I’ve extremely busy so this is just to let anyone know I am still working on a number of threads.
- Chem4Word. We had a really valuable discussion yesterday (sic) in Microsoft Research Cambridge with Alex Wade, Joe Townsend, Clyde Davies and me. We went over the code for Clyde’s benefit as he is writing it up (a) for further C4W work and (b) for #semphyssci publication. Even though I was PI of the project and heavily involved there are swathes of code I didn’t even know existed. It’s a VERY impressive piece of work and Joe Townsend and several others can take great pride. A major part of the next phase is with Nico Adams whom I shall be visiting soon.
- Panton Fellowships. We are delighted in the very high quality response to the PFs and Laura Newman (OKF) has been doing a great job servicing the applications for us to make decisions on who to interview (skype).
- Hargreaves. Jenny Molloy, Diane Cabell and I are putting together a response to IPO/Hargreaves. (I’ve got responses from 6 publishers I wrote to – thanks! – and will summarise and postb them to this blog, probably in a day or two.
- Semantic Physical Science. I am really excited. We have now developed a completely declarative approach to forcefields such that it should be possible to define the complete problem on the fly using MathML and CML (MathCML). Given that a forcefield (misnamed) evaluates the energy as a function of molecular geometry, atom types and a parameterised forcefield it will be possible to code this in a page or two of declarative code supported by standard libraries. The forcefield can be manipulated (e.g. to calculate derivatives) so it should be possible to both optimise geometry and elaborate trajectories in a declarative manner. With Mark Williamson, Andrew Walker, Martin Dove and Jens Thomas.
And so a semantic amusement.
A cup contains 200 ml of water and an apple (4 cm radius) is placed on top.
From reading this description what can be deduced by:
- A 10 year-old Anglophone child
- A first year undergraduate scientist
- A logician
- “Shallow thought” – the accumulation of current “AI” – e.g. Wolfram Alpha, True Knowledge, Cyc, Google, Wikipedia and any other engines you think would be relevant (the problem is given to them cold – they are not trained in this domain).
(I’m interested because I want to develop “Shallow thought” for chemistry – more on that later).