george tziralis thought log

Quoted in Chicago Tribune - the story beyond

I was honored enough to be quoted among the former ATHOC President Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki and the former Mayor of Athens and current Minister of Foreign Affairs Dora Bakoyannis, in a today’s article of the much respected Chicago Tribune, regarding the post-Games Athens (update: the article actually appeared at the newspaper’s front page).

To give you some more info on that, I have met the journalist Philip Hersh in Guatemala, at an IOC conference a year ago. Interestingly, we both attended the Sport Accord 2008 exhibition, held early June in Athens and I was at Chicago a month ago; however the interview was conducted via phone and I was asked to share my humble opinion about the status of the Olympic legacy of Athens, as a senior researcher of the Athens OGGI team.

After all, Mr. Hersh quotes me saying “I do think there are some opportunities that haven’t been used, and I don’t know if and when they will be” and [regarding the main Athens Olympic Sports complex] “I would like to see it as an Olympic Park, where people would use it, we in Athens don’t have a large park or one like [Chicago’s] Millennium Park” (well, clearly I pretty much liked the audio picnic option there, but this is another topic).

While I do not put into question the validity of quotes attributed to me, I feel that there was maybe a slightly biased and somehow disjointed citation of them, especially in the given context of the article’s corpus. I mean, in the phrase “Well, ‘A’ is true, but consider also ‘B’ and ‘C’, which clearly change the broader picture ‘D’.”, you may quote someone saying ‘A’, but this is only the partial truth, and not the full story.

I’m not willing to open the huge debate on 2004 Olympics and their legacy right here and now, nor I consider myself as the most appropriate one to handle or take part in it. However, if you want to get a much broader picture, you may go read this paper and this text (more and specific data are on their way to release) and shape your very own opinion. As for me, I clearly learned my lesson, concerning dealing with (old) media: If you don’t want to be quoted of saying ‘A’, then just don’t say it, in any context and collocation of your words. :)

The concept behind askmarkets

cross posted at “the official askmarkets blog”

Askmarkets is an internet-based service for prediction markets, which consists of virtual marketplaces for information trading. Now, while this sentence might seem like an accurate description to our biased eyes, we bet that you can find a much better pitch line and submit it in the comments below. Still, allow us for now, to shed some light on the concept behind askmarkets.

Our inspiration for askmarkets stems from several years of research on the topic of prediction markets, enabling us - hopefully - to separate the wheat from the chaff. The concept, at its very core, goes like this. Markets are institutions that are everywhere. From the stock market in New York to the fish market in Tokyo to the flower market in Amsterdam, markets exist and are used for a variety of purposes. But, while stock markets, for example, seem to be so different than betting, or fish and flower markets, in their core all those institutions are essentially the same: Markets bring people together, they sum up their information and transmit it through prices.

Askmarkets intends to bring this functionality to the masses. We provide a tool with which anyone can create a virtual market or trade in markets created by others. In other words, we provide a tool which can aggregate the opinions and knowledge of the many and transform these into a meaningful result. Markets arise as the ideal tool to crowdsource cognitive tasks and arrive at consensus results which are typically proven to be more accurate or correct than the opinions of the few experts, as suggested by both theory, experiments and practice.

Practically speaking, the whole concept of markets as an information aggregation tool has a relatively short history of existence. Better captured by the term ‘prediction markets’, it is only during the last years that the rise of the Web has given an actual shape to the idea and its potential. Especially among companies, the promise of markets as a decision support tool has been put into practise and been used as an effective decision-making tool only during the second half of the running decade, while by now all of the following companies are reported to be using markets internally: Siemens, HP, Intel, General Electric, Google, Eli Lilly, Microsoft, Archelor, Nokia, Intercontinental, Best Buy, Electronic Arts, Swisscom, Cisco, Motorola, Qualcomm, InfoWorld, MGM, Chiron, Frito Lay, TNT, Yahoo, Corning, Masterfoods, Pfizer, Abbott, Chrysler, General Mills, O’Reilly and TNT (disclaimer: no, these are not our customers, yet). Typical uses of markets for enterprise decision support range - so far and we’re still counting - from planning and forecasting, project management and marketing to new product development and market research. As our product is suitable for and targets all these applications, we could say that we naturally serve these or any other enterprise needs for dynamic information aggregation. Stay tuned for specific details coming out real soon.

