and if possible, discuss how they have been tackled in other systems

3.       Guide the explanation of the solution so that it covers all aspects of the problem

·         Pattern experts will:

1.       Leverage the other participants (architects and domain experts) to identify recurring problems

2.       Guide the discussion to extract pattern elements, such as context, forces, problems, solutions, known uses

3.       Name, classify, and distill patterns

Outcomes

The workshop's participants will produce a set of patterns covering the focus areas, which will be made  public. Workshop participants can publish the results as they see fit. No one has exclusive control over the workshop material and any publications resulting from the meeting would list all attendees as contributors to the ideas published.

Side benefits of mining these patterns include a better understanding of the Web 2.0 space, validation of solutions with domain experts, and professional networking.

Submissions

The workshop is open to anybody who could contribute to Web 2.0 patterns. To be considered for participation, please submit a short (1-2 pages) proposal providing the following information:

·         The system(s) you could discuss at the workshop.

·         A list of 5 to 10 problems that you suspect are common to other, similar Web 2.0 systems.

·         A very brief summary about how your system addresses these problems.

Together with the program committee we will evaluate these submissions to select the workshop participants. We expect the authors of the accepted submissions to attend and participate in the workshop.

Organizers and Program Committee

Organizers: Dragos Manolescu (Microsoft Live Labs, USA) and Joe Yoder (The Refactory, USA)

Should you have questions or suggestions about the workshop please do not hesitate to contact us: dragosm at microsoft dot com, joe at joeyoder dot com.

Program Committee:

·         Christian Crumlish (Yahoo!, USA)

·         Dirk Riehle (SAP Labs, USA)

·         Kevlin Henney (independent, UK)

·         Klaus Marquardt (Dräger Medical, Germany)

·         Matthew Hurst (Microsoft Live Labs, USA)

·         Uwe Zdun (Vienna Technical University, Austria)

Dates and Location

Proposals due	May 5
Decisions due	May 19
Workshop	June 30-July 1
Workshop venue	ETH Zurich, Switzerland (see http://tools.ethz.ch/ for details)

Both days' workshops will start after 10.00 so that attendees have the option of listening to Monday’s (Michael Brodie) and Tuesday’s (Kryszstof Czarnecki) keynotes.

Web 2.0 features are now commonplace—blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarking and the like are almost everywhere you look online. Now that these technologies are maturing, what are their common problems and challenges? How are these problems being solved? What similar challenges do Web 2.0 developers face, and how can they leverage the most common solutions? Here’s your chance to gather with other professionals facing the same issues and work together to identify solutions.  Find out more.

Congratulations to our own Jeff Weir for winning the South by Southwest (SXSW) Web award in the art category. He was recognized for his Viscosity application, which he describes as a modern art generator. He created it because, as his Web site explains, “it’s beautiful, relaxing, and turns anyone into an abstract artist”. Viscosity was one of just five art projects recognized as part of the 11th Annual Web Awards. A complete list of award finalists is here.

Jeff is just one of the talented and passionate user experience designers who help shape the vision of Live Labs. If you are as passionate about UX as Jeff, we're looking for a few great designers.

As we continue to collaborate with the academic community, we are always amazed by the depth of talent. At this time Microsoft Live Labs, in conjunction with Microsoft Research, would like to announce the four winners of this year's Live Labs Fellowship awards.  

The 2008 Live Labs Fellows are:

Fellow	University
John Froehlich	University of Washington
Dave Levin	University of Maryland
John Wright	University of Illinois
Yisong Yue	Cornell University

Each fellowship includes a $20,000 stipend, payment of tuition and fees, and conference travel for two years. In addition, we offer each Fellow a brand new Tablet-PC preloaded with Microsoft software and the opportunity to be a 12-week, salaried intern.

Congratulations to an outstanding set of graduate students who we feel will reinvent the Internet as we know it.

If you would like more information about our program, please check out http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/fellowships/ or e-mail msfellow@microsoft.com

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced new features in Silverlight 2, our cross platform rich internet application runtime.  One of the most exciting new features is Deep Zoom.  This capability allows users to explore collections of super high resolution imagery, from a 2 or 3 megapixel shot from a digital camera to gigapixel scans of museum pieces, all without waiting for huge file downloads.  The simple zooming interface allows users to explore entire collections down to specific details in extreme close-up, all with fantastic performance and smooth transitions.

Don’t just take our word for it:.  Hard Rock Café is using the Deep Zoom technology to power the site showcasing their huge collection of memorabilia.

Deep Zoom is based on the same Seadragon technology that you have seen in our demos and in the Photosynth preview.  For the first time, we are enabling individual developers to harness the 2D capabilities of Seadragon to support smooth zooming interfaces on super high resolution images and collections.  You’ve been asking for the ability to use Seadragon yourself, now here’s your chance.