My role in adding Sentiment Analysis capability to IBM's Smarter Cities offerings

Earlier this year I announced that I was changing jobs again to incubation team leader. In this role I am supposed to lead innovative projects to introduce experimental new features in our products. The nature of these innovations means that there is bound to be some risk of failure, but I am delighted to be able to say that the first project to develop a city sentiment dashboard was an even bigger success than expected. In order to ensure were meeting real customer needs, we developed it in conjunction with a large European City who gave us very specific requirements. The end result was so well received that this week the software was formally upgraded from a customised solution into a fully supported IBM product.

Our solution uses Cognos Consumer Insight (CCI) to analyse sentiment being expressed about the themes that the city is interested in. CCI provides really excellent analysis capabilities, but the user interface can be daunting for non-experts to use.  Hence, the software we developed pulls the key information into a single easy to understand dashboard that is part of the Intelligent Operations Centre (IOC). Our dashboard was released in the form of an update to the IOC. Customers will typically deploy this software as part of a Smarter Cities project. If you are interested you should get in touch with your IBM sales representative or if you don't have an existing relationship with IBM leave a comment here and I will arrange for someone to get in touch.

Since IOC has many features, the information about the new sentiment analysis feature is buried deep on the product page. The screenshot below shows the dashboard we developed. I deliberately blurred the text in the screenshot because I don't think that I am at liberty to reveal what city we were working with or what topics they wanted to track. However, I think you can get a feel for how we managed to squeeze all of the sentiment data onto a single easy to understand screen:

• On the left there is a hierarchical list of the themes that the customer specified that they are interested in tracking sentiment about. For each theme there is a thumbs up or thumbs up icon to give a quick indication of whether we found more positive or negative expressions of sentiment about the theme in question.
• If you click on a theme, we will display details about the sentiment we discovered for this theme. We have pie charts showing the overall distribution of sentiment observed as well as a more detailed breakdown of the sentiment for each type of site (e.g. we might have observed radically different sentiment in newspapers, blogs and twitter).
• On the bottom we have a trend chart showing how the sentiment statistics varied over time and finally on the right hand side we show you a few samples of positive and negative snippets that we found. Clicking on these snippets will bring you directly to the original source of the sentiment so you can read the snippet in context.

It is amazing what can be achieved by a small agile team in 6 months. Hopefully we will be equally successful with our next projects (which have not yet been decided).

Innovation, Invention and Inclubation

I blogged last May about my new job as a "Sametime Consumability Expert" and I wrote another update in October to let people know how I was getting on in this new role. However, eagle eyed readers of this blog will have noticed that the "about me" section was recently updated again and that my new job title is Incubation Team Leader.

The reason I didn't write a blog post about this new role when I found out about it a few months ago not because I was being secretive, but I needed to figure out what the job involved first before I could tell others. I am now settled into the job and my first project has kicked-off so I think I can confidently write a brief overview.

The first thing that you might ask is what do I mean by incubation. The term is quite ambiguous, but in this context incubation is helping newly invented technologies cross the chasm into innovations that are used within IBM's products. IBM is rightly proud of their record on invention since they have been the most prolific filers of patents each year for the last 19 years. However, the real goal is innovation that matters and while IBM does well at innovation, their leadership in innovation is not as clear as it is with innovation. I don't think that my small team will be able to solve all of IBM's innovation needs, but we do hope that we can make a small but significant growth in the amount of innovation in IBM's products that come from the Ireland lab.

In practice what I will be expected to do is to lead a series of teams who will be assembled to complete a proof-of-concept  integration of some promising new technology into IBM's Smarter Planet product set. Each project will be scheduled to last between 3 and 6 months.  The idea of limiting the projects to such short duration is to ensure that I can tackle a large volume of project ideas. In any case if the technology is really as promising as we thought at the start - then 6 months should be enough time to do enough work on the prototype to persuade at least one paying customer to buy it and/or persuade a product team within IBM to formally fund a permanent team.

In theory the team will be open to projects which use inventions from either inside or outside IBM. However, when I established an ideation blog to allow lab staff contribute ideas for the team to incubate I was pleasantly surprised to find that I quickly got enough ideas to keep me busy with a series of teams for the next year or two before we need to look outside for inspiration.

The first project team has just been formed. I can't say exactly what the project involves - partly for company confidentiality reasons, but mainly because the project definition is changing rapidly. All I can say at this stage is that it will enable our Smarter Cities customers get a dashboard with an overview of what the citizens of the city are saying on social media about what they think of the way the city is being administered. The project will be completed (successfully or otherwise) by August so I will be able to reveal all at that stage. :-)

I am confident that this is a job that I will really enjoy and hence be successful.