Another major field of use regards public applications of aggregating people’s choices, on elections, movies, products or anything else. Especially regarding election results, relevant markets have proven to be more reliable than polls and surveys, and - lately - are gaining extended coverage from media sources like Time, Wired, CNN, Economist, New York Times, Financial Times, Newsweek, Fortune, ABC, Science, Nature, New Scientist, Business Week, Wall Street Journal and others. Moreover, many of these outlets already use markets to tap into the collective intelligence of their audience, giving them the ability to directly shape public consensus to ultimately provide a better alternative than polls. We also address such emerging needs - including yours, too -, so bear with us to find out more or just contact us in case that you want to be among our enterprise product testers. And thank you for your fantastic feedback and support so far, you really stand as our most valuable of assets!

A Course by Blog, Lessons Learned

cross posted at ‘A Course by Blog’

This semester, as you may know, I was privileged enough to teach (or, to be academically correct, to provide teaching assistance, but I truly thank my professor for entrusting me and giving me full freedom to handle everything by myself) the course ‘Information Extraction Algorithms’ -pure Data Mining in practice- at the postgraduate program ‘Applied Mathematical Sciences‘ of theNational Technical University of Athens. And the whole course actually turned out to be a one-off experience, for both me and the 10 students who appeared to take it, by deciding to host the whole course process in a blog. 

‘A Course by Blog’, a wordpress blog created on-the-fly during the first introductory lecture, finally concluded with 142 posts from 11 authors, 182 comments and 8,965 pageviews in total till today. We put everything related to the course online and publicly available, from the course’s syllabus and (optional) short CVs of its participants, to the lecture notes and videos (also, a livestream of the lectures was provided), to the weekly assignments, the final exam and grades, while in parallel a lot of more general posts -still relevant to the core machine learning topic- appeared (well, these are all in greek, apologies).

So, you may now follow the course’s proceedings in detail, or, if you are really determined to, watch on demand all lectures and study the relevant material, actually get the whole course’s juice at your convenience. Well, while this may be a pretty useful corollary effect, the main reason that triggered the whole decision was different. The focus was on enabling and fostering the conversation among the students, actually attempting to switch from a closed and locked status to an open and participative, yet competitive one. So, I’d like to add some rough thoughts on the experiences I gained through the whole implementation.

I might now say that the experiment was after all successful, actually a rather successful one. All of the students proved to be good recipients of the -novel to them- blogging platform and I’m positive that their exposure to each others’ assignments and questions resulted in a significantly improved learning experience. Plus, the recorded live streams of the lectures (16h of broadcasting time, available here) attracted 116 viewers, of 14m viewing time on average, while also resulted in some invaluable last-day-before-the-exam responses like “Hi Prof, I’m watching again all of your lectures and need to ask you a couple more things on…”. 

At the end of the day, I need to confide that going open clearly demands your time, in a way secures the minimal commitment for both the teacher and the students, as nobody wants to spoil his public reputation. And I’m convinced that all of us spent a lot more time on the course, especially when you compare it to the typical offline version. But, most of this effort was made voluntarily and happily, following uncontrolled patters, while resulting in added value for all of the participants. Isn’t that what you ideally expect from an academic course?

An ode to Chicago

Presenting at the 3rd Workshop on Prediction Markets

I attended earlier today the 3rd Workshop on Prediction Markets, organized with the support of Yahoo Research at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in Chicago. The event managed to gather top-notch researchers and practitioners of the field from Japan till, well, Greece, and I really enjoyed the focus and depth of all presentations.

What’s more, I had the chance to met up in person and chat with, among others “PM colleagues”, the Chicago-based Inkling guys -we owe them a lot at askmarkets-, Emile Servan-Schreiber of Newsfutures -he proved to be voluble and absolutely helpful on sharing experiences from many years of providing markets services-, as well as his own majesty and my very own prediction markets guru David Pennock; yes, he is such a geek but modest.

