The Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is a one day, free event bringing together faculty, researchers and students from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area working in Speech/Language/ML. The colloquium is an opportunity for students to present preliminary or completed work and to network with other students, faculty and researchers working in related fields. The event will be held in Baltimore MD at the Johns Hopkins University on Friday 23 September 2011.

Students are encouraged to submit one-page abstracts by Monday, August 15 describing ongoing, planned, or completed research projects, including previously published results and negative results. Student research in any field applying computational methods to any aspect of human language, including speech and learning, from all areas of computer science, linguistics, engineering, neuroscience, information science, and related fields, is welcome. Submissions and presentations must be made by students or postdocs. See the call for papers for more information.

Accepted submissions will be presented as posters and each will also be given a one-minute presentation during a poster spotlight session. A small number of submissions will be selected to be presented as talks, on the basis of diversity and general interest.

Student-led breakout sessions of one hour will also be held to discuss papers on topics of interest and stimulate interaction and discussion. Topics and suggested papers for breakout sessions should be submitted by students alongside abstracts.

The event is sponsored by the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence and the Center for Language and Speech Processing at the Johns Hopkins University.

Back in May, it was reported that a robot explorer sent through the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered mysterious hieroglyphs in the 4,500-year-old mausoleum behind one of its mysterious doors. The images transmitted by the robot showed hieroglyphs written in red paint that had not been seen by human eyes since the construction of the pyramid.

This week, the reports are that the three red ochre figures painted on the floor of a hidden chamber at the end of a tunnel deep inside the pyramid are just numbers. The builders of the pyramid simply recorded the total length of the southern shaft from the Queen’s Chamber: 121 cubits.

While not exactly graffiti, it reminds me that when I’ve worked on an older house, I’ve often found notes left by the original workers who built it, like sketches with dimensions on the plaster covered up by wallpaper.

The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited. Submissions are due by June 3, notifications will be sent by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9 for the November 4-6 workshop.

Relevant topics include the automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources, ontologies for government data, entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources, adding temporal qualifications to government data, creating mash-ups with open government data, linked open government data analysis, metadata for provenance, certainty and trust, policies for information sharing, privacy and use, social networks and government data, machine learning applied to government data, data visualization techniques, and applications. The symposium organizers are Li Ding (RPI), Tim Finin (UMBC), Lalana Kagal (MIT) and Deborah McGuinness (RPI). Program committee members and additional information are listed on the OGK2011 symposium site.

A story in yesterday’s NYT, Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars, reports that Google has hired a Nevada lobbyist to promote two bills related to autonomous vehicles that are expected to be voted on this summer.

“Google hired David Goldwater, a lobbyist based in Las Vegas, to promote the two measures, which are expected to come to a vote before the Legislature’s session ends in June. One is an amendment to an electric-vehicle bill providing for the licensing and testing of autonomous vehicles, and the other is the exemption that would permit texting.”

Arguments the lobbyist offered included that “the autonomous technology would be safer than human drivers, offer more fuel-efficient cars and promote economic development.”

I’d add that the Google Bot has a clean driving record, exhibits an excellent sense of direction, will obey any laws inserted into a state’s robots.txt, and does not drink. However, the Google Bot’s current cars are all Toyotas and an Audis. Maybe the Nevada legislator should find a way to encourage it to support the US auto industry and buy some American cars.

I liked project leader Sebastian Thrun’s example of a potential benefit of autonomous vehicles.

“In frequent public statements, he has said robotic vehicles would increase energy efficiency while reducing road injuries and deaths. And he has called for sophisticated systems for car sharing that, he says, could cut the number of cars in the United States in half. “What if I could take out my phone and say, ‘Zipcar, come here,’ ” he asked an industry conference last year, “and a moment later the Zipcar came around the corner?””

The new Journal of Web Semantics preprint server is now online. Final drafts of accepted papers will be added to the preprint server as papers are accepted for publication, making a preprint available as soon as possible.