Hack the City

One of he most exciting events planned for the Dublin City of Science 2012 will be happening in June of this year when the Science Gallery will be hosting a series of 2-3 person teams who will be competing against each other to do the best job of "Hacking the City". I know that hacking  is a term that carries negative connotation, but this contest is all about the best form of hacking. To quote the web site:

The goal of the programme is to rethink our cities from the ground up through the spirit and philosophy of the hacker ethos - to bend, mash-up, tweak and cannibalise our city systems, to create possibilities, illustrate visionary thinking and demonstrate real-world examples for sustainable urban futures.

I know you might think that June is a long time away, but the call for registrations has just been released and if you would like to take part, you would be well advised to register your interest very soon because I expect that this event will be over-subscribed.

Is Dublin a hotbed of innovative startups?

After the dramatic implosion of the Celtic Tiger economy the Irish government set up an eminent task force to decide how Ireland could reposition itself for sustainable growth and prosperity in the future. One of the recommendations of this task force was that Ireland needs to become a much more attractive location for small innovative companies to establish themselves.

One of the initiatives which sprung up indirectly from this new government strategy was the establishment of a Startup Boot camp. Since IBM was one of the organisations involved in sponsoring this initiative I had a chance to visit the Boot Camp on Friday last and speak to some of the start-ups to discuss any possibilities of them establishing links with IBM. I must say that I was very impressed with what I saw.

Since the whole idea is to establish a culture and environment that encourages innovative start-ups, the whole ambiance of the area is critical. The building that they are located in is anything but plush: the building itself was completely derelict and was scheduled for demolition as part of a redevelopment project which has been put on indefinite hold until the property market recovers. A minimum amount of work has been done to make the building habitable (e.g. all the desks are made out of planks of plywood crudely nailed together), but this Spartan surroundings is probably a good reminder to the occupants that they can't afford to waste money on unnecessary extravagances. The enthusiasm of the start-up companies gives a cheerful air to the place which more than counteracts any gloom from the rough conditions. In fact the entire part of Dublin where they are located is a strange mixture of abandoned derelict buildings and  beautiful newly refurbished buildings as you can see from this picture. The amazingly plush Google HQ is almost directly across the road which is a contrast and acts as a goal for the start-ups to aim at.

I don't think that I can reveal the details of the various start-ups that I met with since many of them are not yet ready to launch. However, an interesting example  was a company which was founded by an American and a Chinese national. Due to the nature of their company they felt that there was not a big market in Europe and USA, but they felt that Dublin was the right place to come to start their company - partly because of the presence of the  Startup Boot Camp, but also because of the general environment which is friendly towards technical innovation. Actually I was able to validate their choice because although I don't see much chance for IBM to work with them in the short term, I was able to put them in touch with another Irish start-up (started by an ex_IBMer) that they hope to partner with.

Fantastic Dublin Science Hackday event indicates that ireland has a bright future

Crochet model of a red Blood Cell

The first ever Dublin Science Hackday was held this weekend in Dublin City University. The event was part of the Dublin City of Science 2012 celebration. This event involved teams of amateur completing challenging projects over a grueling 36 hours. I say amateurs as a compliment because although many of the participants are professionals, they completed in this event purely out of their love of science and technology.

I initially planned to take part in the event myself, but as I got closer to the event the reality of spending 36 hours of my weekend working on a hack began to scare me and I chickened out. Instead I attended the kick-off talks on the Saturday and then gave a few words of encouragement to the participants before I went back to my normal weekend activities. Luckily there was lots of status updates posted to the #dubscihack hashtag on Twitter so I could follow along with the excitement from home. I then returned to DCU on Sunday afternoon to see what had been accomplished. I found the participants very much more subdued (not surprising after 36 hours without sleep), but the projects were very impressive.

You can see all of the details of the projects completed here, of even watch the project presentations on Ustream, but the prize winners were:

• Best use of Government Data went to the YPath project which developed an application for children to track their physical activity.
• Most interesting Use of Data went to the Financial Market Sonification project which produced an audio stream which provides an audio stream that represents a summary of the activity in the market so that traders can have ambient awareness.
• The Hardware Award went to the Aurora Lamp  which used LEDs to project information about the level of the Aurora Borealis activity.
• The Design Award went to Open Stats Wiki developed a cool mobile application to allow fans to use their smartphone record statistics of a match the attended live as the action unfolds. This hack will have a bright future because there are many people who share an obsession with sport and an obsession with technology.
• The People's Choice Award went to The Aurora Orrery project build a visualization of from where on the globe the Aurora activity can be seen.
• Last but not least, the hBest in Show Award went to the Elements Trail project which built an augmented reality layer using Layar. to build a treasure hunt game based upon the periodic table

It is also worth giving honorable mention to:

• Tríona (@triploidtree) completed who the CIYbio project (crochet it yourself biology) which involved  using crochet to build models of things to do with biology (to help teaching). I am not sure if it was useful, but the models were certainly cute.
• μsic developed a cool application that mixed music listening with social networking.
• The intermeter project projected the level of Network activity from the science hackday into a simple amp meter.

I think that Ireland has a very bright future when we have bright hackers like this. Well done to everyone who contributed to the event.

