The first year of NWR is coming to a close and we definitely had a good year. We started off a bit bumpy due to some administrative delays, but we have caught up: our pipeline is up and running, we are analysing the results from the first batch of data processed, we wrote a bunch of well-received papers, gave lots of presentations, and received a grant for additional computing power and expertise. Our agendas for 2014 are already filling up…
On Friday December 13, the “Patterns in Narrative Texts” symposium took place at Meertens Institute in Amsterdam. This symposium was part of the series of meetings organised by different projects within the Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage framework funded by NWO. Narratives play a crucial role in the NewsReader project as they provide the framework for connecting the events, news stories and entities in our domain. We were thus very interested in seeing what our colleagues are working on. The…
De fascinatie van onderzoeker Piek Vossen voor de complexiteit van taal Prof. Dr. Piek Vossen van de Vrije Universiteit is een van de winnaars van de big data-wedstrijd Enlighten Your Research. De taalkundige onderzoekt hoe computers mensentaal kunnen leren en leren begrijpen. “De huidige programma’s zitten in 40% van de gevallen fout. Zo moeilijk is het dus.” Vossen komt aan het woord in de eerste aflevering van de interviewserie De Voorste Linie, een interviewreeks in opdracht van SURFnet en Fast Moving Targets waarin…
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…
NWO Spinoza laureate 2013 – Piek Vossen – announced his plans for the 2.5 million euros NWO Spinoza Prize he has received. “Understanding of Language by Machines – an escape from the world of language” – Spinoza prize project Vossen: SPI 30-673 (2014–2019) The goal of the Spinoza project “Understanding of language by machines” (ULM) is to develop computer models that can assign deeper meaning to language that approximates human understanding and to use these models to automatically read and understand text.…
Next week NWR will be represented at ISWC 2013 by Luciano Serafini, Willem Robert van Hage, Thomas Ploeger and Marieke van Erp. Your greatest chances of running into these NWR team members will be at the following sessions: On Monday: Marieke is co-organising the Linked Science workshop, which this year has a special focus on reproducibility, scientific investigations and experiments. Don’t miss out on Carole Goble‘s keynote there! On Monday afternoon Marieke and Willem are co-organising the DeRiVE 2013 workshop,…
Vossen invited guest on Spinoza Price and NewsReader @ “OBA Live”, a radio-talkshow with Theodor Holman, 4th floor Openbare Bibliotheek (OBA), Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October 11, 2013 (19.00-20.00 p.m.): CLICK HERE TO LISTEN (in Dutch).
Last week the NewsReader team got together in Trento for a face-to-face meeting. During this meeting, we discussed the current state of the project and made detailed plans for the coming months. While a lot of things can be done through discussions via email and Skype, getting together every now and then and being able to look at each other’s screens and drawing things on the flip-over is super helpful to get through some more complex issues and brainstorm about…
NewsReader is about helping information professionals make sense of the huge amounts of daily news streams. To find out how to help professionals the most, it is important to know what types of information they need, how they search for it and what the bottlenecks in current technology are. Before the summer, the NewsReader team got in touch with the Department of Information services at the Dutch House of Representatives to see whether NewsReader could be useful to them. Last week, we…
