Semantics for the Rest of Us: Variants of Semantic Web Languages in the Real World is a workshop that will be held at the on 26 October 2009 in Washington, DC.

We seek two kinds of submissions: full papers up to ten pages long and position papers up to five pages long. Format papers according the ISWC 2009 instructions. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and be part of the workshop proceedings.

Organizers:

• Lalana Kagal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Ora Lassila, Nokia
• Tim Finin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Yesterday the MIT faculty approved a university-wide open access policy. The full txt of the resolution, which passed unanimously, i available on Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog. Here’s an excerpt.

“Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. … The Provost’s Office will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open- access repository. The Office of the Provost, in consultation with the Faculty Committee on the Library System will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty.

I have to say I am conflicted about this and wish I was more informed. As a researcher, I am 100% for the right to make papers describing our results freely available. But I also recognize that publishers and professional societies are an essential part of our research infrastructure and their business models are partially built on copyright and controlling access to content.

Just as we are seeing the big changes in main stream media, we will probably see related changes in publishers, including professional societies. We’ll have to wait and see if they represent a phase shift to a new and better model or simply the collapse of the old one.

The analogy between the two is far from perfect. Traditional MSM publishers pay a professional staff to research, write and edit stories. Journal publishers and professional societies don’t typically pay their authors who increasingly deliver camera ready copy or near camera-ready electronic copy.

Stimulus funding for research and science has done well in the version of the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act coming out of conference. The conference report overview identifies a category that will:

“Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: To secure America’s role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America’s investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the marketplace. This will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.”

The CRA policy blog has the details in House Numbers for Science Prevail in Stimulus Conference. Highlights of the $15B+ to be invested in scientific research include:

• Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering – which spurs discovery and innovation.
• Provides $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds research in such areas as climate science, biofuels, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences – areas crucial to our energy future.
• Provides $400 million for the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency in collaboration with industry.
• Provides $580 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including the Technology Innovation Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
• Provides $8.5 billion for NIH, including expanding good jobs in biomedical research to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease.
• Provides $1 billion for NASA, including $400 million to put more scientists to work doing climate change research.
• Provides $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants.

The CRA reports that the US science and technology research community may get it’s own little bailout. The House Appropriations Committee released details of their American Recovery and Reinvestment economic stimulus package that includes funds for scientific research.

NSF is slated to get $3B in new money:

“including $2 billion for expanding employment opportunities in fundamental science and engineering to meet environmental challenges and to improve global economic competitiveness, $400 million to build major research facilities that perform cutting edge science, $300 million for major research equipment shared by institutions of higher education and other scientists, $200 million to repair and modernize science and engineering research facilities at the nation’s institutions of higher education and other science labs, and $100 million is also included to improve instruction in science, math and engineering”

The plan also calls for new research money for NIH, DOE, NASA, NIST and other government organizations as well as $6B for broadband deployment.

While this is not large as bailouts go, we must keep in mind it was done without a crisis brought about by the rampant use of research breakthrough default swap instruments or scholarly paper citation pyramid schemes. Maybe we should have gotten MBAs.

Update 1/16: The CRA policy blog has some more details on how the funds will be allocated within some of the agencies.

eigenfactor.org is a fascinating site that is exploring new ways to measure and visualize the importance or journals to scientific communities. The site is a result of work by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. The project defines two metrics for scientific journals based on a page-rank like algorithm applied to citation graphs.

“A journal’s Eigenfactor score is our measure of the journal’s total importance to the scientific community. With all else equal, a journal’s Eigenfactor score doubles when it doubles in size. Thus a very large journal such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry which publishes more than 6,000 articles annually, will have extremely high Eigenfactor scores simply based upon its size. Eigenfactor scores are scaled so that the sum of the Eigenfactor scores of all journals listed in Thomson’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is 100.
…
A journal’s Article Influence score is a measure of the average influence of each of its articles over the first five years after publication. Article Influence measures the average influence, per article, of the papers in a journal. As such, it is comparable to Thomson Scientific’s widely-used Impact Factor. Article Influence scores are normalized so that the mean article in the entire Thomson Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database has an article influence of 1.00.”

