The winners of the 4th edition of the Enlighten Your Research (EYR4) competition were announced on the 7th of November 2013 at the Nationaal eScience Symposium 2013 in Amsterdam.
For this edition researchers from any discipline and with any level of technical expertise were invited to submit a proposal with challenging data questions. The research should revolve around data which is either too voluminous or too varied to deal with using existing solutions.
Prizes: Participants competed for a 2-years access to data storage, computing facilities, and visualisation infrastructure provided by SURFsara, for advanced network connections provided by SURFnet, and for support in the mapping of research solutions onto these e-infrastructure services by the Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC). The winners also received a cash prize of EUR 20,000.
Vossen and his team won with his proposal ‘Recording history in large news streams‘ and is going to use big data in analyzing large news streams.
Jury quote: ’This proposal pushes the boundaries of the available infrastructure using an innovative way of analysing big data streams. A new way of dealing with the news.’
“Every day thousands of news articles are published, presenting new events or providing updates to events reported earlier. With current technology it is impossible to keep track of the vast amount of information coming in daily. The purpose of this project is to develop the optimal architecture capable of processing as many daily news items as fast as possible, utilizing the most advanced semantic processing techniques available in Natural Language Processing (NLP) today. One of the main challenges in this project lies in scaling up existing linguistic processing to maximize the usage of available computational resources in order to manage the daily stream of incoming information. The resulting infrastructure will provide the basis to build a ‘history recorder’ that follows the news, stores it and can automatically relate new events to events that took place in the past. It will provide the complete story line to decision makers, pointing out forgotten details and possibly even finding new links between current situations and historic events”.
Read the blog post Vossen wrote about the project he proposed: “RECORDING HISTORY IN LARGE NEWS STREAMS” and the flyer of the Big Data Challenge with information on all three winners.