Hello! Hello! Can you hear me?

I believe that telephone based applications offer a huge benefit in terms of ease of use as compared with web based applications. However, many people don't even try to create applications with a telephone interface because they mistakenly believe that it is very hard to do. Now that we are on the eve of Dublin Science Hackday I decided it would be a good idea to tell people how easy it is to develop applications with a phone based interface by describing a simple application I developed myself.
 First, let me explain some of the background for why I developed the application. I used to work on the development of a computer telephony system. We were strong believers in the theory that it was important for the developers to get a good understanding of the end users' perspective of the system and so we encouraged all of the development team to use early builds of the system as much as possible.

Some of the Headphones I Use.

To be totally honest the experience was painful in the early days. Each time I made a call I knew there was a significant chance that the call would not be successful. Not only was there a chance that there was a bug in the latest daily build of the client which I had installed on my machine or in the server code which was also updated regularly, there was also a very significant chance that there would be some problem with the volume settings on my headset. Most headsets have hardware volume controls and/or mute options on the headset and these controls might not be set properly to interact with the volume settings on my laptop's operating system - and because I carried my headsets around in a bag with other hardware they frequently suffered physical damage.
Because of all of these potential problems I often spend the first few minutes of a telephone meeting shouting "Hello! Hello! can you hear me?". If I was speaking to another team member I could expect them to be understanding of this wasted time and/or poor audio quality while I tested several headsets to find which was working best. However, when I was making an important call to someone I wanted to impress, I needed some way to be totally confident that all aspects of my telephony setup were working correctly.
Anyone who uses Skype is probably familiar with the "echo123" virtual user. This is a virtual Skype account that anyone can call and be answered by a pleasant sounding lady who will listen to what you say and then repeat it back to you as it sounds to her. I decided to hack together something similar that could be used with any telephony system. After a bit of searching on the internet I found the voxeo developers site which offeres excellent free resources to anyone wanting to develop voice based applications. Voxeo make their money from providing commercial grade voice response systems to mission critical systems, but in order to convince people how easy it is to develop a user friendly voice interface to their system they give developers free access to their powerful web based development environment and they will even host your application on their test servers so that you can test it out in action.
Voxeo support a number of programming languages including the industry standard VoiceXML. Developing a VoiceXML server is very complex, but the good news is that since Voxeo have done that you don't have to. Developing a voiceXML application is very easy (there are excellent tutorials on the Voxeo site to get your started). I was able to develop my application in under 30 lines of easy to write/understand XML. You can get the full source code here.
The way VoiceXML works is that you specify prompts for the system to play and then you listen for the user to say something (or type a DTMF tone on their keypad). You specify in XML what should be done with the response. You can see I have only one
statement and I use the text to speech function to generate the prompt (it is also possible to record the prompts for a more natural sounding interface).

The only complex line in my code is the one that reads

record name="R_1" beep="true" dtmfterm="true" maxtime="10s" finalsilence="1s" silence="3s

Translated into English this tag means:

• Record what you hear in a file named R_1.wav
• If you hear a DTMF tone, stop recording
• Listen for a maximum of 10 seconds
• If you hear nothing give up after 3 seconds
• If you hear something then terminate when the speaker leaves a gap of 1 second or more

The rest of the application is just instructions to play back the recording to the user (or play an error message if we didn't hear anything). It then loops back to the start so that it gives me time to adjust my headset and see if it sounds any clearer.
Obviously real world applications could get more complex and if you try to recognize  what the user is saying it can get things hilariously wrong when the caller is not a native speaker. But the general idea is not too hard to master. In any case we only need to distinguish between when we hear something so that the "filled" tag applies, or when we hear nothing and the "noinput" tag applies.
If you want to try out the application you can call +1(617)963-0648  to get the version with this source code, or if you prefer the sound of my voice you can call +1(617)500-5332 to hear a slightly modified version where the prompts use a recording of my voice.

The business case for Open Data

I attended a great seminar yesterday organised by the Irish Software Association on the business possibilities for open data. The room was packed and we got some very good presentations followed by an interesting panel discussion. As a result of this discussion I got a pointer to an excellent EU funded research report that there was almost always a new benefit to a government from either eliminating charges for access to public sector data or reducing the price to a cost recovery level. Similarly, a recent report from Deloitte suggests that open data will be one of the main mechanisms that will enable a recovery from our recent economic woes.

I think this is very timely that this seminar was held in the week leading up to the Dublin Science Hackday, because I am sure many of the Hacks delivered at this event will probably use some of the open public data.

