The Interesting Link

This REWERSE deliverable "Rule-based Policy Specication: State of the Art and Future Work" could be a nice starting point if you want to get an overview of the state of the art security policies, trust management or business rules.

Very interesting overview of the work of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft

This bbc article explores Microsoft's vision of the future (gadgets for your home). I especially like the paragraph "Picture This" about how better image recognition techology will may one day enable vastly better graphics editors and about tools that automatically create caricatures from portraits. Along the same lines an article about more cool gadgets under development: Technology's just getting started.

Japan starts a program aimed at developing search technologies to challenge Google and Yahoo. This is another program that will have a focus on multimedia retrieval (the EU is going in that direction too).

Wired prognoses 2006 to be the year of mobile malware - what a great prospect ;-)

Businessweek has a nice best of 2005 site (best ideas, best leaders, best products). I was surprised by the "best products" - really thought I had already seen all cool new gadgets ...

structured blogging is surely an interesting development - but I guess it'll be a while until Blogspot offers something like it :-( (yea, I should be hosting my own blog).

Google is becoming more evil by the day ;-) (but it really sounds more like AOL bought a stake in Google and not the other way around)

Why you should continue to date me - a series of charts and graphs" - very nice (via information aesthetics)

Upcoming Conferences: New CfPs for the eChallenges 2006 (not so well known, but a good place for not so technical stuff), 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2006 and the AAAI-06 Workshop on Modeling and retrieval of context.

The Political Link: I'm constantly tempted to post politcal articles to this blog ... So I decided to allow myself to sneak in exactly one political link per week: Here it is: Caroline Hawley - BBC Correspondent in Bagdad since before the fall of Saddam - moves to Jordan and in this article says Goodbye to Badgad.