Know thyself

I read the paper introducing "Know thyself" and found I can use some of its idea in my project. I am now reading the papers accepted (Chi 2010).
http://personalinformatics.org/ is the website main page, I am also reading the content here.

Plan for the data-gathering prototype:
I have already implemented the prototype for Gmail, and I still need to do the same thing for Blogger, Facebook and Twitter.
1. spend one week for each of the there social sites.
2. spend one week for the integration
3. during the implementation, I will well document all those prototype.


What I am doing:
1. writing thesis proposal 
2. continuing documenting Graph My Inbox

Chorme Database

I spent the whole morning trying to make the chrome database api work, which is called "gears". However I failed. And it turned out that google no longer update the api and has removed gears since chrome 12. (I am currently using chrome 17, source:  http://gearsblog.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/stopping-gears.html).

The reason why google give gears up is that it is a fast move by google to implement the web database and other web technologies. However, since now html5 is globally available, which is a standard to provide all the technologies provided by gears, google shift its focus to html5.

I'll get started with html5 tonight.

Appointment 2

------ At the appointment on 20th March, my extension failed to return anything on Rafa's Mac laptop.

I used several Gmail accounts to check if my chrome extension is still working. After a few tests, now I know that Google have again changed the implementation of Gmail backend. The reason why the impact to my extension is huge is that my extension bases fully on the underlying internet protocol, rather than Gmail api provided by Google development team.

??? My solution is that I will re-implement the extension with offical Gmail api with goog documentation.

Literature Research 1

My mission is to deal with the ambiguity of emotional words, distinguishing different meanings interpreted in different contexts.All I found do not seem to be qualified to do the job.

From 6th March, I have been reading academic papers on the subject of emotion recognition. However, what I found is that all the papers I have read only use the statistical method or machine learning to process the text, and "context" is defined as "the previous and the next sentence of the current sentence" by almost all the authors, which is not a satisfactory manner.

There is a hierarchical approach which was proposed in both 2008 and 2010 by 2 groups of researchers might be a way to try. 

In terms of the data gathering part of the project, facebook api and twitter api will do the job. What I need to do is just find out a way to display all the data through a plugin.

Description of the Extension

2/29/2012
After about a month's work, the Gmail extension has been developed.The current version is slightly different from the original version of the extension.

I keep made small changes to the UI just to provide more information to the users, and maintained the functionality of the original extension.Once the extension has been launched, users will see a window about half the size of the screen, on which there are the search input box, the logo of the extension and some guideline for the users. Users can view the guidelines just by moving the mouse to the exact point they want to read. This extension provide the same search engine as Gmail. When a user has put in the key word he/she wants to search and clicked "Search" or pressed "Enter" on the keyboard, an icon with the current status information, "Searching", appears under the search box. On the icon, there is a small "x" at the end, a user can click it to terminate the indicated search.

When all the email information is received, the status icon will change to a colour ball followed by the key word and the extension will draw 3 charts which enable users to view their email graphically.A user can click on the data points on the first graph to see the main content of the emails received in a single month and have the second and third charts upgraded to the corresponding daily and yearly charts.

Above is the a description of the full round of the working process of the extension, if the users want to compare emails with different key words, they can simply enter another key word and search again. The extension will draw 3 new charts with data points and lines of different colours. Also, the users can remove the search result generated by a key word by clicking the corresponding "x" at the end of the key word icon.

One thing to note is that because this extension rely fully on the response from Google, update to a newer version will generally happen several days after Google changes the response. During the development phase of this extension, Google changed the response twice and I had to change the response manipulation part of the code.

Getting Started

11/5/2011
These days I've been working on the Google Chrome extension. I've gotten familiar with programming with JavaScript and I did a few tutorials on using the Google and Gmail APIs. Also, I have already understand how the GYI code works. Now, what I need to do is to understand the widget of Gmail and how to retrieve user email information through widgets.