Nov
30
2006
Irish FP7 launch event covered in CORDIS
CORDIS has published a brief report of the Irish FP7 launch event that took place in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham recently.
Nov
29
2006
First FP7 calls formally announced
The European Commission has formally announced that the first FP7 calls will be opened on December 22.
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Nov
28
2006
Comment and trackback spam
Recently, my blog has been infested with comment and trackback spam. The default mechanisms in Typo to block spam are not great, in my opinion – certainly not up to the quality of spam management available in Wordpress. One step I have taken is to enable Akismet filtering. I have not used this before, so I have no idea how effective it will be.
In the meantime, I found myself with hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks that I had to deal with. Thankfully, I came across a console feature available on RoR applications (of which Typo is one). To get rid of all trackbacks, use the following:
Trackback.find_all.each { |t| t.destroy }To get rid of all comments belonging to a particular post (article), you can to as follows:
Article.find(6).comments.each { |t| t.destroy }The 6 in the above line is the id of the article that has the comment spam.
Clearly, this approach is no substitute to a proper spam management interface, but it does show how powerful the RoR console can be.
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Nov
28
2006
New appointment for Bill Harris
Biotechnology Ireland has published an announcement from DCU that Bill Harris, the former DG of SFI, has been appointed as an Adjunct Professor.
The announcement is also available on the DCU news site:
Professor Bill Harris, former Director General of SFI and current Head of Science Foundation, Arizona, has been appointed Adjunct Professor at Dublin City University.
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Nov
24
2006
The power of Wikipedia
Around the time I started work, and in particular attending presentations by colleagues, many such presentations would start with a slide like “Webster’s dictionary defines X as ….”, where X is the topic of the talk.
One of the events at the DERI research day I mentioned previously was a panel discussion on the topic of informatics. Three of the five panel members started their slides with quotes and definitions of informatics taken from Wikipedia. Looks like we’ve come full circle.
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Nov
24
2006
DERI research day
Yesterday, I spent the day at the DERI research day. DERI, as you will recall, is the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, based in Galway.
There were a number of interesting speakers, including Professor Stefan Decker, the centre director, Professor Manfred Hauswirth the recently appointed vice-director, and a number of the DERI researchers.
One presentation that particularly stuck with me was that of John Breslin who I’ve mentioned here before. John is one of the senior researchers in DERI, and much of his recent work has been on a software component called SIOC – Semantically Interlinked Online Communities. SIOC is one of a number of tools that DERI are working on that is trying to “make the semantic web real”. In effect, it is a very simple semantic “ontology”: for online content such as posts to blogs, forums, bulletin boards, mailing lists, etc.
However, thankfully, John and his colleagues are not just developing theoretical ontologies, there’s real software behind the ideas. One piece that I’ve used myself on another site that I manage is a plugin for Wordpress. This is a standard plugin for Wordpress, which, when installed, generates the SIOC semantic data for your blog. Well worth a look.
I haven’t had much of an opportunity to play with the actual data that is generated, but I can sleep easier knowing that I’m doing my bit to help populate the semantic blogosphere.
Somewhat ironically, there is not yet a SIOC exporter for Typo, the blogging engine that I’m using for this site. Maybe I should look into that myself…
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Nov
10
2006
European Research Council
As many of you in the research community will know, the European Commission is currently putting the finishing touches to Framework Programme 7 (FP7). One of the new components of FP7 is called the ‘Ideas Programme’. This programme will be run and managed by a new agency called the European Research Council (ERC).
The Ideas Programme is particularly interesting in that it moves away from the idea of international, inter-institution consortia that are the norm in the Cooperation Programme. Instead, Ideas has the primacy of the individual Principal Investigator as its central tenet.
What this means in reality, is that individual, independent researchers will be able to seek significant funding for themselves and their teams, without having to enter into one of the large European research networks. This is a fairly radical departure for the EU, and one that it particularly welcome.
Of course, the Cooperation programme is still present in FP7, and still makes up the bulk of the FP7 budget. Nevertheless, the ERC has been given substantial funding: approximately €7.5 billion over the 7 year lifetime of FP7.
Why is this relevant? Well, SFI has been nominated as the government agency with responsibility for spearheading the ERC/Ideas initiative within the national FP7 strategy. Enterprise Ireland is the lead agency for the initiative, with other agencies taking responsibility for different parts of the framework.
EI are developing a new website for FP7, but for the time being have a small section of their current site devoted to FP6 & FP7.
I will write more on FP7 and the ERC in due course. Watch this space…