Tip

I’m still recapping my last six months. I went from the idea of a pervasive recommender market (Pythia) to a graph database to operate in (Tipspace) and ended up with the interface for navigating: Tip.

Tip is an interface for interacting with a conversational recommender through an accelerometer-enabled smart phone. You tip the device to navigate the interface:

Tip screens are laid out in a template whose components are drawn from Tipspace. Users can change their local links to change how the screens look.

Authors can then create tipstreams which describe the progression of screens that a user is presented with. For example, the stream leading from the first screen is:

The stream is represented internally as a progression through a graph. /tip/start is a link to /question/Do you want to Tip?. The movement to the right then is to /tip/start/yes. (Movement to the left is a link to /primitive/unknown which is outside the system.)

Honestly, Tip is something I need to write code for before I will really understand it. I’m pretty sure it is a good idea and potentially a really good one, but I have a call with my adviser on Friday and I need to move on to other subjects for the time being… I’ve just discovered I can use Google’s Appengine to deploy java on the web without needing a new webhost.