Databases are a fundamental technology for most information systems and especially those based on the web. A group of senior database researchers met recently to assess the state of database research, as documented in site. So, where did the Semantic Web fit into their vision?
The short article Scoring the Candidates in the current Technology Review introduces the concept of range voting and argues that it would prevent third-party spoilers in elections as well as give voters more say, Arrow’s impossibility theorem notwithstanding. Heaven knows we need *something* to save us from modern political life, a least in the USA.
Who is alisyn camerota and why are so many people suddenly interested in her?
Pundits often describe the Web as humanity’s giant, collective brain. So what are we thinking about today? Yesterday UMBC PhD student Akshay Java launched a new service, Wikimatix, that shows the Google’s 100 hot search terms for the past hour and tries to explain each with information extracted from Wikipedia.
David Huynh completed his PhD at MIT CSAIL last year and joined MetaWeb a few months ago, where he has been working on new and better interfaces to explore the data encoded in their Freebase system. He recently released Parallax as a prototype browsing interface for Freebase. Here is a video that shows the interface in action.
Forget becoming a Pythonista or learning how to exploit the Semantic Web in social networking applications. Learn Cobol.
From today’s New York Times (In California, Retro-Tech Complicates Budget Woes), comes this note on how to avoid being an obsolete geek: be a Cobol hacker. The context is an emergency plan that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to deploy to address a $15 billion budget deficit.
Cloud computing is a hot topic this year, with IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and Amazon all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing”. We’ve started using it in our lab, like many research groups, via the Hadoop software framework and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud services.
The tutorial program for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) has been announced. It includes includes two full-day and nine half-day tutorials to be held on October 26 and 27 in Karsruhe.
“Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas” warns Google as if ask for walking directions in Google Maps. That’s always good advice I suppose.
Google Maps now gives directions for getting from one place to another in three modes: by car, by public transit and by walking. After experimenting with a few examples, I found the that the walking routes differed from the driving ones and were generally pretty reasonable.
The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) has begun the process of selecting a site for the 9th International Semantic Web Conference to be held in 2010. Since ISWC’08 will be located in Karhsruhe Germany and ISWC’09 in the DC area in the US, locations in Asia and Australia are preferred for 2010.
The NYT Bits blog has a post, Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Reduce Vandalism on Pages on Wikipedia’s proposed Flagged revisions/Sighted versions policy. This policy is currently being used in the German version of Wikipedia.
Bit.ly is a URL-shortener like TinyURL with a host of interesting features, as enumerated in the switchAbit blog.
The BBC broadcast an interview with Tim-Berners Lee on the future of the Internet”. In the interview he talk about the linking open data paradigm. On a related note, MIT recently announced that Tim has been named the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
HealthMap is an interesting Web site that displays a “global disease alert map” based on information extracted from a variety of text sources on the Web, including news, WHO and NGOs. HealthMap was developed as a research project by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, part of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology.
The WSJ has an article, Get Out of Your Own Way, on research suggesting that people have often form intentions to act and make decisions well before they are conscious of the fact. Maybe this is like detecting the inferences made by the OWL reasoner or classification of a low-level SVM model before the high-level Python code processes its results. This picture from the article sums it up nicely.
Venture Beat reports that Microsoft will acquire Powerset for a price “rumored to be slightly more than $100 million”. Powerset has been developing a Web search system that uses natural language processing technology acquired from PARC to more fully understand user’s queries and the text of documents indexed.
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