For example, here are the ISI-indexed journals in the AI subject category ranked by the Article Influence score for 2006.

The site makes good use of GoogleDoc’s motion charts to visualize the changes of metrics for top journals in a subject area. You can also interactively explore maps that show the influence of different subject categories on one another as estimated from journal citations.

The details of the approach and algorithms are available in various papers by Bergstrom and his colleagues, such as

M. Rosvall and C. T. Bergstrom, Maps of random walks on complex networks reveal community structure, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 105:1118-1123. Also arXiv physics.soc-ph/0707.0609v3 [PDF]

(spotted on Steve Hsu’s blog)

Databases are a fundamental technology for most information systems and especially those based on the web. A group of senior database researchers met recently to assess the state of database research, as documented in site. So, where did the Semantic Web fit into their vision?

“In late May, 2008, a group of database researchers, architects, users and pundits met at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley, California to discuss the state of the research field and its impacts on practice. This was the seventh meeting of this sort in twenty years, and was distinguished by a broad consensus that we are at a turning point in the history of the field, due both to an explosion of data and usage scenarios, and to major shifts in computing hardware and platforms. Given these forces, we are at a time of opportunity for research impact, with an unusually large potential for influential results across computing, the sciences and society. This report details that discussion, and highlights the group’s consensus view of new focus areas, including new database engine architectures, declarative programming languages, the interplay of structured and unstructured data, cloud data services, and mobile and virtual worlds.”

On the site you can read the post-meeting report, view the participants presentations on DB research directions and talks and discuss the report on a Google group.

It’s a good report with lots of interesting things in it and definitely worth reading, but I was disappointed to find that it makes no mention of the Semantic Web, RDF, OWL, ontologies, AI, knowledge bases, or reasoning. Here’s a word cloud (generated with wordle) generated from the report, which provides a 10,000 foot view of it’s content.

The reports says that it was “surprisingly easy for the group to reach consensus on a set of research topics to highlight for investigation in coming years”. Those topics are:

• Revisiting Database Engines
• Declarative Programming for Emerging Platforms
• The Interplay of Structured and Unstructured Data
• Cloud Data Services
• Mobile Applications and Virtual Worlds

There is clearly overlap between the database and semantic web communities in the first three topics.

Wired reports more cuts to DARPA’s budget in Pentagon Slices and Dices DARPA Budget.

“The Pentagon’s storied research and development arm turned 50 years old this year, and its birthday present appears to be another $100 million in budget cuts, according to a Defense Department document provided to DANGER ROOM. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is having a tumultuous financial year: in June, DARPA faced a $32 million cut because it was “underexecuting”, leading the agency’s director, Tony Tether, to strike back by saying the Pentagon’s “comptroller apparently does not believe in accountability.”
   Whether those comments sparked an all-out comptroller-DARPA war is open for speculation, but the latest “reprogramming,” signed on July 11, may speak for itself. The document includes a number of Pentagon-wide cash transfers, but it hits DARPA particularly hard. Cognitive computing systems, which has previously been hit by congressional cuts, will lose another $13 million, while Network Centric Technology is sliced by $19 million. Another $18 million is being diced from biological warfare defense, and a big cut is taken out of DARPA’s Electronics Technology program, which loses $26 million. The cuts also indicate that DARPA’s high power fiber laser program has apparently been canceled.”

To put a $100M cut in context, the yearly DARPA budgets have been over $3B recently. Still, many of these cuts will be painful within specific R&D communities.

Businessweek Magazine has a special set of articles on innovation in business in its April 28 issue. As in the past, they identified and tanked the 50 most innovative companies worldwide. The list of companies ranked in order are as follows

It’s gratifying to see how many of these are companies based on computing and/or communications or have a business that is largely based on exploiting the latest computing and communications technologies. I think that it is appropriate to look at IT and communications as a group, even though they are traditionally viewed as different business sectors, because the innovations in each tends to be in areas where they overlap.

The distribution of the country in which these 50 companies are based is interesting. Of course, many of these are truly multi-national corporations .

