Young Scientist ot Year - ya wha ?

naitkris

Originally posted by karlin
The student and Esat then released a press release to clarify that it was 200,000 lines he produced.

ok, still, as a programmer, even 100,000 lines in 1 and a half years is still way too much code - and to check this for errors, rewrite it etc. In a day, though I may manage a 100 lines or more, it will end up being as little as 10 lines after I debug and recheck it all (maybe it's cause I'm such a clean coder!). And that's me, a programmer, not a secondary school student who has to go to school and do other things in those 18 months as well.

Esat is of course willing to facilitate access to Adnan but the bottom line is: NO ONE HAS ASKED! Instead people keep quoting my stories or other writer's stories and lots of distortions have gone out to some of the boards around the world and to other news sites. In particular I'm amazed at how many foreign journos have just emailed me or used my stories as background without simply talking to Adnan -- though maybe it's a language issue. So push someone else to go have a chat with him!

First of all, the reason the discussion even came about on boards.ie and many other places on the internet and elsewhere is due to the huge lack of information given by Adnan about his program from the very start.

I don't think most people on this forum are journalists and so they'd much rather debate the topic as one does as a boards.ie member :-) which is much easier then interviewing Adnan. There's nothing wrong with this practice as we all do it in some form or another - and that's why boards.ie is so popular.

You are right to a certain extent, however it can't be up to the public to have to drag information out of someone who has got acclaim for winning the Young Scientist's competition. In fact, him winning the competition should allow the public an in depth view as to what he has done. I also think that copyrighting it straight afterwards is more of an excuse not to let people download it and thus sell it commercially if he plans to do so. This to me is not "science" but more commercialism.

The fact that he only had 2 pages about his software at the exhibition is an example of just how little information he has given the public. Two pages about a piece of software as complicated as his (if it is 200,000 lines of code!), surely should have at least a 20+ page description (i.e. 1 page per 10,000 lines!) in order to show the "science" behind it all.

Oh yeah, the point about earlier downloads -- Adnan told me he had a site where well over a year ago you could download a really basic form of the browser -- just the initial design with very little added in. He took the site down after a while, once he started adding things in.

why would he take down the site? If it is as unique as it is portrayed and he was adding things to it, why take it down? Had he kept it up he would be able to improve it thanks to feedback and ideas from others etc. If you ask me, I'd put up a site for the program once I start to add things in and it begins to get interesting, but definitely not even think of taking down the site!

zynaps

If you ask me, I'd put up a site for the program once I start to add things in and it begins to get interesting, but definitely not even think of taking down the site!

Aye naitkris, but if you had chosen to stop updating the version you had online, and work on your private copy until it was ready to be entered into the competition and released (to err... just esat, or something?), you may feel that the online version is so out of date and basic that it would misrepresent the program as it is now, or something?

Interesting to see that some of the people we talk about do seem to read around on ioffl's board[edit -s].

*slaps ntl*
*slap*
*slap*

zynaps

cherrio

Hi karlin, I dont think this has been suggested here before. But could you perhaps you could ask Adnan to visit this thread (he could use Xwebs:D ) and perhaps he could clear away some of the confusion, tell us exactly what Xwebs can and can't do.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Gavin

Originally posted by daveirl
In one of Karlins articles she said he has been advised not to read this thread or the one on slashdot or any of the hundred of other things which slate the project all over the internet. Can you imagine what that would do for your confidence

To go slightly off topic, if the lad can't handle criticism from a bunch of internet users or as zero likes to say, comic shop owners then I don't think he's very safe in the real world.

If anything I'd say he'd learn a good lesson, quickly. Don't get upset about what people post on the internet.

The more I've read about his browser, albeit most of it buzzwords, there appears to be a few grains of truth coming true. At this stage I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Gav

sceptre

Originally posted by Verb
To go slightly off topic, if the lad can't handle criticism from a bunch of internet users or as zero likes to say, comic shop owners then I don't think he's very safe in the real world.

If anything I'd say he'd learn a good lesson, quickly. Don't get upset about what people post on the internet.