We are loading papers from back issues into the preprint server as time permits. The preprint server is based on the Open Journal Systems software and hosted by Gesis, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

After drafts are on the preprint server, they enter Elsevier’s production pipeline in which they are professionally copy edited, formatted for the journal, and proofed by the authors. The result is assigned a DOI and put online as a JWS article in press available to to individual and institutional subscribers. When the article is assigned to an issue and printed, the final copy will be available online to subscribers in Elsevier’s Science Direct system.

We would like to thank the people who helped stand up the new preprint server, including Ute Koch of Gesis, Kaixuan Wang of the University of Manchester, and Silke Werger of the University of Koblenz and Landau.

Publishing trends has a good post describing a new variation on spam: creating low-quality ebooks from plagiarized or public-domain content and selling them in ebook markets like Amazon’s Kindle store. If you want to MAKE.MONEY.FAST there are people willing to help:

Automatically detecting these spam ebooks might be a good machine learning project. One problem is that to use features of the ebook itself (e.g., poor formatting) might require purchasing it. But there are sure to be many useful features that the ebook store provides that might support an effective classifier.

(h/t Bruce Schneier)

DARPA is developing a new component to track “quiet submarines” to be part of the Navy’s Anti Submarine Warfare toolkit and is using a software game to collect effective strategies for its use.

“Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous Waters™ game. DARPA is offering this new ACTUV Tactics Simulator for free public download.

This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully. Your tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so you’ll need to safely navigate among commercial shipping traffic as you attempt to track the submarine, whose driver has some tricks up his sleeve. You will earn points as you complete mission objectives, and will have the opportunity to see how you rank against the competition on DARPA’s leaderboard page. You can also share your experiences and insights from playing the simulator with others.”

This is a kind of crowdsourcing — leveraging the experiences of a large number of people playing a game. Applying various kinds of machine learning algorithms to the simulator data could be an effective way to train an autonomous tool for this task.

The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited. Submissions are due by June 3, notifications will be sent by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9.

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public participation by publishing public government data online. Although this data has been used for some intriguing applications, it is difficult for citizens to understand and use. This symposium will explore how AI technologies such as the Semantic Web, information extraction, statistical analysis and machine learning can be used to make the knowledge embedded in the data more explicit, accessible and reusable. The symposium’s location of Washington, DC will facilitate the participation of U.S. federal government agency members and enable interchange between researchers and practitioners. We also expect attendance of international open government data players from e.g. UK and Australia.

Relevant topics include the automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources, ontologies for government data, entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources, adding temporal qualifications to government data, creating mash-ups with open government data, linked open government data analysis, metadata for provenance, certainty and trust, policies for information sharing, privacy and use, social networks and government data, machine learning applied to government data, data visualization techniques, and applications.

This symposium will include a mix of invited talks, paper presentations, panels, system demonstrations, a poster session, and discussions. We plan to have several invited speakers drawn from government, academia and industry. We will run panels on the emerging challenges and best practices, including (i) how to enhance transparency and interoperability within an agency and across different agencies/countries, and (ii) how to promote nationwide health information network that effectively integrates government-curated public records and citizens’ personal health data.

The symposium organizers are Li Ding (RPI), Tim Finin (UMBC), Lalana Kagal (MIT) and Deborah McGuinness (RPI). Program committee members and additional information are listed on the OGK2011 symposium site. For more information about the the symposium, send email inquiries to ogk11-info@googlegroups.com.

Important Dates

• Workshop: 4-6 November 2011 in Arlington, Virginia USA
• Submissions due: 3 June 2011
• Decisions by: 15 July 15 2011
• Camera ready by: 9 September 2011

Microsoft Research and Bing are jointly hosting the Speller Challenge. The goal is to build the best service that could propose alternative spellings for search queries submitted to Bing. Entries must be submitted for the challenge in the form of a REST-based web service, and they will be judged based on their expected F1 score against a test set sampled from real Bing queries.

