The Google Scholar blog announced some changes to their service, and in particular some enhancements to Google Scholar Citations.
Might be worth checking out if you’re into that kind of thing.
A little bit late, but this week (November 13 – 20) is Science Week. Check out the Science Week website to see what activities are on in your area.
TOG, the Dublin hackerspace, is putting on a number of interesting talks that might be worth checking out.
Last night, it was my privilege to be a judge for the Thesis in 3 competition, organised by the CLARITY CSET, in conjunction with their colleagues in the other eight CSETs.
The idea of the Thesis in 3 is very simple. It’s a rapid-fire competition, whereby PhD students in our CSETs have an opportunity to present their thesis work to a general audience. They get three minutes, and three slides to do so. Sounds simple, but condensing three or four years to highly technical and involved research into such a short time, and clarifying it to be understandable to the non-expert, is truly a difficult task. All 25 PhD candidates who entered the competition did so admirably.
On the night, we heard presentations on topics as diverse as the nanoscience of graphene, cancer biology, sensor networks, intestinal health, artificial intelligence, interference in wireless telecommunications, software engineering and speech processing. A great cross section of the work currently underway at the CSETs.
Despite the stiff competition, the judging panel of Dr. Keith O’Neill of Enterprise Ireland, Rosemary MacCabe of the Irish Times, Patrick Haughey of TodayFM and myself ultimately selected Eva Szekely of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) in UCD as the winner, for her talk entitled “Voices that Speak to You”. As part of her prize, Eva will get to present her talk at the upcoming SFI Science Summit next week, in front of an audience of the top scientists in the country.
Many congratulations to Eva, our two runners up, Arlene O’Neill of CRANN and Sean Fitzgerald of BDI, as well as all the other participants. A particular congratulations to Bridget Kelly of CLARITY, who is the mastermind behind the whole effort.
Unless you follow the online camera/photography blogs and websites, you might not be aware of the corporate implosion currently underway at the once great Olympus. It looks like the incoming CEO, Michael Woodford, (the first non-Japanese person to hold the post, incidentally) uncovered a massive fraud. He was fired for his trouble, but has reported his findings to the Fraud Office in the UK. This has consequently led to a further investigation, and recently the resignation of the Chairman if the company.
Here’s a decent summary of the story so far, as well as some links for further reading.
On Tuesday, I attended the launch of Dublinked. Dublinked is an joint initiative supported by the four Dublin local authorities (Dublin City Council, South Dublin Council, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and Fingall County Council), NUI Maynooth and the IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre.
On the NUIM side, two SFI-funded groups are involved, including Dr. Tim McCarthy from the StratAG Strategic Research Cluster, and Dr. Ronan Farrell from the Callan Institute for Applied Information and Communications Technologies. The SFI-funded DERI Centre has also contributed to the initiative.
Dublinked is an effort to publish publicly available data in a coherent and periodic fashion, and ultimately, to encourage new businesses to grow and develop new services or apps based on this data. This follows initiatives in other major cities, such as the London Data Store.
So far, Dublinked has published about 200 data sets available. Most of these are available for free, but some require registration, and may ultimately require payment for the most valuable or sensitive data. Much of the data is in the form of the location of stuff (e.g. libraries and weather stations, to give a couple of examples), but also includes more dynamic data such as traffic data and school enrollments.
The sponsors of Dublinked are quick to point out that this is a first step, and that the data is ‘ugly’, but they have (rightly, in my opinion) decided to follow a publish-quick-and-dirty approach, and iteratively improve the quantity and quality of the data that is made available.
Two of the most obvious improvements that we might look forward to are (i) that some of the data could or should be provided in real-time (at the moment, all data is in the form of static files that are uploaded periodically) and (ii) that the data be provided in open linked data formats. Currently, the data is typically provided in formats such as text, CSV, Excel, KML or PDF. By Tim Berners-Lee’s 5 star rating, most of the data could be categorized as either a 3 or 4 star, which is not bad at all, for a first effort.
In due course, I’m sure that these two developments (real-time and linked data) will take place. Of course, the beauty of providing data in open formats, like text and CSV, even if they are unstructured, means that another service provider can come along an represent the data in their preferred open linked data ontology.
I’m delighted to say that the Dublinked was well attended, with, by my estimate, about 200 people there. There seemed to be a good mix of people from Government agencies who are looking to publish their data, and private companies who want access to the data to help build new services.
I believe that Dublinked is definitely one to watch.
The 2010 SFI annual report was published yesterday. This gets some coverage in today’s Irish Times:
Ireland ranked 20th in the world for research in 2010, the report says. Irish research now ranks above the EU-27 countries and also the OECD average.
The foundation released payments of €150 million during the year and researchers receiving its support published just under 5,000 peer-reviewed papers during the year, an increase of 22 per cent on 2009.
The story is also picked up by the RTE news site:
There was also an increase of 44% in collaborations between scientific researchers and Irish industry. The foundation says this highlights a determination by the enterprise sector to innovate and increase its competitiveness.
"The day-to-day work of SFI-funded researchers is intrinsically linked to strategic sectors of our economy, from agri-food and energy to medical technologies and telecommunications," commented the Chairperson of SFI, Professor Pat Fottrell.
While we all realise that the world rankings for Universities (and probably most other things) is flawed, people still pay a huge amount of attention to them, and being higher is certainly better than being lower.
From today’s Irish Times:
TCD AND UCD have continued to slide down the world university rankings in a trend which will concern Government, business and heads of colleges.
The latest QS rankings – published this morning – show a substantial drop in ranking for most Irish universities.
TCD drops down 13 places to 65; UCD is down 20 places from 114 to 134. NUI Galway suffers the most dramatic fall, down 66 places to 298. UCC bucked the trend, up marginally from 184 to 181.
Not good.
This month’s Euroscientist website has a nice piece on the Dublin Science Gallery, located on the grounds of Trinity College Dublin. If you haven’t been there, it’s definitely worth a visit. The cafe there is pretty decent too, so it’s worthwhile dropping in for lunch or a coffee.
Here is a collection of images I made around Sir John Rogerson’s Quay on Dublin’s southside a couple of weeks ago. They are mostly centred around the Samuel Beckett bridge and the National Convention Centre.
Perhaps anybody who wants one already has an account on Google+, but on the off chance that you’re looking for one, and don’t have one yet, here’s my invite code:
https://plus.google.com/i/PteJKIRsu4Y:VH5Q5d1PMLA
Just click on the link and grab yourself an account. Don’t forget to add me to one of your circles!