Timeline for news readers

Facebook is going to launch new feature called "Timeline". It organizes all contents (including walls, photos, links, ...) on Facebook page according to time. It looks interesting.

Now I am thinking about timeline ... for news readers. Searching on the Internet, I've found some links:
- http://html5.labs.ap.org/
- http://feeds.allofme.com/RSS_Timeline.html?target=http://www.life.com/rss/news
- http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-news-time-as-rss-reader/9089/

This timeline feature has been being developed. There is still a room for us ^^.

Summarizing contents across websites in the Internet

Summarizing contents across websites in the Internet:

http://www.iresearch-reporter.com/
http://ultimate-research-assistant.com/

The summary quality of the above systems is not actually good (i think). One possible improvement is to focus mainly on summarizing contents from research papers which contain very useful and detailed technical materials. It could be regarded to "Related Work Summarization" (see my paper at here).

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Cheers,
Vu

The Legacy of Randy Pausch

Prof. Randy has been very famous with two lectures: "Time Management" and "The Last Lecture" (MUST SEE THEM!).

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Randy/ - a collective site about Prof. Randy's lectures.

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Cheers,
Vu

Baseline methods

How to effectively design the baseline methods for specific problems?
This is also my raised question when approaching any specific research problem. The baseline methods can be 1) state-of-the-art methods that well-studied in previous studies (yeh, we can use them by re-implementing some of them but how many are enough? It's hard question) 2) the simplest methods that we can think of naturally or the methods we easily propose but should not be too naive (because beating the methods which are naive will degrade the value of your proposed methods).

Just my thoughts, any corrections are welcome!

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Cheers,
Vu

Intuition and Observation in NLP research

I think that intuition and observation are crucial factors that strongly affect the proposed methods/approaches solving the problems in NLP research. I read quite a lot of NLP papers and recognized this. Due to the ambiguity in natural language, some of NLP problems will be heuristically solved based on some intuition and observation from what humans are able to do naturally.

Anyway, just my opinion. It is quite subjective. Please contradict me if any!

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Cheers,
Vu

Hypotheses

I have learned one lesson from my adviser.

Sometimes you are thinking about the problem and want to figure out the solution for it. The best way to do this is that you should firstly think of some hypotheses for your problem theoretically. You will then validate your hypotheses empirically based on some experiments. Explain and analyze why the results look like. It is worthy noticing that sometimes your data may not support for your hypotheses.

Please do not do experiments only, it is not helpful.

Hopefully, it helps me a lot then. Keep up with my best effort in my research.

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Cheers,
Vu