Here are two of the three presentations delivered (I don't have soft copy of the slides delivered by Maurice Lynch of Nathean Technologies)

This first presentation was by Dominic Byrne and it describes some of the great initiatives being done by Fingal county council to promote open government data. I must admit I was initially skeptical when I saw the relatively limited number of feeds cataloged on the Fingal Open Data web site when it launched, but time has proven that it was the correct policy to launch with what was available and then subsequently concentrate on improving it. This is a wonderful local initiative, the only concern I have is that we must not let local initiatives like this blind us to the fact that the real power of open data is its global reach. For example, when I looked for a mobile phone application for DublinBikes, I found that there were no applications written exclusively for DublinBikes but lots of applications written for city bike rental schemes which could be configured to work with bike rental schemes in many different cities including Dublin. From looking at the web sites associated with these applications I noticed that many of them were initially developed for a specific city that the developer was familiar with, but then they soon realized that they could easily broaden the appeal of their app by making it configurable to work with similar bike rental systems elsewhere.

Open Data Business Opportunities - Fingal Open Data & Dublinked

View more PowerPoint from Fingal Open Data

This second presentation was by Jonathan Raper, whose company Placr has made a great business out of exploiting Open Data in the UK. Both during his presentation and during the subsequent panel discussion, he shared some of the lessons he learned from the struggle to promote open access to public data in the UK. One interesting story he told was about what happened when the London Transport authority realized that many applications were being developed that relied upon a feed that they had accidentally made public. Their IT department initially wanted to shutdown the feed because the popularity of the application meant that too much load was being generated on their infrastructure. However, the mayor was aghast at this suggestion because he saw that there would be a huge political backlash if these popular applications suddenly stopped working. Someone pointed out that this was really an online equivalent of the ancient legal principle of "right of way".

Irish Software Association/ Open Data Bisiness Models

View more PowerPoint from Jonathan Raper

Less than a week to go until Dublin Science Hackday

There is only a few more days left until the start of Dublin Science Hackday that its happening in Dublin City University this weekend (3rd/4th of March). This is one of the first in a series of exciting events planned for Dublin City of Science 2012 celebration. I have very good experiences of being involved in Hackday events inside IBM and so I expect that getting involved with an even wider public audience should provide even more innovation and excitement.

Initially I was planning to organise for a team comprised of IBM employees to compete in this event, but the reaction to this suggestion was not very positive. On the one hand, employees who had spend a busy week from Monday to Friday working hard on their technology projects, did not relish the prospect of spending a 36 hour stretch of their weekend working on another demanding project. Also some of the organisers felt that it might not set the right tone to have a team of experienced professionals competing against teams that are mainly comprised of enthusiastic students with little practical experience.

Instead I think I will be arranging for some IBM employees to attend the event as advisers either giving training talks on technology topics that would be useful to hackers and/or informally offering practical help to the project teams as they complete their projects.

In any case I am looking forward to an exciting weekend of technology. I saw the great projects completed at previous Hackdays held in cities such as London, San Francisco and cape Town and I know that the Dublin hackers will be just as good (if not even a little better).

Hackday Project results in Patent

Hackday 9 is taking place tomorrow and due to a training course, I won't be able to take part for the first time in several years. Therefore it was ironic that I just got notification of a patent that was just issued based upon a project I did back for Hackday 6.

The patent is entitled "System and method for client-based instant message monitoring for off-line users" and it deals with an innovative way that I devised to get around the fact that I was forced to implement my Hackday project on the client side due to the fact that I didn't have access to change the server. If you want to find out more, you can access the patent via Google Patents.

Good luck to everyone taking part this year. I hope you succeed in generating several more patents.

My Hackday mini-Project

Due to schedule conflicts, I won't able to take part in Hackday 9 which is due to happen on Friday. However, I felt it would be setting a bad precedent if I completely ignored the event. Hence I decided to tackle a mini-project the last Sunday at home.

I have been recently working with some local primary schools helping them to do projects relating to Smarter Energy for display at the BT Young Scientist Exhibition next January. In order to help introduce the concept I was decided to build a simple test rig with several different types of light bulbs that the students can use to measure the efficiency of the bulbs. This was not a technically very challenging job, but it did involve a few hours of hard work stripping wires and screwing in light fixtures. On the right you can see my completed handy-work.

I have also purchased a simple plug-in power meter so that the students can easily measure the power consumed as each of the lights is switched on. Of course the power consumed is only telling part of the story - I also needed to measure the light output of the various bulbs because as well as having a huge variation in power consumption the bulbs also produce radically different amounts of light.

Rather than purchase a dedicated light meter I decided to see if I could find an application for my phone which was capable of taking the measurements. After a bit of experimentation I settled on using the Light Meter Application from Borce Trajowski. As well as producing reliable measurements of light intensity, this free application also has a really attractive retro-style display. Of course it is only fair to mention that I also tried a different application called Light Meter as well as ones called beeCamLightMeter and  Lux Meter which didn't seem to work reliably at all (which just goes to show that you can't totally trust the application descriptions in the Android market).

I plan to use this test rig in some upcoming visits to schools by myself, but of course I am happy to lend it to anyone else who would like to use it for similar events.

