Last week I gave an invited talk on the opening day of the 15th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 2007). Fundamentally, their focus is on computational representations that are also cognitively tractable, hence the invitation to forge a link with our work on usable tools for the network-centric mapping of dialogue and arguments. The…
KMi Chief Scientist Marc Eisenstadt delivered a stinging condemnation of elearning at his keynote address to the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies on Friday in Niigata, Japan. The keynote, entitled "Does elearning have to be so awful? (Time to mashup or shutup)", took objection to decades of false promises and research that had…
Congratulations to Sofia Angeletou, Laurian Gridinoc, and Vlad Tanasescu, all Ph.D. students in KMi for winning prizes for their mini projects at this year’s Semantic Web Summer school held last week in Cercedilla, Spain. At the summer school 50 of the best Semantic Web Ph.D. students from across the world carry out projects over the…
Fun (and muscle fatigue) was had last Friday, when a small group of the ‘fittest’ and most able people in KMi met on the playing fields of Walton Hall. Our illustrious Director joined us for the first half-hour, although no proof of this exists as he left before the photo-shoot, stating that he had important…
The ACM IEEE joint conference on Digital Libraries was held in Vancouver 19-23 June 2007. The ‘hot’ topics focused on information extraction and profile matching, eye tracking to detect user’s attention, geo-location applications, collaborative tagging, mining citations and online photo sharing. Interestingly, Web 2.0 tools, such as CiteSeer, del.icio.us, digg and flickr were very popular…
Michele Pasin’s PhD work on the representation and navigation of philosopical resources (PhiloSURphical) has attracted the attention of the people working on the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which aims to enlarge the usage of digital technologies by scholars in the humanities. As the authors note, the ³task seems particularly daunting because issues in the…
The first version of Watson, the Gateway to the Semantic Web, has just been made publicly available. Watson is a tool and an infrastructure that aims at supporting the development of a new generation of semantic web applications, which can dynamically select, combine and exploit the growing amount of semantic data and ontologies available online….
"I refuse to put my life on hold while I wait for somebody else ‘to make me whole’." That quote, from an article written by Jez in 2000 about his high seas sailing adventures [linked below], is typical of the dynamo who served as KMi Business Manager from the opening of KMi in 1995 until…
The KMi developed ERA (Enabling Remote Activity) system, designed to enable mobility impaired students to participate in Geology field trips, was recently voted the most inspiring project at a UK wide Virtual Fieldwork conference. KMi’s Earth Science collaborators, Jesscia Bartlett (SXR339 Course Manager) and John Whalley (Field Tutor) presented ERA to the May 2007 EES…
A new project, called Personal Inquiry (PI), aims to help young people to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to understand and contribute to their changing world. The project, a collaboration between the Open University and the University of Nottingham, has been awarded nearly £1.2m from the Economic and Social Research Council and the…