For development purposes, they are making available a TREC evaluation dataset through their Web-NGram service.  Refer to this page for detailed evaluation measures and REST service specs.

Time to start implementing!

Pervasive, context-aware computing technologies can significantly enhance and improve the coming generation of devices and applications for consumer electronics as well as devices for work places, schools and hospitals. Context-aware cognitive support requires activity and context information to be captured, reasoned with and shared across devices — efficiently, securely, adhering to privacy policies, and with multidevice interoperability.

The AAAI-11 conference will host a two-day workshop on Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages focused on techniques and systems to allow mobile devices model and recognize the activities and context of people and groups and then exploit those models to provide better services. The workshop will be held on August 7th and 8th in San Francisco as part of AAAI-11, the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Submission of research papers and position statements are due by 22 April 2011.

The workshop intends to lay the groundwork for techniques to represent context within activity models using a synthesis of HCI/CSCW and AI approaches to reduce demands on people, such as the cognitive load inherent in activity/context switching, and enhancing human and device performance. It will explore activity and context modeling issues of capture, representation, standardization and interoperability for creating context-aware and activity-based assistive cognition tools with topics including, but not limited to the following:

• Activity modeling, representation, detection
• Context representation within activities
• Semantic activity reasoning, search
• Security and privacy
• Information integration from multiple sources, ontologies
• Context capture

There are three intended end results of the workshop: (1) Develop two-three key themes for research with specific opportunities for collaborative work. (2) Create a core research group forming an international academic and industrial consortium to significantly augment existing standards/drafts/proposals and create fresh initiatives to enable capture, transfer, and recall of activity context across multiple devices and platforms used by people individually and collectively. (3) Review and revise an initial draft of structure of an activity context exchange language (ACEL) including identification of use cases, domain-specific instantiations needed, and drafts of initial reasoning schemes and algorithms.

For more information, see the workshop call for papers.

Congratulations to Tom Heath and Christian Bizer on the publication of their new book, Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. It’s published by Morgan & Claypool in the series Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology edited by Jim Hendler and Frank van Harmelen.

“This book provides a conceptual and technical introduction to the field of Linked Data. It is intended for anyone who cares about data – using it, managing it, sharing it, interacting with it – and is passionate about the Web. We think this will include data geeks, managers and owners of data sets, system implementors and Web developers. We hope that students and teachers of information management and computer science will find the book a suitable reference point for courses that explore topics in Web development and data management. Established practitioners of Linked Data will find in this book a distillation of much of their knowledge and experience, and a reference work that can bring this to all those who follow in their footsteps.”

More importantly, we should all thank them and Morgan & Claypool for making a free HTML version available on the Web.

Many people now use the Web to find recipes rather than their own collection of cookbooks and it is estimated that about one percent of all Google searches are for recipes. This past Thursday, Google released Recipe View in the US, letting you limit results to pages that are recipes and further narrow your search by ingredients, cooking time and calories. This feature is powered by semantic metadata encoded in RDFa and other formats

Google describes the new recipe search in a post on the Official Google Blog:

“Recipe View lets you narrow your search results to show only recipes, and helps you choose the right recipe amongst the search results by showing clearly marked ratings, ingredients and pictures. To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link in the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. You can search for specific recipes like [chocolate chip cookies], or more open-ended topics—like [strawberry] to find recipes that feature strawberries, or even a holiday or event, like [cinco de mayo]. In fact, you can try searching for all kinds of things and still find interesting results: a favorite chef like [ina garten], something very specific like [spicy vegetarian curry with coconut and tofu] or even something obscure like [strange salad].”

Recipe View extracts data embedded in Web pages that is encoded in Google’s rich snippets format. This includes both the W3C Semantic Web standard RDFa as well as microformats. Google recognizes a simple recipe vocabulary with fourteen properties.

This is a great example of the potential of semantic web technology that can be understood and appreciated by anyone with an interest in cooking. Or eating.