How to avoid being ripped off by exorbitant mobile data roaming charges

I (like many other people) have become very reliant upon my Smartphone. Luckily the market is quite competitive both for phones and for service providers so that in general you can get very good value when either buying a new phone or when subscribing to a mobile data service to allow you get the most out of it.

One big exception to this is when you leave your home country. The roaming data rates charged by most operators when you bring your Smartphone abroad are nothing short of outrageous. For example, my provider charges €10 per MByte for data access when I am outside of Ireland so naturally I turn of 3G on my phone and try to survive without connectivity when I am travelling.

In recent years the European Union has done a great service to the public by putting pressure on the  carriers to reduce their roaming charges for phone calls within the EU. They have recently turned their attention to also reducing data roaming charges, but this initiative is likely to take some time to bear fruit.

I recently came across and the TEP Wireless service which seems like a really cool idea whereby you can rent a pocket wifi from them for the country that you are travelling to. Then you can configure your Smartphone to use this wifi service and you are able to use your Smartphone abroad as much as you want without having to worry about running up large bills. The rates seem quite reasonable, presumably because they buy the devices and sign up for contracts in the country you are visiting so they are paying local rates rather than visitor rates.

I can't wait to try out this service (it was only launched a few weeks ago). Unfortunately they don't offer service in South Africa yet, so I won't be able to use it on my upcoming vacation, but I definitely will try it out soon.

With broadband speed you don't necessarily know what you will be getting

Since I live in an urban area, I am luck enough to now have a choice of Internet service providers vying for my business. Competition is definitely a good thing from the customer's point of view, but one of the problems is that many consumers don't know if they can believe the claims of the competing service providers about the speed of their Internet services.

Recently, I was delighted to receive the following text from my broadband provider: "UPC has increased your broadband speed from 15Mb to 20Mb Unplug your modem from the power supply, plug it back in and you'll have even faster broadband. Enjoy." Clearly, this was good news, but since I am sceptical I decided to use a SpeedTest.net testing service to test my Internet service both before and after the upgrade to see if the speed I experience really was as high as claimed.

If you read to the end, you can see the full details of the testing I did of my connection speed before and after the upgrade, but if you want a quick summary here are the conclusions:

• The download speed achieved on my download link did indeed increase as promised by my ISP, however in most cases it would not have any noticeable effect upon the overall experience of using the Internet because download speeds from many sites was way slower than the maximum capacity of the link from my ISP.  Therefore, although any increase is welcome, it is probably not worth my while to spend more money on a further increase in download speed.
• The upload speed of my connection was much slower than the download speed. This did not change noticeably after the upgrade which is a pity because this would be a factor that would impact my experience of the Internet. Upload speed should become an important factor when comparing different Internet providers, but very few publicize their upload speed.
• Some of the sites which were giving me the fastest download speed also had considerable ping delays. In some applications (e.g. VOIP calls) the ping delays I measured would be likely to have a noticeable impact upon performance. 

When considering the speed of your internet connection, one of the first things that you need to realize is that the internet is not a single unified entity. The speed of the connection from your house to one particular server on the internet might be quite slow, but your connection to other servers might be fast. In order to account for this, the Speedtest site has a wide range of test servers all over the world and you can choose which one you can use for testing your speed.

Before I present the actual test results, I think I should briefly explain the parameters that SpeedTest measures about the link. It measures three factors:

1. Download Speed: This is metric shows how quickly it is possible to download a large file from the test site. It is measured by downloading test files of various sizes and then measuring how the time to download varies with the size of the file i.e. they ignore the overhead delay which would be required to start any download. This is the metric most commonly quoted by ISPs in their advertisements because one of the most common uses of the Internet when it first became popular was to download large software kits. However, the things that people do on the Internet has changed significantly in recent years so this is not necessarily the most relevant metric for current users of popular sites like Facebook etc..
2. Upload Speed: This is a measure of how quickly you can upload a large file to the internet. It is essentially the same measurement as the download speed except that the data is going in the reverse direction. This would be the metric that would affect how quickly you could upload some pictures to your favorite photo sharing service. Many Internet links provide significantly less upload speed than the download speed because they assume that you will spend the bulk of your time accessing information that other people have uploaded rather than uploading your own information. However, since many people spend a lot of their time online using social network sites it is not clear to me that this assumption is still valid.
3. Ping Time: This is a simple measure of how long a single packet of information takes to travel from your computer to the chosen Internet server and back again. This measure is important in any application which involves real-time interaction over the network because this will set the minimum on the communications lag. For example, many people will have seen remote correspondents being interviewed on the TV news where it is clear that their is a noticeable lag between the interviewer asking a question and the question being heard by the interviewee. As you know packets are not sent directly from your computer to the Internet server, instead they pass through several intermediate nodes with each hop adding to the delay in delivery time.

These are not the only factors that need to be measured to judge the quality of the line. Other factors include the percentage of packets lost and the jitter (i.e. how much does the ping time vary from one packet to another), but to make my life easy I only considered the parameters that Speedtest gave me.

