Lend me your navigator...
just to make some research
May, 2015
Sumarizing
- Web navigators used to make complicated calculations
- Many navigators can yield good results: cooperation
- Index
- Data+Algorithm+Language+Computer
- Javascript
- Our experiments
- The future
The basis
- Researching in CS ~~ "building and running" programs
- Building:
- Algorithm
- Language
- Running
- Data
- Computer(s)
preparing a (good) mojito {
º put brown sugar and mint leaves in your glass
crush a lime
add crushed ice
put 2 shots of rum
shake it
add Sprite, 7UP or Ginger Ale
}
Data+Algorithm vs
Language+Computers
- The good news:
- Data: can be local (files) or available from one server (URL)
- Algorithm: is an abstract concept
- The bad news:
- Language: needs a translator
- Computers: resources controlled by an Operating System
- Linux, MacOS, Windows
- Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Firefox OS, Tizen
- Frequently, a program only runs in a given platform
Unity makes strength
- So... how many computers do we really need?
- Option 1: A single, big, fantastic, expensive and, probably, very soon outdated one
- Option 2: As many as you can... no matter their specific characteristics
- But then... how can we make a program that can be easily translated and run in many different computers?
- Option 1: Convincing a huge amount of people of installing a given translator
- Option 2: Choosing a translator already installed by a huge amount of people
And the winner is...
- So, we need:
- A program...
- ...that is already installed by people in their computers...
- ... and that is able to translate and run programs
- Does it exist?
- Definitely (and fortunately) yes!
- In fact, there exist many of them
- They are called web navigators
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Opera
- some times, even Internet Explorer :)
So... my navigator is a code translator?
- First navigators couldn't translate any but HTML code
- Describing a document's layout and content
- No operations can be done
<h1>Unity makes strength</h1>
<ul>
<li>First thinng you need</li>
<li>Secong thing you need</li>
</ul>- Current navigators can translate and execute Javascript
<script>
var birthYear = prompt( "Enter the year you were born" )*1;
var age = (new Date()).getFullYear() - birthYear;
alert( "You are " + age + " years old" );
</script>Most web pages use Javascript
How can we use Javascript to do research?
- We collect some data ( traffic? blood donors?)
- We create a model (Neural Nets, Genetic Algorithms, ... )
- We try to forecast future values
We're trying
to do this in
YOUR navigator!!
First experiment...
- We created the jsEO program
- We left it http://vrivas.es/jseo
- We asked people in Facebook and Twitter to access that page, and waited...
Would people lend us their navigators to do some research?
...and its results
- 270 visitors in 24 hours, about 360 executions
- Many different operating systems and navigators
- The poster can be seen at:
http://es.slideshare.net/victorrivassantos/poster-js-eo300dpi
The future
- Enhancing the program to deal with time-series forecasting problems
- Making it run in "background" mode
- Building user-friendly applications
- Publishing papers
Thanks!
Lend me your navigator... just to do some research!
(vrivas@vrivas.es)