The Harvard Boston Research Initiative [HBRI], in conjunction with the City of Boston, has announced that it is seeking applicants for a part-time graduate fellowship. The fellowship runs from February 1, 2012 through August 31, 2012 and applications are due January 1, 2012. The announcement states, “The fellowship is funded by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, but doctoral students from any school in the greater Boston area with strong skills in data management and analysis, and an interest in computational social science are encouraged to apply.”

“Fellows will work 15-25 hours/week, mainly at Boston City Hall, and will be paid $20/hour. While at City Hall, fellows will spend much of their time working closely with a team of policy makers and researchers interested in using new types of data to carry out analyses that can improve both public policy and scholarship about key urban issues. ” Read more

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!

The U.S. government on Tuesday unsealed an indictment of Aaron Swartz, who helped to develop standards and tutorials for Linked Open Data, on charges including computer intrusion, fraud, and data theft in computer hacking incidents that targeted the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, a not-for-profit archive of scientific journals and academic work.

If convicted, the 24-year old Swartz, a Harvard researcher who worked on the Linked Data standards while serving on the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group, could serve up to 35 years in prison and face a fine of as much as $1 million. Swartz, among other things, also co-founded Reddit and was Metadata Advisor to the nonprofit Creative Commons and coauthor of the RSS 1.0 spec.

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Stephen Wolfram, creator of Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica, & Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

Tuesday, April 28, 3:00 pm
Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School
RSVP Required via the form below or on Facebook
This event will be webcast live at 3:00 pm ET.

There’s been great anticipation around Stephen Wolfram’s ambitious project to create a comprehensive "computational knowledge engine."  The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will host a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha system, and a discussion of its underlying technology and implications.  Participants will include Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law.

The HCLS IG gave a tutorial at the C-SHALS Conference last week. It was very well attended and consisted of participants from pharma, payers, health care organizations, technology companies, and academia.

The first half of the tutorial began with a primer on the Semantic Web that was delivered by Lee Feigenbaum. He did an excellent job of introducing the technology, and answering a broad range of good questions from the participants.

The second half of the tutorial began with Eric Prud’hommeaux (W3C) introducing HCLS. He highlighted that the mission of the group is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine, and health care; and described the strong need for interoperability within these domains. He highlighted that almost 100 individuals are now participating in the interest group.

The tutorial then provided an overview of the activities being undertaken by the different tasks within HCLS. Vipul Kashyap (Cigna) described how the Clinical Observations Interoperability task built a demo that enables querying across electronic health records that are in different formats. John Madden (Duke) presented on work within the Terminology task to represent SNOMED within Semantic Web representations, and compared benefits of SKOS to OWL. Susie Stephens (Lilly) presented on making publicly available data sets about drugs available within the Linked Data cloud, which is ongoing work within the Linking Open Drug Data task. She also briefly introduced the new Pharma Ontology task which has the goal of creating a high-level, patient-centric ontology for translational medicine. Tim Clark (Harvard) represented the Scientific Discourse task and described their approach for integrating knowledge relating to hypotheses derived from literature and experiments using SWAN, SIOC, and myExperiment ontologies. The tutorial concluded with Kei Cheung (Yale) providing a description of the accomplishments on aTags and federated query within the BioRDF task.

Slides are available from the tutorial on the HCLS Wiki.

Back when I was an industry analyst (VP, E-Business Strategies at the META Group, since acquired by Gartner), I often had to critique emerging markets.  Unlike venture capitalists, industry analysts are privy to product roadmaps from publicly-traded companies, including the industry giants (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM).  And unlike i-bankers, they are privy to product roadmaps from start-ups.  And as a kicker, some analysts (actually, only those with the largest firms; back then, primarily limited to those analysts with Gartner, Forrester, META and Giga) get a lot of great feedback from CIOs and other end users.

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