The presentation I gave for our late research attempts with Panos Ipeirotis entitled as ‘Detecting Important Events Using Prediction Markets, Text Mining and Volatility Modeling’ is attached hereby, while, as a work in progress, your comments are more than welcome.

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TechCrunch goes Open Coffee Greece

It’s true. It’s big. It’s awesome. After 22 Open Coffee events and hundred of participants around Greece this season, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ll cohost Open Coffee Athens XIII with Techcrunch. When? Tuesday, July 1st.

Close your mouth :), we are serious. The blog that brought the term start-up to the mainstream and is read by millions of people worldwide is on european tour and Mike Butcher, editor of Techcrunch UK, will join us to meet-up with you all and bring attention to the best and brightest of our attempts.

The setting goes like this: Take our very own entrepreneurs’ community. Add 10 Greek web start-ups, getting a 5′ chance to show and tell their story to the world. And all these with tons of karma and passion, in an uber cool-location (to be announced soon).

If you were dreaming about your start-up mentioned at Techcrunch, wake up and send us an email at opencoffee(dot)gr(at)gmail(dot)com. Or, if you would like your name among the sponsors, again email us. And, if you’d like to feel the love and passion that we Greeks share about start-ups and the web at large, just join us, we bet you will.

So, stay tuned for updates, save the date, spread the word and be there (or be square)!

cross-posted by OpenCoffee.gr

Attending Greek Blogger Camp 2008

I’m attending Greek Blogger Camp 2008 (photos are flowing here, more stuff on twitter) organized by my friend Stefanos in the magnificent island of Ios. Attendance is not excessive in size, but mood and atmosphere are pretty excellent and today alone I had the chance and priviledge to share some ouzo with Boris and Patrick (the latter one is also a speaker to the forthcoming Open Coffee Athens Meeting XII, next Tuesday June 3rd), jog throughout the Mylopotas Beach with Tim Ferriss (I can assure you that his writings are truly real, the guy is awesome and has managed to learn tons of greek in half a day) and chat with his own majesty Matt Mullenweg on the experiences of A Course by Blog.

Among the talks that took place earlier today, greek blog/podfather Panayiotis Vryonis shared his humble story on the Web, but I was almost excited with the presentation of teh dutch guy Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. Through narrating his personal lifetime, Boris brought into surface an insightful parallelism. The fundamental properties of what we considered as of ‘god nature’, he argued, is being omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and immortal. But, exactly these very properties are fully implemented by The Web! Boris’ delivery was excellent and I do confess my excitement on the thought of democratizing -at last- the concept of ‘G0d’ via the internet. Implications vary from practical to deeply philosophical levels, I may return to these thoughts of mine on a later post.

After Boris and Tim, sharing -as usual- some tips on efficient blogging policies, Matt went on stage to present -among others- some new features of the forthcoming WordPress 2.6. To my partial knowledge and short updates, some of these features weren’t announced anywhere else before (and Matt validated my feeling on a later discussion by the pool), so I think these new features would be of interest to you :) Here you are:

• WP will support Google Gears, to bring your blog into the desktop and enable the offline WP experience. Moreover, you’ll never lose any data again when losing internet connection, etc.
•  A ‘Turbo’ button will be available to speed up page load by optimizing javascripts and css. Early data reveal a 6x increase in performance
•  WP 2.6 will get wiki capabilities!
•  New post categories ala Tumblr will be added (photo/quote/video, added to the current text default one)
•  bulk uploads of photos and collective tagging will be enabled

Moreover, Matt promised no other major redesign but small changes on administration user interface from now on, among them the categories box will be restored back in their older place, up in right column. He also demonstrated a home-grown feature of using WP as mail inbox, in a full-fledged talk that left nobody dissapointed (as far as I know, videos of the speech will soon be available on the camp’s website). And I do need to also describe his willingness to answer every single question with his ever-ending smile and fully humility… Respect and keep up Matt!