Archive by category | Meetings

SciFoo: The Podcast

Just in case you haven’t already ODed on SciFoo blog coverage — or perhaps you have but a touch of audio will come as welcome relief — the 16 August episode of the Nature Podcast has a great segment on the event narrated by my colleague, Adam Rutherford. Listen here. (If you’re impatient then fast-forward to 21 minutes in, but don’t miss the celebrity endorsement at 1:29.)  … Read more

ETech Call For Participation

My favourite conference of the year, ETech (OK, perhaps I’m excluding certain invitation-only ‘unconferences’) has opened its CFP. Wey hey! And there’s more: Due to what I can only assume was a rare administrative mix-up at O’Reilly, I’ve also found myself on this year’s program committee. w00t!  Read more

Science Foo Camp 2007

Science Foo Camp 2007

Everyone else is writing about it, so it’s probably about time that I did too. SciFoo ‘07 was wonderfully intense, mind-expanding and surreal. Organisationally, it was a bit less stressful than last year’s inaugural event (at least for me), mainly because we knew it was going to work to some degree. Indeed, the success of SciFoo ‘06 lead to a fair amount of anticipation this year, best described in words by Jonathan Eisen and in pictures by Pierre Lindenbaum. (See also Pierre’s cartoons from the event itself.) Such is the variety and (relative) anarchy of the event that there’s no  … Read more

OTMI at BioNLP 2007

OTMI at BioNLP 2007

I presented a talk and a poster on OTMI at BioNLP 2007 the week before last (Friday, June 29). This was a one-day workshop attached to ACL 2007 (45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics) conference held in quiet outskirts of Prague. There were around 80 present including speakers and delegates. The talk was well received and there were many questions (see below) which provide some food for thought. Many thanks to Kevin Cohen and Lynette Hirschman for inviting me. I was fortunate enough to talk early in the morning while people were still lively (talk is here)  … Read more

Agile Descriptions

Agile Descriptions

Last Thursday week, March 8, Library of Congress held a public meeting of the Future of Bibliographic Control Working Group hosted by Google at their Mountain View home. The theme of the meeting was ‘Users and Uses of Bibliographic Data’. This was the first in a series of three meetings which is part of a one-year review (Nov. ’06 through No.v ’07) where LC (and by extension other libraries) may want to invest their future budgetary allocations on providing descriptors of curated works of intellectual property both for collection maintenance and resource discovery. This quote from Karen Coyle’s meeting summary  … Read more

SciFoo review

It’s three weeks since Science Foo Camp, which now seems both a lifetime ago and only yesterday. In that time we’ve received tons of feedback from the people who came, and I’ve attended O’Reilly’s technogeek Foo Camp (the original inspiration for SciFoo). So perhaps this is a good time to review what we did, consider how it went, and start outlining plans for the future.  Read more