I ran the first test utility before I rebooted my network router so this would be a measure of the performance of my existing network link. By default, the site assigned me to use a server in Limerick for testing, but the performance of my link to this server was surprisingly poor so I repeated the tests with 3 other servers in more distant parts of the planet. I took each measurement twice to get a quick feel about how repeatable the test result might be.


By default, the speedtest site selected a server in Limerick, Ireland to test my connection. Although Limerick is not very far from my home (roughly 200km) I found that the results from this server were quite poor (perhaps the server is overloaded or else it might be in a data center without fast connections to other parts of the Internet). I chose a few other servers in different cities to repeat my test and as you can see below the tests varied quite a bit depending upon which server I selected.

The speed of my link to Oslo and San Jose was reasonably good, but the link to Philadelphia was not as good and the link to Limerick was worst of all.  It is surprising that it took longer for my network packets to reach Limerick (which is roughly 200 km from my house in Dublin) than they took to reach San Jose (which is over 8,000 km away) - but of course the packets destined for Limerick could very well be routed through intermediate servers on the far side of the Atlantic.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
0.97/1.97	0.94/1.03	215/220	Limerick
10.27/9.23	0.99/0.95	115/120	Oslo
2.25/1.99	1.08/0.99	123/124	Philadephia
9.07/6.75	0.84/0.82	176/182	San Jose

I repeated the same test immediately after I rebooted the network to see if there was a noticeable difference. When I ran the pre-upgrade tests I did not realize that there was a test server available in Dublin. I ran tests with this server and I was pleased to see that the speed achieved to this server was over 15 Mb/s so the link from my house must indeed have been upgraded beyond 15Mb/s. The ping time to the server in Dublin was dramatically better than any of the others which probably means that there were very few networks hops between my home and this server.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
0.98/1.39	0.80/0.84	217/231	Limerick
10.38/11.18	1.05/1.03	122/110	Oslo
1.70/2.10	1.15/1.06	121/124	Philadelphia
10.18/10.88	1.23/1.10	178/178	San Jose
15.98/15.36	0.94/1.02	31/30	Dublin

In general there was not a noticeable difference in the speed of the link to any of the servers I had used before. Of course the speed of an overall network link is determined by the speed of the slowest link along the path. Looking at download speed, there is a dramatic difference between the speed when using different sites. This seems to suggest that the so the link from my house to the ISP's data center is not the bottleneck and the bottleneck must be somewhere else along the path to the slower sites. Therefore speeding up the capability of the link between my house and the ISP is not likely to affect the overall download speed achieved from most of the hosts.

However, the upload speed tells a very different story. The upload speed was around 1 Mb/s for any of the servers tested which is much less than the download speed. This means that the upload speed was probably limited by the link between my house and the ISP's data center.

Using a VOIP tool like Skype, the same amount of data would be transferred in both directions. In most cases it is the upload speed of each parties Internet link rather than the download speed that would determine the overall quality of the connection achieved. Therefore someone who is unhappy with the quality of their Skype link would be wasting their time and money in switching to an alternative service provider who promised higher download speeds.

Of course network performance will vary depending upon congestion so I did the following tests the next morning. It seems that the download speed from Limerick had improved from the day before, but the download speed from the server in Dublin was worse. The upload speed was still remarkably similar for both servers although it was about 20% faster than the night before.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
3.05/2.93	1.27/1.1.6	216/214	Limerick
12.93/12.72	1.29/1.33	27/24	Dublin

This asymmetry between the upload and download speeds is mainly a feature of the domestic broadband market. Commercial services are more likely to provide matched upload and download speeds. To see how a commercial service would perform I repeated the tests from the office where I work.

Although I the office is physically in Dublin, my employer has an internet connection provided by a UK based company. Therefore the SpeedTest.net service defaulted to using a server in London which it was able to reach faster than the one in Dublin. Luckily my employers has a very good internet link, but the download speed was 14-15Mb/s which is only slightly better than the speed I was getting at home. Looking at the upload speed however, the connection in the office was about 10 times faster than my home link

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
14.38/14.23	12.90/13.82	56/77	Dublin
15.10/14.09	10.68/13.10	24/24	London

I mentioned before that part of the reason limiting the speedtest results are the fact that my packets were competing with packets from other network users (this is called network contention). Therefore I decided to test the speed of the link again early on a Sunday morning when I guessed that there would be relatively little traffic congestion on the network. As you can see from the results below the download speed was indeed much faster, but the upload speed was virtually unchanged.

Download Speed (Mb/s)	Upload Speed(Mb/s)	Ping Time (ms)	Server Location
19.52/19.16	1.25/1.24	26/25	Dublin
2.75/2.10	1.26/1.28	215/215	Limerick
12.38/12.90	1.37/1.38	110/109	Oslo

Do we really need competition in the electricity market?

