Image Photo Courtesy Flickr/401(K) 2012

Universities play an important role in advancing the technology ecosystem, semantic technology included. Look for starters at work done at The Tetherless World Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Wright State University’s Kno.e.sis Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, MIT, and the Digital Enterprise Research Institute located at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

In addition to driving technology ever forward, institutions like these and others also provide a home for incubating good ideas that could become good businesses. Music discovery service Seevl and the enterprise-focused SindiceTech are two examples of semantic spin-outs from DERI, for instance, while MIT Media Lab gave birth to commercial properties with semantic underpinnings including music intelligence platform The Echo Nest. The Kno.e.sis Center points work it’s doing in the commercial direction, too: Its LinkedIn profile description notes that its “work is predominantly multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional, often involving industry collaborations and significant systems developing, with an eye towards real-world impact, technology licensing, and commercialization.”

Given the projects with commercial prospects underway within their own houses, it would seem there’s opportunity for universities themselves to look for even more ways to contribute to that success. And that’s just what the University of Minnesota is doing: This week it said that it’s launching a $20 million seed fund over a ten-year timeframe to support the innovative ideas to which its campus plays host.

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Early in the summer, The Semantic Web Blog introduced readers to Nara, an advanced neural networking service to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users. (See that story here.)

The service is moving ahead with the launch today of its mobile version, as well as in other respects. “We’re now doing a full-on consumer launch of a polished product on both the web and mobile [platforms],” says CTO Nathan Wilson. “People really are clamoring for the mobile component, especially for this [dining] use case.” Versions for both the iPhone’s iOS and Android operating systems are available.

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Dr. Graham G. Rong, founder of IKA LLC, and senior industrial liaison officer at the MIT Corporate Relations Office, leading collaboration between the institute and industry, has been working on a semantic web approach to social and financial analysis based on digital financial data and other information related to companies that can be found on the Internet. The approach first turns XBRL data from SEC reports into RDF format, and then links that with the relevant social information in the company’s ecosystem, to deliver more business value.

The project, which began at MIT (see our earlier story here), has advanced to the application stage, and the software is moving from a JAVA to a browser-based interface. Rong says the team also is developing a web services API for the system.

“Current XBRL technology primary collects financial data for reporting, and secondarily, as more XBRL-based financial data becomes available, it will need to effectively extract financial data for value,” says Rong. Semantic web technology lets the focus be on the latter.

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As the opening ceremony for the London Olympics gets underway tonight, sentiment on the event can be gauged nightly in a big way: The EDF Energy London Eye Ferris Wheel, the largest in Europe, will turn colors depending on the sentiment analysis of tweets coming out of the U.K. mentioning the Olympics.

Sosolimited, an art and technology studio helmed by three MIT grads, has written software to capture these tweets and then uses sentiment analysis algorithms to assess their emotional content. SentiStength, a program that itself hails from the U.K., is reportedly the source of the algorithms. During the day, that will be charted on a large LED next to the London Eye, and each night the data will guide the sequence of a visual lightshow around the Eye.  “That data is played back out across full color architectural lighting fixtures around the Eye and with large ground based search beams,” according to a blog posting from founder Justin Manor. It’s been reported that yellow will be the dominant color to express positive sentiment, while purple will showcase negative sentiment.

Expectations: Early on, at least, probably a lot of yellow, even if traffic is a nightmare, from a lot of outraged Brits who want to have their say over Mitt Romney’s comment about how well-prepared the city is for the Games.

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Dollars to donuts most folks haven’t ever found a place to eat courtesy of neural networking technology before. Generally, Internet searches for spots to have a bite come courtesy of friends’ Facebook recommendations, services like Yelp, and even some semantically-powered offerings such as BooRah, now an Intuit company.