Aye, certainly true - but the whole "he's only 16" thing casts a slightly different shadow on it. Some of those Fark posters were pretty hardnosed about it. Again (as with here where we've mostly been quizzical) it's probably because there haven't been any technical details in the media - if Karlin's posts on her blog hadn't been made we'd know almost nothing about it at all. It's not his fault - just that most reporters seem to be happy to hand in something vague for their rags (or just rip off someone else) without going to the source at all.

adnans

i'm flattered. thank you all for believing in .... oh wait, youre talking about another adnan. i'll just go and see how those monkey's are doing with my shakespeare play.

adnans

sceptre

Originally posted by adnans
i'm flattered. thank you all for believing in .... oh wait, youre talking about another adnan. i'll just go and see how those monkey's are doing with my shakespeare play.

Fecker, made me look. Back to your art and design box with you.

Slutmonkey57b

That kid is totally going to get sued by Microsoft and the DVD forum for ripping off their copyrighted logos. I hope.

BanjoDanjo

Just thought i'ld check here and see if there is any more infor about this being made public.
To be honest i'm not surprised he hasn't come out and made his project available to anyone else.
I reckon he's getting set up for a commercial release. Probably got funding etc and part of the contract is to stay quiet until the product is ready for market or maybe just before, to drum up another frenzy.
I know for a fact the company i'm working with have since started to develop a fast internet browser and according to the guys working on it are about 2 months from a working version which will surpass even adnans claims. Can't get them to tell me anymore though because they say its 'top secret' until release, no matter how hard i try to get it out of them , so its no wonder Adnan is keeping mum about his work, he's probably under the same hush type order.
Anyway, when he's ready we'll hear all about it. If it is a bull**** project (i don't think so, since i've been told all the claims of his project CAN be produced and will be produced in the next few months) then you'll hear nothing ever again about it.
People are missing the point thoug,
The guy won a competition, give him and the judges some credit.

ozmo1

I guess if this guy had won YS2003 for claiming a cure for cancer , doctors might be a bit miffed if he wouldn’t tell anyone what it was - or dismissive if he wouldn’t let anyone test it.

But he won for a technology project - and so gets stick from techy ppl for not sharing if its real(unlikely) - or even letting it be tested.

Personally - I think he got lucky getting some really poor judges who were convinced by his jargon that it was a worthy winner and computer literate people are annoyed as his audacity.

ozmo.

---

Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
Date: 2003-03-08 05:59:32 PST

Adnan Osmani, a 16-year-old from Ireland, has designed XWebs. He says it is five times faster than anything else but he would not demonstrate it to us.

"I designed a browser because I didn't feel that other browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape were fast enough and they didn't have enough features in them that users would find useful," he said.

And what about online criticism questioning his claims?

"I just shrug most of those comments off. I don't believe people on the discussion groups," said Adnan.

"Their opinion does matter, but I don't really think it makes that much of an impression on me. If they can't look at something in a positive way then just forget about them, that's what I say."

Posted on soc.culture.iranian
http://groups.google.ie/groups?selm=7Hmaa.7729%24Wy1.65453%40newscontent-01.sprint.ca&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain

sceptre

Just FYI on the usenet post that ozmo added: the original poster on Usenet cut it from a recent BBC online news about browsers (so the "us" is the BBC online team)

cherrio

Sorry to bump this one from oblivion, but just wondering if any one has any updates.

It has now been over 9 months since he won and still no sign of Xwebs any where.

The Young scientist website has a bit of fluff on it:
http://www.esatys.com/info_winners.htm
I like the bit "has the potential to improve the speed", no mention of x4 or x5 times fast.


As the winner he is going forward as Ireland's entry to the EU young scientist: http://www.eucontest.hu/ (Sept 20 - 26).

If any one is in Budapest, might like to check it out:) They have a "Contest Catalogue":

http://www.visualia.hu/download/Catalogue.pdf there is a bit about his entry (page 33), its called

Xwebstm, but nothing new really, except an interesting bit about 1500bit security key, which I never saw mentioned before.