Ireland has only relatively recently introduced competition into the residential electricity market. As a result a considerable amount of broadcast time on both radio and TV is devoted to advertisements from the various electricity companies encouraging household to switch electricity suppliers. Naturally, I took advantage of this situation to switch to a company who is providing me with cheapest electricity, but at the same time I am confused by what is the point of the exercise.



I am not an economist, but as far as I understand the reason why they recommend the introduction of competition into markets is because the competitive pressure to win market share will encourage the various companies involved to introduce innovations that will reduce costs and/or increase quality of service.



I can see how this works in the telecoms market. Some of the companies active in the market provide high quality services and premium prices and others provide lower levels of service, but at cheaper prices. In practice it can be difficult to find out the quailty level of the service you will get from a particular service provider (in fact it can sometimes be hard to find out the exact price they will charge you either), but in general the market works well with different service offerings appealing to different market segments.



The trouble with the electricity market is that the electric grid is designed to deliver exactly the same voltage of electricity to all of the customers. I know that some of the companies like to boast about the fact that they use a high percentage of renewable energy sources such as wind, but there is no way to tell that the electricity delivered to their customers' houses is from these clean source sand not from the dirty coal fired stations owned by their competitors. Likewise, if the wind didn't blow and there was a shortage of electricity, fairness should dictate that the environmentally conscious customers should be the ones subjected to the inconvenience of a temporary loss of supply - but there is no way to cut off supply to these customers while maintaining supply to the customers who chose to go with the less environmentally friendly company.



As far as I can see the only way that the electricity companies can compete with each other is in their billing system. This is hardly the area where the greatest amount of innovation is to be found. Am I missing something?

What is the weather like where I live

I finally got around to connecting my new weather station to the internet using the pywws open source software to upload data from my weather station to the Weather Underground site. Now if you want to check what the weather is like in my back garden, you can visit my personal weather station page on wunderground.com.

This site is a really cool collaboration of amateur weather monitoring stations all over the world. It automatically generates trend maps and other cool visualizations of amateur weather readings. Unfortunately, my weather station is not (yet) set up to automatically upload readings in real time and hence the will data only get updated when I manually connect the weather station to my laptop and upload a batch of data. I hope to rectify this sometime soon.

How green is my driving?

I just got a new car which has a feature whereby it constantly rates the environmental friendliness of how it is being driven. When the car is being driven in a very fuel efficient manner the speedometer display has a green background. As the driver starts to waste fuel, the speedometer background turns a blueish shade of green and finally when fuel is being needlessly wasted it turns pure blue.

Being a gadget freak, I naturally had to experiment with this feature to understand exactly how it works. It seems that the decision about what colour to display is taken based upon what is happening at that exact time, while it would be more useful if it took a slightly longer term view.

Here are some samples of what I observed:

• When I put my foot on the brake and come to a complete stop (e.g. at a traffic light) the engine control system will frequently turn off the engine completely. This behaviour takes a bit of getting used to, because the first few times I though that I had caused the engine to stall. Naturally the efficiency meter is pure green in this case because there is no fuel being used at all.
• At other times, when I stop the engine is not automatically switched off (presumably because the engine control system detected that the batteries need charging). In this case the efficiency display will turn pure blue. I can understand that it is wasteful of fuel to have the engine running, but since there is nothing the driver can do to change this I am not sure what value this information provides.
• The most inefficient way to drive is by accelerating quickly away from traffic lights before slamming on the brakes at the next junction. If I drive like this, the meter will show me as green when I slam on the brakes because no fuel is being used as I slow down - however if it averaged the fuel consumption over a longer period it would rightly identify this as inefficient driving.

My environmentally friendly new car

Honda Insight

I am not really a big car fan, but my company car was well overdue to be replaced and after some consideration I decided to go green and choose a Hybrid electric/petrol car. The model I chose is a Honda Insight. which looks quite stylish (an important consideration for the female members of my family). It was delivered yesterday and I must say that my first impression are that it was a good choice - it is a pleasure to drive and it comes with lots of cool accessories that I have not yet had time to fully explore (e.g. a Bluetooth hands free speaker system for my phone and a USB connection to connect my music player with the car's entertainment system).

I am not certain that Hybrid vehicles really are that much more environmentally friendly than a conventional car since all of the power ultimately comes from the petrol engine, but pure electric vehicles are not yet widely available in Ireland and even if they were there would be concerns about the availability of charging stations.

It is a pity that Ford doesn't offer it's Sync platform in Europe, because I would have been very tempted to choose a Ford vehicle if they did. They have announced that they will begin selling both Hybrid and fully electric vehicles in 2011, but as in the software industry there is a significant lag between an announcement and the product being available for sale.

How I became mayor of my local Gym

Since a General Election has just been called in Ireland, many people might be wondering how to achieve elected office. Those of you who follow my Twitter stream might have noticed my recent tweet "I just ousted @slkav as the mayor of Westpoint Health and Fitness Blanchardstown on @foursquare http://4sq.com/6LqwIq" and wondered how I achieved that.

