One more paper

A couple of months ago, I submitted a paper to the ACM DRM workshop on the work I did while I was doing my internship at Fraunhofer. And it got accepted ... quite nice actually as it was a very complex paper on privacy and DRM. Also, my first paper that does not feature Andrew (my PhD supervisor) as an author.

Very impressed with myself :)

Movie: Wall-E

At its core, it is a love story - between robots. Except, it is expressed more clearly than many science fiction writers have ever managed in their entire working life. This has been a common theme in many movies/stories - Asimov's Bi-centennial Man is a quick example - where robots finally get to the AI stage - where they become self aware, and usually one of the attributes given to self aware machines, is the capability to love.

But Wall-E is more than just a love story - it is also a story about pollution. Wall-E is a robot that is cleaning up the mess that earth has become. It is a story, ironically given the Disney backing, about commercialism - where humans are consumed totally by consumerism and not caring about their surroundings. It is about laziness - robots do almost everything, to the extent that humans have all become obese slobs.

Wall-E works as a movie, because it is primarily a great story. It also works because it is not a typical cartoon where all the inanimate objects talk - but the story is told, almost in mime. It is a throwback to the silent era where the acting was key. And it works beautifully.