But the collection of neuroscientists, computer scientists, astrophysicists, and creative artists behind Nara, launching into public beta today, have taken the advanced neural networking route to automate, personalize and curate web dining experiences for users – though there’s more to come on the future menu. President and CEO Tom Copeman says of the company, which in April secured $3.6 million of a $4.5 million equity offering, that its cutting-edge neural network and proprietary and patented algorithms and process for analyzing tons of web data, and personalizing it, including considering user feedback on the suggestions it offers, is creating a whole new category.

That is the pure-play digital lifestyle brand that “creates an emotional connection between us and the Web. We’re trying to change how people think about the web, and from sense of what it means to me, and makes sense to me, and how personal it is to me.”

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Courtesy: Flickr/ Vince Viloria

Out with the old, in with the new. We’ve covered (here and here) the year past for the semantic web. So now let’s see what might be in store for the year ahead.

Also, don’t forget to listen to our podcast here for more insights into what 2012 may hold.

• Interest in sentiment analysis exploded with the growth of the social Web, although its reputation suffered due to the prevalence of low-grade Twitter-sentiment toys, simplistic, wildly inaccurate systems that misled many into criticism of the concept where it was the cheap implementations they’d tried that were faulty.  In 2012, sentiment analysis will come into its own: Automated (and crowd-sourced!) mining of attitudes, opinions, emotions, and intent from social and enterprise sources, at the “feature” level, linked to real-world profiles and transactional data. — Seth Grimes, founder, Alta Plana Corp

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Bioinformatics software provider IO Informatics recently released its free Knowledge Explorer Personal Edition. Version 3.6 of the Personal Edition can handle most of what Knowledge Explorer Professional 3.6, launched in October, can, but it does all its work in memory without direct connectivity to a back-end database.

“In particular, a lot of the strengths of Knowledge Explorer have to do with modeling data as RDF and then testing queries, visualizing and browsing the data to see that you have the ontologies and data mappings you need for your integration and application requirements.” says Robert Stanley, IO Informatics president and CEO. The Personal version is aimed at academic experts focused on data integration and semantic data modeling, as well as personal power users in life sciences and other data-intensive industries, or anyone who wants to learn the tool in anticipation of leveraging their enterprise data sets for collaboration and integration projects.

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Photo courtesy: Flickr/Florian

How’s your Thanksgiving meal planning and prep going? Hopefully well, but some day, semantic web technologies might help it go even better.

A couple years back, K. Krasnow Waterman – visiting fellow at MIT who co-chaired its Linked Data Product Development Lab that has evolved into a course – organized a lecture on the topic of the business value of the semantic web. For her presentation, she focused on catering to a consumer application — that is, how the technology could add up to improving prepping a holiday dinner.

It was fun to do it then, Waterman says, and new developments like the integration of Siri into the iPhone could push the envelope even further, adding a voice-activated intelligent personal assistant to the mix.

She describes the vision of streamlining T-Day operations via the semantic web with the initial finding of recipes online. From there, apps could take the recipes a user has selected and extract as structured data various entities – i.e., the ingredients for a shopping list. After the app pulls the ingredient list, the cook-to-be could indicate what’s already in the house (e.g., flour, salt, pepper), so it’s only searching for what’s needed. 

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MIT has created a computer chip that they claim thinks like a single synapse of the human brain. The article explains, “It may be a bit on the Uncanny Valley side of things to have a computer chip that can mimic the human brain’s activity, but it’s still undeniably cool. Over at MIT, researchers have unveiled a chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt to new information (a process known as plasticity) which could help in understanding assorted brain functions, including learning and memory. The silicon chip contains about 400 transistors and can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse — the space between two neurons that allows information to flow from one to the other.” Read more

[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 |  Day 2 |  Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 3 was the first full conference day. The past two days were dedicated only to tutorials and workshops on more specific topics. This year, ISWC turns 10 years old and they showed a tag cloud of the abstracts submitted in 2001 versus the tag cloud of the abstracts submitted this year. Not surprising, the word “data” appears much larger, the word “ontology” has maintained its size, the word “web” has almost disappeared while the word “query” appears now and barely appeared 10 years ago.

(tag cloud image after the jump)

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