Micro-blogging has increasingly been an important tool for communication among people. The web services like Twitter, Facebook, provide certain kinds of micro-blogging. Typically, they allow you to record your current status, such as your thoughts, your feelings, or your discoveries, etc, and share them among your friends or other people.
Human beings, as social animals, are naturally attracted to these services. From my personal experiences, I have always some interesting ideas (at least I thought), but they are usually not great enough to be written into blogs; also due to laziness, I seldom write them on a paper. Even interesting information gets easily lost, let alone those that are not very interesting, such as what I eat in lunch, whether I do sports today, when I go to sleep, etc. But it turns out that these kinds of information might be very valuable from health care perspective, especially if you have certain kind of illness. The doctors and nurses won’t stick to you to check these information so regularly, because it is very time consuming, and they typically have to take care of many people at the same time. In my opinion, the micro-blogging services provide the essential information recording service so that you could use it to improve your health and tackling your illnesses. For example, you could routinely record your health related micro-information so it can help the doctors to find out what are the causes, combined with the traditional medical records & lab tests; and they might even offer you suggestions on what you could do to improve your health based on your information. If the local-community you are in starts to do micro-blogging as well, then you could get social support as well. There are indeed many issues there, such as privacy protection (you might not want your today’s blood pressure known to the public), that can inhibit the acceptance of this new technology, but this just mean that there are still a lot to be done.
I just found some interesting slides by Phil Baumann, who points out the potential applications of Twitter in Health Care. I will write more on this in the coming weeks.
Title: Verification of Games in the Game Description Language
Authors: Ji Ruan, Wiebe van der Hoek, and Michael Wooldridge
Abstract: The Game Description Language (GDL) is a special purpose declarative language for defining games. GDL is used in the AAAI General Game Playing Competition, which tests the ability of computer programs to play games in general, rather than just the ability to play a specific game. Participants in the competition are provided with a previously unknown game specified in GDL, and are required to dynamically and autonomously determine how best to play this game. Recently, there has been much interest in the use of strategic cooperation logics for reasoning about game-like scenarios – the Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL) of Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman is perhaps the best known example. Such logics are specifically intended to support reasoning about game-theoretic properties of multi-agent systems. In short, the aim of this article is to make a concrete link between ATL and GDL, with the ultimate goal of using ATL to reason about GDL-specified games. We make the following contributions. First, we demonstrate that GDL can be understood as a specification language for ATL models, and prove that the problem of interpreting ATL formulae over propositional GDL descriptions is EXPTIME-complete. Second, we use ATL to characterize a class of ‘fair playability’ conditions, which might or might not hold of various games.
Keywords: Verification, general game playing, game description language, alternating-time temporal logic, model checking.
Link to an online version: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1666968.1666995&coll=&dl=
Bibtex:
@article{RuanHW:2009JLC,
author = {Ruan, Ji and van der Hoek, Wiebe and Wooldridge, Michael},
title = {Verification of Games in the Game Description Language},
journal = {J. Log. and Comput.},
volume = {19},
number = {6},
year = {2009},
issn = {0955-792X},
pages = {1127–1156},
doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exp039},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
address = {Oxford, UK},
}
On 5th July 2009, a tragic event happened in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province, China. As of 9th July, it has been reported that 156 people died, and more than 1000 people injured. I was saddened by the news. So what happened? What are the causes of this tragic? What is still going on? Here is a list of information sources I collected. I will keep updating it until I know enough to answer these questions.
- July 2009 Urumqi riots (Wikipedia)
- Search for Han Chinese sister whose family were butchered by Uighurs (The Times, 10 July)
- Roit Video 1 (*containing very disturbing images, Youtube)
- Photos on 8th July (Boston.com)
- The Urumqi Mass Incident (A compilation of news from many sources. *Containing very disturbing images)
- Migrants Describe Grief From China’s Strife (New York Times)
- The riots in Xinjiang: Is China fraying? (Economist.com)
My joint paper with Wiebe and Mike with title “Verification of Games in the Game Description Language”, has been accepted by the Journal of Logic and Computation. This is my second journal paper.
Here is the preview version (final draft). The first version was submitted on 8th August, 2008.
I have only a Chinese version yet: #lvba #greendam
当GFW遭遇微博客（1）
In this first article, I try to analysis the huge impact of the uprising of micro-blogging services towards the Great Firewall (GFW), which is created by the Chinese government to censor the Chinese Internet. My website was blocked by the GFW from August 2008 to May 2009, so during that period, the users from China mainland could not directly access my website. Whenever they tried to connect to any page in jiruan.net, their web browsers would get a “The Connection Has Been Reset” error message.
I will argue that the micro-blogging services are making the GFW more difficult to stop the information flow to Chinese people. I believe that this is the very reason that recently Chinese government requested all the pc vendors in China install a censorship software called “Green Dam + Youth Escourt” by 1st July.