Any one else got any updates?

Delphi91

He's just been made an honourary member of the Irish Computer Society - read this http://www.ics.ie/article-020.shtml

Mike

ozmo

Originally posted by cherrio
As the winner he is going forward as Ireland's entry to the EU young scientist: http://www.eucontest.hu/ (Sept 20 - 26).

Well - anyone know how he did?? No updates on the pages linked above.

ozmo.

cherrio

http://dbs.cordis.lu/cgi-bin/srchidadb?CALLER=NHP_EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=EN_RCN_ID:20953

and

http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=6A9AEA0D-1828-49FB-B74AFB2B4EA2697D

No mention of xwebs on either, can't say Im surprised. I would say they had qualified judges there this time.

ozmo

Originally posted by cherrio

No mention of xwebs on either, can't say Im surprised. I would say they had qualified judges there this time.

Quote
"Uwe Treske, an 18 year old secondary school student from Hamburg was rewarded for his project on a low cost tunnelling microscope, which he designed with a mere 50 euro. Equally innovative was the development of a set of high fidelity loudspeakers using plasma, by the 19 year old Hungarian prize winner, Gábor Németh. Jana Invanidze, 19, also picked up first prize for her investigation into the internal pH of endoplasmic reticulum, a cell organelle involved in protein synthesis. Her results may help to develop hormone therapy in the future. "

Now there is some really worthwhile projects from Schoolkids.

amazing.
ozmo.

ps. Anyone checked the online Patients database for XWebs and XSockets or yer mans name - He was making a big thing about patienting it at one stage.

ozmo

LimerickNomad

Any further update, lads?

LFCFan

whatever xweb is, it's obviously not gonna set the world alight and is probably just another browser with 4 windows that the Irish judges hadn't a clue about. We would have heard a lot more about it if it really was as great as was made out.

ssh

I seem to remember now...

It sped things up by:

A) Increasing the priority of the packets it sent out, to make a QoS router think that the connection was latency sensitive. Rude.

Opened up multiple connections to a web server and downloaded a single file using many different streams, thus side stepping some web servers which rate limit connections. Once again, rude.

The scale of the software makes it an impressive feat, but come on, this isn't an advancement of anything. It's just clumping a bunch of different technologies together coupled with some rfc-raping.

naitkris

Originally posted by Delphi91
He's just been made an honourary member of the Irish Computer Society - read this http://www.ics.ie/article-020.shtml

Mike

i think this is a really great achievement and looking back over the whole thread i have to take back a lot of my sceptiscm over xwebs. its just that i knew so little about it all from the start. to award an Honorary Membership to the Irish Computer Society to someone so young is a tremendous achivement and even though we still know little of the inner workings of the software, one cant dismiss his achievments now that he has been recognised to the extent that he has.

well done Adnan!

LFCFan

have the ICS actually used the system though or are they just getting caught up in all the hype? If it's so good then why hasn't it been released yet?

iano

A quick search revealed no applicable patents in UK, Ireland, Europe, or USA for inventor "OSMANI", so I guess that the patent stuff is not real.

The ICS citation commends Adnan for "his contribution to software engineering ".

At this stage, almost a year on from the hype of the Young Scientist competition, can anyone actually point to any such contribution?

Renton

Is there any way at all we could contact this guy and get him onto boards ? I mean surely he knows at this stage the amount of critisicm (sp?) he's getting world-wide, he must want to defend himself..

Serbian

Anyone know how this guy got on in the EU Young Scientist Competition 2003? I found the official site here, but like most official sites, it hasn't been updated. Supposedly he was competing in September. I guess if he had actually won anything then we would have heard about it on the news...

Serb

ozmo

Originally posted by Serbian
Anyone know how this guy got on in the EU Young Scientist Competition 2003? I found the official site here, but like most official sites, it hasn't been updated. Supposedly he was competing in September. I guess if he had actually won anything then we would have heard about it on the news...

Serb

Couple of weeks and the next YSE will be on. Maybe there will be some info then?

