With our SemanticTED demo, we (Daan Odijk, Edgar Meij, Tom Kenter and me) won the Web of Linked Entities 2013 Workshop’s “Doing Good by Linking Entities” Developers Challenge (at WWW2013).

Read the paper of our submission here:

• D. Odijk, E. Meij, D. Graus, and T. Kenter, “Multilingual semantic linking for video streams: making “ideas worth sharing” more accessible,” in Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on web of linked entities (wole 2013), 2013

Now we get to share an iPad.

Hooray!

My first contribution to the (excellent) noun project.

Download it here.

What is an Amsterdammertje?

The goal of this post is to make the research I’m doing understandable to the general public. You know, to explain what I’m doing in a way not my peers, but my parents would understand. In part because the majority of the returning visitors of my blog are composed of my parents, in part because lots of people think it’s a good idea for scientists to blog about their work, and in part because I like blogging. And finally, I suppose, because this research is made possible by people who pay their taxes ;-).

In this post I’ll try to explain the paper ‘Context-Based Entity Linking – University Of Amsterdam at TAC 2012′ I wrote with Edgar Meij, Tom Kenter, Marc Bron and Maarten de Rijke. It will also hopefully provide some basic understanding of machine learning.
» Read this post

That’s a (35$ a.k.a. €45) tiny full-fledged computer, which is hooked up to my home internet connection 24/7, running a webserver (at http://pi.graus.nu – if it’s down, grausPi is off or my internet is down) headless.

It also runs a revived @sem_web (remember him? My linked-data Twitterbot — now called @grausPi), so my Raspberry Pi introduces random-linked-data-fact-noise into the tweetosphere on an hourly basis. So if you too want to stay up to date with mind-boggilingly interesting facts as at the bottom of this post, check out @grausPi.

In the meantime, my Pi waits for a €5 WiFi USB dongle I ordered from DealExtreme, so it can free itself from half of its wires currently attached. Then I’ll think about some more projects to run on this Pi. I still have some servo-motors, LEDs and LDRs (Light Dependent Resistors — simple light meters) left from Arduino days long gone, and apparantly I can control these GPIO pins through Python, as opposed to Arduino’s proprietary language, which is cool. Now for the take-home message:

Did you know the EntrezGene of Biomolecule Chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor is 7026?
— David’s Raspberry Pi (@grausPi) December 12, 2012

The Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam (ISLA) at the University of Amsterdam has been awarded the hosting of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in 2014. The ‘local’ organization concerning such tasks as arranging a venue, keeping an eye on finances, arranging a social event, arranging accommodation for conference attendants, etc. of this big conference will be largely in hands of me and my fellow PhD candidate-colleagues. In my opinion quite an awesome way of getting some experience in all the aspects involving the organization of such an event.

Within this ECIR2014 ‘local team’, I am trusted with PR/Communication tasks. The first task I’ve done is getting a website up. It lives here: ecir2014.org. The site is designed by Rutger de Vries/Perongeluk and subsequently ever so subtly destroyed into usability by me and colleagues. Another PR task is Twitter, as we have full confidence of Twitter remaining the number one micro-blogging platform in 2014 ;-). So, you know what’s left to do: follow @ECIR2014, like ECIR 2014 & visit ECIR2014.org. And put down in your agenda: April 13th to 17th, 2014. See you there!

The last couple of weeks I’ve been diving into the task of entity linking, in the context of a submission to the Text Analysis Conference Knowledge Base Population track (that’s quite a mouthful – TAC KBP from now on). A ‘contest’ in Knowledge Base Population with a standardized task, dataset and evaluation. Before I’m devoting my next post to our submission, let me first explain the task of entity linking in this post :-). » Read this post

As I’ve finished my MSc thesis and have started working at the Information and Language Processing Systems group (ILPS) at the Universiteit van Amsterdam as a PhD candidate in a project in Semantic Search for e-Discovery, I figured it’d be time to leave my thesis blog behind, and start a brand new research blog. » Read this post