A Wired article, DARPA Nabs Big Bucks for Mach 6 Planes, Giant Robotic Blimps, Next-Gen Networks, summarizes the news in the proposed 2009 DARPA budget.

“DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad science division, got a $324 million boost in the Defense Department’s new budget — a ten percent increase. Which means lots more cash for giant blimps, next-gen wireless networks, Mach 6 planes, shape-shifting drones, and improvised bomb-beaters. … But not everything in the DARPA budget got bumped up. The agency’s much-ballyhooed efforts at “Cognitive Computing” took at $30 million cut, to $145 million. Which could mean that even the Pentagon’s most wide-eyed visionaries see thinking machines are still far, far off in the distance.” (link)

DARPA has traditionally been an important funding source for basic computer science research. While the ORCA program got a healthy increase of $53M, this is the only CS-related program mentioned.

The ACM named Edmund Clarke, E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis winners of the prestigious 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their research on Model Checking.

From the ACM announcement:

“Their innovations transformed this approach from a theoretical technique to a highly effective verification technology that enables computer hardware and software engineers to find errors efficiently in complex system designs. This transformation has resulted in increased assurance that the systems perform as intended by the designers. … Clarke of Carnegie Mellon University, and Emerson of the University of Texas at Austin, working together, and Sifakis, working independently for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Grenoble in France, developed this fully automated approach that is now the most widely used verification method in the hardware and software industries.” (link)

I confess to being thoroughly confused. The revealed wisdom in US higher ed has been that we are simply not producing enough grads in the STEM area, and we need to do more to attract folks to sciences/engineering/IT etc. The National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this as well. We certainly keep hearing that here in our department, with exhortations to increase enrollment.

However, the Urban institute folks (Lowell and Salzman) claim that not only is the US not lagging behind other nations in the quality of STEM education at the school level, it in fact overproduced STEM grads (three times as many as the net growth in jobs) in the period from 1985 to 2000. So not enough or too many STEM grads — which is it ?

This of course further muddies the immigration/ H1B debates. The IT industry claims that there is a shortage of IT grads, and so they need to be able to hire more from overseas. The “Immigration Restrictionists” of various flavors, and the Programmers Guild like organizations, argue that this is just a part of plan by corporations to keep the wages in the IT sector depressed. Many of them have blogged about this new Urban Institute study, offering it as proof that the H1B type programs can be scrapped.

However, if the primary push behind lobbying for increased skilled immigration/H1 workers was depressing (or at least not increasing) the wages, then a factor of three overproduction within the US should take care of this, right ? In other words, all the folks in STEM fields who weren’t getting jobs in their area would sign up for short MSCE/CCNA type courses (or AAs in IT) and then get hired. I presume Bill Gates or others don’t particularly like foreigners enough to go through and pay for the H1B/Green card process when they would achieve the same wage depressing affects by hiring US citizens retrained in IT areas from the oversupply in the overall STEM areas?  On the other hand, there is  a recent statement by Fed chief Bernanke doing rounds of the blogosphere that a non increase in STEM wages would indicate that there wasn’t a shortage in the area. 

Net result, I am not sure what to believe anymore.  In admissions events, I dutifully present data from CRA (which in turn got it from BLS)  that seems to indicate that within the wider STEM areas, IT (strictly, Mathematical and Computer Sciences) would be the subfield where the total production of degrees would fall short of the projected job openings, even factoring in all the outsourcing.

Videolectures.net was recording talks at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) held in Busan, South Korea this week. They already have up two of the three keynote talks and one tutorial.

This is a great service run by the Jozef Stefan Institute. The videos of computer science talks, lectures and tutorials are professionally recorded and edited and provide a wonderful resource to the international computer science community.

The ISWC 2007 talks that have already been put online are:

• POWERSET – Natural Language and the Semantic Web, Keynote talk by Barney Pell, Powerset, Inc.
• How I was right even when I was wrong, Keynote talk by Chris Welty, IBM
• Automatic Techniques for Extracting Semantic Data (from text and media), Tutorial by Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield

See Videolecture’s ISWC 2007 page for the complete set of videos. I expect to see many more from ISWC 2007 in the coming weeks.