Public demonstration of ContentMining (TDM) in Brussels April 14/15

I am excited and honoured to be invited to talk/present at http://www.openforum.be/ next week. I was going to talk about ContentMining anyway – the potential, the vision , the value to citizens, but the launch of Open Science Europe last week has made this even more relevant.
 
Simply:

• Mining for Science is valuable for everyone – citizens (doctors, policymakers, secondary schools, patients, conservationists, transport, finance … etc.)
• Mining can be done by anyone who is happy to install a program [1]. Takes 10 minutes.

I shall demo this in my talk but I am present for 2 days. On Friday I am happy to hack, be contacted – just drop in. We can demo in a 15 minute session and answer a subject YOU are interested in. (The emphasis is biomedical but other subjects – including social science and humanties – can be addressed ).
If you are in any way involved in the current European debate on Copyright or Open Science please come. This is aimed at citizens, not just “academics” or professionals. We would love to see Commission and Parliament people at all levels,but also any interested citizens and curious minds.
 
From the programme:
Open Data & Open Access : getting more from scientific papers with content mining, Thursday 14 April 2016, 18h30, University Foundation (on a map), Brussels
There several thousand scientific papers published each day, and nobody can keep up with them. If they are Open Access they can be aggregated in a single place such as the repositories CORE (UK), HAL (FR), and Europe PubMedCentral (for biomedical papers).
It’s then possible to use machines to help us filter them on scientific grounds and select exactly those sections of each paper that the reader wants to read. It’s also possible to extract chunks of scientific knowledge such as molecular structures or evolutionary trees and compute completely new knowledge.
I shall demo this system using at least two examples:

• The “Zika epidemic”. What do we actually know about Zika from the peer-reviewed literature? How does it link to other Open Scientific Knowledge?
• Clinical trials. Europe and other countries have collected 400,000 clinical trials. Can we search them? What procedures where used? How many patients? And, very importantly, has the trial been reported in the recent literature?

This presentation will be accessible to anyone: school students, scientists, policy makers, data journalists, etc.
All content and tools are free and open, and can by used by anyone.
 

Hackday on Friday 15 April 2016, 9h

The hackday will explore the automatic extraction of facts from documents, especially (not not exclusively) science and medicine . By default we can extract:

• species
• DNA
• places
• genes
• word frequencies
• drugs
• organizations

Participants can also create their own word lists and regular expressions.
By default we’ll use the Open Access scientific literature but we can also look at any easily retrieved public documents (e.g. government, NGO).
[1] If you are interested in installing and running, come to the Friday session. You need to be able to use a commandline, and know how to install a program. That’s all.