Just how open must an open network be for an open network to be labeled "open"?

In 2003, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will decide in multiple contexts the extent to which governmental action should be used to maintain the "openness" of telecommunications and Internet networks. At the same time, the European Union will put into effect its new, comprehensive Access Directive. 2003 may, therefore, be a critical year for the future of governmental policy towards the "openness" of next-generation networks. This paper argues that the debate between "open" and "closed" networks has been insufficiently precise and, therefore, has failed to bring to policy makers' attention critical factors of decision. That is because the choice between "open" and "closed" networks is not binary; rather it consists of different policy bases operating from different perspectives on the network. Arguments for or against governmental opening of a network can be premised on a variety of disciplinary regimes that include, for example, engineering principles, economic theory, social philosophy and legal analysis. Often ignored is the plain fact that these disciplines do not always line up with each other. This will be critical to understand if in the future policy makers are asked to weigh claims of economic theory ? say the need to encourage investment ? against claims of social philosophy ? say the value of free speech and experimentation. Nor do contentions necessarily operate at the same perspective. From a user's perspective, the network can include the activities of an end user, competitive network provider, an independent content/software provider, or the network owner itself. Thus a claim of an end user's "right" to access content through a network may shed little light on the claim of a competitive network provider to use that same network. This paper demonstrates the interplay of the policy bases and network perspectives with four examples: Access to Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) networks; access to U.S. cable networks; the European perspective as demonstrated in the Access Directive; and, the architecture of the Internet itself. Along the way, the paper also notes, as an aspect of future analysis, the extent to which the Internet as an "idea" influenced public policy in a manner that departed from normal interest-group politics. The paper posits, as an example, a decisional template that could be employed, for each perspective on the network, to distinguish between policy disciplines. The paper concludes by noting those circumstances that reinforce the continuing importance of the "open/closed" network question. The goal of this paper is not to advocate for any particular policy outcome. It is, rather, to demonstrate that current policy analysis would benefit from applying greater analytical precision to the question of whether ? and why ? governments should act to open next-generation networks. Finally, the paper includes an addendum reviewing regulatory activity in February 2003

How open is open enough?: Melding proprietary and open source platform strategies

Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards. Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives

Automated construction and analysis of political networks via open government and media sources

We present a tool to generate real world political networks from user provided lists of politicians and news sites. Additional output includes visualizations, interactive tools and maps that allow a user to better understand the politicians and their surrounding environments as portrayed by the media. As a case study, we construct a comprehensive list of current Texas politicians, select news sites that convey a spectrum of political viewpoints covering Texas politics, and examine the results. We propose a ”Combined” co-occurrence distance metric to better reflect the relationship between two entities. A topic modeling technique is also proposed as a novel, automated way of labeling communities that exist within a politician’s ”extended” network.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Unconstrained Face Detection and Open-Set Face Recognition Challenge

Face detection and recognition benchmarks have shifted toward more difficult environments. The challenge presented in this paper addresses the next step in the direction of automatic detection and identification of people from outdoor surveillance cameras. While face detection has shown remarkable success in images collected from the web, surveillance cameras include more diverse occlusions, poses, weather conditions and image blur. Although face verification or closed-set face identification have surpassed human capabilities on some datasets, open-set identification is much more complex as it needs to reject both unknown identities and false accepts from the face detector. We show that unconstrained face detection can approach high detection rates albeit with moderate false accept rates. By contrast, open-set face recognition is currently weak and requires much more attention.Comment: This is an ERRATA version of the paper originally presented at the International Joint Conference on Biometrics. Due to a bug in our evaluation code, the results of the participants changed. The final conclusion, however, is still the sam

Ono: an open platform for social robotics

In recent times, the focal point of research in robotics has shifted from industrial ro- bots toward robots that interact with humans in an intuitive and safe manner. This evolution has resulted in the subfield of social robotics, which pertains to robots that function in a human environment and that can communicate with humans in an int- uitive way, e.g. with facial expressions. Social robots have the potential to impact many different aspects of our lives, but one particularly promising application is the use of robots in therapy, such as the treatment of children with autism. Unfortunately, many of the existing social robots are neither suited for practical use in therapy nor for large scale studies, mainly because they are expensive, one-of-a-kind robots that are hard to modify to suit a specific need. We created Ono, a social robotics platform, to tackle these issues. Ono is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components and cheap materials, and can be built at a local FabLab at the fraction of the cost of other robots. Ono is also entirely open source and the modular design further encourages modification and reuse of parts of the platform