PMR events at Unilever Centre January 15/16 and 17

“Visions of a Semantic (Molecular) Future”

The weekend and Monday events in Cambridge are now shaping up well and there is already a very promising amount of interest and registration. The following is the material just sent out to participants

Overview The main event is a one-day symposium (January 17th) in the Unilever Centre/Department of Chemistry to which a number of distinguished scientists have agreed to contribute, both in real-life and remotely:

Robert Glen, Tom Blundell, Cameron Neylon, Henry Rzepa, Tony Hey, Alex Wade, John Wilbanks, Dan Zaharevitz, Douglas Kell, PMR

The theme is to look forward to how new technologies, motivations and ways of working might change our practices in scientific scholarship in this decade. The symposium is preceded by a separate weekend hackfest in the Centre to explore some of the technologies and practices with hands-on activities.

Delegates may register for either or both parts of the event.

Timetable

January 15^th

0900     Hackfest opens

1300     Lunch (by default in the now-famous Panton Arms)

1800    Blue Obelisk dinner in Panton (all welcome – reserved room)

January 16^th

1700 Hackfest finishes

January 17^th “Visions of a Semantic (Molecular) Future” Symposium

Symposium We invite the speakers to guess parts of the future and to indicate areas that scientists should be active in. We are planning to provide streaming video/audio so that people unable to be present can follow the symposium. We shall have a hashtag and coordinate the twittersphere, e.g. live twitterfall, which will include remote contributions. With their permission, speakers’ contributions will be openly available under CC-BY.

At lunch there will short 3-minute presentations (possibly Pecha-Kucha style) from those providing demos during the event and a 10-minute contribution from Anita de Waard from the BeyondThePdf event. During the breaks and reception there will be demos by approximately 6 groups.

Demos There will be about 6 demos from the PMR group and extended community showcasing the software and projects. The current list is: –

(a) Chemical Markup Language (CML and Chem4Word). CML is the growing de facto semantic approach to chemistry. (EPSRC, Microsoft Research)

(b) AMI. An intelligent fume cupboard conversing with an intelligent lab-coat. Pervasive computing in chemistry (sponsor JISC)

(c) Patenteye. Automatic interpretation of chemical reactions in patents using OSCAR4 and ChemicalTagger (EPSRC, JISC)

(d) Lensfield-Quixote. An Open community-based infrastructure for computational chemistry. (Community)

(e) Blue Obelisk. Open Data, Open Standards, Open Source in chemistry (community)

(f) Open Bibliography and Open Scholarship . Protocols and practices for Open Scholarship, driven by bibliography (JISC)

(g) Open Climate Code. Making climate research Open and Reproducible. (Climate Code)

Hackfest An unstructured (but responsibly run) gathering, where geeks meet to create something within a weekend. Resources will include:

• physical devices (Arduinos, Kinect, Wii, sensors, etc.)
• mashup targets (data.gov <http://data.gov>, Linked Open Data cloud, DBPedia, etc.) British National Bibliography, UKPubMedCentral, etc.
• Open software (Blue Obelisk for chemistry, OKF software, Climate Code)

The outcomes can be technical (a new sensor for AMI), societal (new ways of creating communities), mashups, entries in OKF’s CKAN etc. Experiments in new media. Open Wifi available. Bring laptops and ideas – anyone can start up an un-activity.

Publication Jan Kuras from the Journal of Cheminformatics (BioMed Central) has invited all authors and demonstrations to submit manuscripts for a special article in the journal.

Remote Participation. We are actively investigating streaming of video or audio and slide show. There will be a hashtag and a Twitterfall. More details later.

Connections PMR has been connected with the following communities and activities and anyone interested or involved in them should enjoy either/both events: Open Knowledge Foundation, Blue Obelisk, Climate Code, Quixote-chem, British Library, UKPubMedCentral, and JISC.

Links The primary reference page is
http://www-pmr.ch.cam.ac.uk/wiki/Main_Page, which gives links to otherpages (including registration for either/both event (free, but required). PMR will also blog developments (/pmr/ (old URL redirects).

Pleaes let us know via registration if you would like to come and also let others know of the existence of the events.

I shall be posting regularly about progress and the motivation of some of the components.