This was actually achieved very easily compared to how difficult it would be to become a real mayor. I recently started to use a service called FourSquare which allows you to check-in to various locations to tell your friends where you are. Initially I was quite skeptical about the potential benefit of using such a service, but since it seems to be growing in popularity I said I would see what the fuss is about.

An obvious thing to worry about using a service like this is that you might not want people to know where you are at any particular time. However, this is not really an issue, since FourSquare only tracks my  location when I explicitly check-in to a location (typically by using an application on my phone). This is quite different from services like Google Latitude or Facebook Places which can sometimes be publishing your location without you being consciously aware of that.

Initially I did not use it much because I was not sure when I might want to publish my location but then I joined a local gym and decided that I ought to boast about that fact to my friends. In my first check-in, I did not realize that the Gym was already registered on Foursquare and so I accidentally registered it a second time. The next two times I visited the gym I check-in properly with FourSquare and hey presto I was declared to be the mayor (based upon the fact that I had checked-in more frequently than anyone else in the previous 60 days) and FourSquare automatically tweeted the good news on my behalf. I should point out that at the time I was the only person check-in to the gym on FourSquare, but the gym was packed so the most frequent person to check in on FourSquare is not really a good estimate for who is visiting the gym most often.

Will this service catch on? I think it probably will, because it combines a fun element. I saw that my predecessor as mayor of the gym tweeted "nooooooooooooooooooooo!" in reply to the news of me becoming mayor, so maybe FourSquare can encourage more visits to the gym as we battle for the mayorship.

Harnessing the fun factor to bring young people into contact with the Lotus Products

I am delighted to see that Lotus are making special efforts to connect young students during the upcoming Lotusphere event. The Lotus community is very vibrant and the people who work with the Lotus products tend love them and be very loyal. However since Lotus products are not really aimed at the consumer market, many young people who are studying computer science are not even aware of their existence.

The Lotusphere conference which is happening next week in Orlando, Florida is the biggest event in the year for the Lotus community. It combines education and fun in a way that really helps build enthusiasm for Lotus products.  Normally this event is only attended by people who are already working with Lotus products, but this year a special initiative is being undertaken to help connect with the next generation of IT professionals - we are expecting over 500 students from local universities to attend Lotusphere on our special college day 31st of January,

In addition a special Xpages contest for students is being run in conjunction with a business partner. Because of all of the great results from the Hackdays inside IBM I am confident that we will get great results from this contest.

The video industry is currently in transition from 2D to 3D in much of the same way as it transitioned from b/w to colour over half a century ago

3D Glasses for the Bolt 3D Movie
Originally uploaded by DanieVDM

The stories from the consumer electronics show that was recently held in Las Vegas indicate that the industry is investing heavily on 3D video technology. However, many consumers (including myself) are very skeptical about the transition. Although many cinemas are proudly boasting about the many new movies that they have available in 3D, the quality of the experience is not brilliant. Part of the reason that the electronics manufacturers are getting excited about 3D is because the cost of the equipment is dramatically higher. I think that most consumers will be waiting for the price to reduce and quality to improve before they decide to invest. In addition there is hardly any content available for 3D devices (not surprisingly because who would bother producing content that nobody has a device capable of consuming it).

At first glance you might think I am pessimistic about the chances of 3D video taking off, but since I am old enough to remember the transition from black & white TV to colour I can see many parallels.

• I was a young child in the 1960s. At this time cinemas had completed the transition from black & white to colour and virtually all movies were released in colour. This is similar to the current situation where 3D is taking off in the cinema, but not yet in homes.
• When I was young, colour TV had been invented, but very few people had purchased them because the cost was so much higher than the black and white version. Most TV stations broadcast the bulk of their content in b/w format with only occasional programs in colour (partly because very few of their viewers would notice). This is similar to the current situation where some but not all movies are available in 3D format.
• Gradually all TV stations converted to colour broadcasting and consumers gradually converted to colour receivers. However even up to the 1980s they had to take into account that a significant number of viewers would be watching in b/w format e.g. if a football match was being broadcast between two teams who had jerseys that looked similar in b/w one of the teams would be asked to change. I wonder how long it will be before a movie will consider it OK to have a key plot line that would be missed by anyone watching in 2D!

Therefore I think that 3D video will eventually catch on, but the transition will take decades rather than years. After all, I don't think that it is possible to purchase a black & white TV anymore.

I have two selfish reasons to be delighted that Alexander Amini won the overall prize at the young scientist:

1. He is a local boy from Castleknock College (although he only recently moved to Ireland)
2. His mother Lisa is a colleague in IBM

I tried a few times to see Alexander's project when I was at the exhibition yesterday, but I was not able to get near the stand because each time I came by he was busy talking to judges - I should have realized then that he was in the winning for a big prize. I will try meeting him again today, but in the meantime here is a short video of him talking about the project.