scifoo: images

This blog doesn’t have many pictures but these remind me of three sessions at scifoo with a chance to say a little more after the event. I shan’t (== can’t) identify everyone so feel free to annotate…
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Andrew Walkingshaw presenting his Golem system. Tim O’Reilly (under the rocket) listened attentively. Golem addresses the important question of how doe we find out what is in data files when we know the vocabulary used, but not the structure of the document. Data was a key issue in the meeting.
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The blogosphere (part). Deepak Singh (closest) and Jean-Claude Bradley. There were more people than this photo suggests. As we skipped from blogger to blogger, Bora Zivkovic brought up their blog on the screen and scrolled through it.
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Andrew Walkingshaw (left) and Alex Palazzo. (right) in animated conversation with Philip Campbell (centre, Nature) after the session A+A ran on young scientists and the culture of fear. This was probably the highlight of the meeting for me – where else could you get an idea which surfaced at 0930 on one day and 26 hours later there was a deep debate among equals?

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One Response to scifoo: images

  1. Alberto says:

    First picture, blue shirt: Alberto Conti. I asked Andrew quite a few questions since the data mining aspect of his talk was common to astronomical dataset discovery 5-8 years ago. I found Andrew’s talk stimulating in that it got a log of people interested in one of the most pressing problems (at least in Astronomy): what is the role of metadata? Or to put it like Tim O’Reilly “how do we generated metadata for information without forcing users to tag everything? The role of the user should only be that of “promoting” those metadata associations that are indeed relevant for that particular research field: a sort of page ranking, even if manually done. This is to date the approach Google has on his directory. Some in the astronomical community are trying to use full-text indexing codes such as Lucene (Apache Foundation)

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