---

http://www.esatys.com/info_timeline_95_03.htm

2003
WINNER : Adnan Osmani
SCHOOL : St Finian's College

Adnan amazed computer scientists and enthusiasts worldwide with the level of intelligence put into his project. Adnan completed his Leaving Cert in June 2003 and is currently studying computer engineering at Sheffield University in the UK

---

Ro

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34806.html

Fast Web browser to be commercialised
Friday, January 09 2004
by Matthew Clark

The controversial winner of last year's Esat BT Young Scientist competition, Adnan Osmani, says his 'mega-browser' will be ready for commercialisation soon.

Latest ENN headlines
Fast Web browser to be commercialised
For the record 9 January
In the papers 9 January



Speaking with ElectricNews.Net, the 17-year-old Sheffield University computer engineering student said that in about seven months' time, patents for the Xwebs mega browser should be filed and the software will be primed for commercialisation. Osmani said that he hopes to sell the technology to an interested company, holding on to the proceeds as a nest egg.


"I guess I always thought that it might have commercial potential when I was working on it, but mostly, I wasn't really thinking about that," he said. "I just wanted to get it done."


The Xwebs mega browser gave the Mullingar boy international acclaim last year when it won the top prize at the Esat BT Young Scientist Awards in Ireland, as well as the esteem of the tech industry and even a job offer from Microsoft upon his graduation from college. The Internet browser included direct access to 120 search engines and incorporated five different media players for sound and video, as well as DVD functions and a talking guide named Phoebe.


Osmani said he has since added 30 more audio and video features to the software, which is based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. When unveiled last year, the Young Scientist judging panel described the work as "university-level" and the panel was forced to bring in experts to test the software's capabilities as well as Osmani's knowledge of programming.


But what really launched the young man into the cyber-public's eye was a claim that Xwebs could increase the speed at which a browser functions by a factor of two to five times on a normal PSTN telephone line. The so-called "hyperspeed" technology worked by making multiple requests for the information on a Web page in several small data streams.


The claims earned him much praise initially, followed by doubt and eventually criticism and negative commentary on the Internet's many blogs and mailing lists. Many said that the technology couldn't match Osmani's claims, while other offered insults with their analysis. "I looked at what they were saying, even though they told me not to, and I have to say that some of it hurt," Osmani said.

But even now, with a year of upgrades packed into Xwebs, Osmani says that he has figured out a way to make the browser even faster, though he won't divulge details or exactly how much faster, describing the performance increase as "significant." He has aptly named the new hyperspeed technology "Icarus," the boy in the Greek myth who with wax wings flew too near the Sun. Unlike Icarus, Osmani does not plan to crash into the sea.

Many said that the technology couldn't match Osmani's claims, while other offered insults with their analysis. "I looked at what they were saying, even though they told me not to, and I have to say that some of it hurt," Osmani said.

I hope ye're happy. Boards.ie. It hurts

LFCFan

let's wait and see and then judge him!

osmethod

http://www.fileflow.com

oneweb

incorporated five different media players for sound and video

five DIFFERENT players? Sheesh, just get Winamp5, it'll do the job of most.

The so-called "hyperspeed" technology worked by making multiple requests for the information on a Web page in several small data streams.

Um, à la "Pipelining", such as can be found in Mozilla? Or simply starting the download of multiple elements of a page simultaneously to make it look faster (they'll get there in the same time.)

btw, excellent wording by Clark

a claim that Xwebs could increase the speed at which a browser functions by a factor of two to five times on a normal PSTN telephone line

The speed at which it functions, not necessarily download. Sure cutting down on browser bloat would do that anyway.

So he skinned IE, added 120 search engines (how many are actually gonna be useful, are the results ranked?) and made it 'faster'. He's either extremely clever or had a lot of help. I think a full investigation into the claims should have been undertaken from a snapshot of a clean OS install to see what changes may have been made. But in the eyes of the judges it looked good.

Whatever happened to the days of Young Scientist being about investigating the effects of beans in a diet or silly robots that avoided hitting each other and other amusing stuff?