Over here at SemanticWeb.com, we’re big fans of what co-founder Nick Holzherr and his team are doing at Whisk, a UK-based startup that allows users to create a complete online grocery shopping list built out of their chosen recipes. Nick gave his second keynote address in front of a SemTechBiz audience this morning–the first came at SemTechBiz UK in London last year. If you haven’t had a chance to read our past coverage of Whisk, here’s a quick overview of what the innovative startup offers today:

Whisk is using natural language processing (NLP) and other semantic solutions to bring together online recipe content with online grocery retailers. Currently only available in the United Kingdom, users can turn to Whisk’s phone app or browser widget to pull together recipes that they want to attempt that week. The Whisk platform then analyzes the recipes to create shopping lists of all the ingredients that the user will need in order to complete the recipes. The system has the sense to figure out appropriate quantities of each ingredient and eliminate staples like salt and sugar that the user probably already has at home. (Users can re-add these items to the list if they don’t, in fact, have these ingredients in their pantries.) The user then has the option to take that list to their local grocery store or, even better, purchase the groceries automatically from an online grocery retailer. Read more

Carmel Doyle of Silicon Republic reports, “Fujitsu Laboratories is set to engage in a series of collaborative Irish research projects over the next three years to test technologies in order to steer the ICT company’s future strategy. Fujitsu Ireland CEO Regina Moran said collaborative R&D has the scope to deliver a seven-fold return on an initial investment. Moran was speaking at an innovation conference organised by Fujitsu that kicked off in Croke Park in Dublin this morning. Industry strategists and academics are convening at the one-day event to thrash out ideas on ways of maximising R&D collaboration in order to translate research activity into commercial outputs.” Read more

Medical Xpress reports, “One of the major frontiers of modern science is a comprehensive understanding of the human brain and its functions to guide the development of new technologies in information and communication. In a major announcement for the globalization of science, two Japanese research organizations, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and RIKEN, will join forces with a large European consortium on the Human Brain Project (HBP) which the European Commission has officially announced as one of two Future and Emerging Technology (FET) Flagship projects. The new project will federate international efforts to understand and simulate the human brain for the creation of new technological advances for society.” Read more

The Financial reports, “Unlocking the future—that was the theme Rick Rashid, Microsoft chief research officer, used to close his opening remarks April 23 during the first day of the Microsoft Research Machine Learning Summit 2013… ‘This topic of machine learning has become incredibly exciting over the last 10 years,’ [Rashid] said. ‘The pace of change has been really dramatic, so it’s exciting to get so many people from so many different areas to be here today to talk about it.’ Rashid recalled a time in the not-so-recent past when machine learning was in its nascent stage, using rules and pattern recognition to produce results many found less than stellar. But today, he stated, a combination of data, devices, and services has led to newfound respect for the discipline, which is having an increasingly dramatic impact on business and society.” Read more

Barbara Starr of Search Engine Land reports, “In a June 2010 Semantic Web Meetup in San Diego, Peter Mika of Yahoo!’s research division gave a presentation entitled, ‘The future face of Search is Semantic for Facebook, Google and Yahoo!’ As the title suggests, the presentation focused on the ever-growing use of semantic markup as a means for helping computers parse and understand content. The talk focused on what was then the current state of the Semantic Web, as well as upcoming formats/technologies in development and the research being done in the field of semantic search.” Read more

Ellyssa Kroski of American Libraries Magazine recently shared a list of ten technology initiatives that can improve libraries. She writes, “Today’s hottest web and mobile technologies are offering libraries a new world of opportunities to engage patrons. Ultra-popular social media websites and apps combined with the availability of affordable cloud-based services and the evolution and adoption of mobile devices are enabling librarians to share and build communities, store and analyze large collections of data, create digital collections, and access information and services in ways never thought about before.” Read more

Marjorie Teresa R. Perez of the Business Mirror recently questioned what data will look like in 2013. She writes, “There are many, many people who talk about this issue. For instance, Director, Market Insight and Strategy at Amdocs Michal Harris—who is awesome, by the way—says that we’re going to see a move away from service providers just worrying about the operational challenge of managing data to operators beginning to realize the business opportunity that big data brings. And if you look at the trends toward data and video traffic, you can see that the number of people enjoying LTE coverage is going to skyrocket in the next couple of years. Unlike the Web today, the semantic Web won’t just reside within computers, laptops and mobile devices. Instead, it will be part of electronics like refrigerators, cars and televisions.” Read more

Saul Klein of the Guardian recently discussed the new age of the internet and the role that London could play in this period of innovation and development. Klein writes, “My career in the internet industry began in London in 1993 and if you had told me then that the UK would one day be the most advanced internet economy in the world, I would have questioned your sanity. But that is precisely what it is today. According to the Boston Consulting Group, by 2016, 3 billion people will be online and the internet economy will be worth $4.2tn among G20 countries – almost doubling in size since 2010. It’s a revolution which is rewiring every part of business and society, from SMEs to multi-nationals, not-for-profits to governments – and Britain is leading the way. In 2010, the internet accounted for more than 8% of UK GDP (a figure I’ll come back to), more than any other G20 nation, including the US (at 5.4%) and China (6.9%).” Read more

Bob Evans of Oracle has written an article for Forbes regarding the future of Big Data. He writes, “If you think we’ve got Big Data problems now—with “only” about 9 billion devices connected to the Internet—what’s the situation going to be like when that number soars to 50 billion at the end of the decade? Oracle president Mark Hurd recently raised the possibility that unless businesses and government agencies can seize control over that Big Data explosion, then they’ll run the risk of simply being overwhelmed by vast volumes of data that they can’t find, control, manage, or secure—let alone analyze and exploit.”

He goes on, “What happens when that already-tricky situation is compounded dramatically as an additional 40 billion devices get connected to the Internet over the next several years and begin streaming out massive volumes of data about speeds and location and performance degradation and volume of usage and even such vital but narrowly focused applications such as whether or not your morning coffee is ready? Read more

Doc Sheldon of Search Engine Watch reports, “Tim Berners-Lee first spoke of a Semantic Web at his address at the first World Wide Web Conference in 1994. Given the technical level of the audience, his presentation was, for the most part, met with excited nods. The Web Berners-Lee described was a far cry from the library-style repository of the Web at that time, but the concept wasn’t so far-fetched, at least to the listeners with a more visionary nature. ‘Semantic’, however, is a qualifier that means a great deal in this context. It demands that a machine, or more accurately, the software that drives that machine, must understand the information in the way it was intended. Let’s face it: most of us know a handful of human beings that are challenged in that regard.” Read more