Google Analytics gives web site owners good information about what’s clicking with visitors to their site, how those users got there, and more. But, attaining that insight can be somewhat laborious for those not well-versed in the tool and its interface, says Nick Cassimatis, associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He’s the founder of natural language processing technology startup SkyPhrase. His take: Apply SkyPhrase to the task, and things get a lot easier.

The startup in February began private beta testing of its NLP interface to Google Analytics. “Google Analytics lets you ask things like how many people from California visited the site last month, or which of your pages were most visited on mobile devices,” says Cassimatis. “Our system lets you ask these questions in natural language and get answers to them” more seamlessly than using Google Analytics alone.

Previous to bringing its NLP help to Google Analytics, SkyPhrase had a public site that let users run natural language searches of their Gmail or Twitter accounts, as well as flights and music.

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IBM will provide Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a modified version of Watson, making RPI the first university to receive the technology. The article states, “The arrival of the Watson system will enable new leading-edge research at Rensselaer, and afford faculty and students an opportunity to find new uses for Watson and deepen the systems’ cognitive capabilities. The firsthand experience of working on the system will also better position Rensselaer students as future leaders in the areas of Big Data, analytics, and cognitive computing.” Read more

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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It’s probably safe to say that people want their firefighters, EMT, law enforcement and other emergency responders to be as best-equipped for their jobs as possible, so that they can be successful and well-protected, too.

Semantic technology can have a hand in making sure that happens. Deborah McGuinness, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor and Director of Web Science Operations John Erickson. both of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) , are spearheading an effort, thanks to some funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST) under program manager William G. Billotte, to use semantic technology and social media to help that organization better understand what requirements should be for these heroes.

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This week the United Nations revised its findings of three years ago that more than 1 billion people worldwide were going hungry. In its 2012 State of Food Insecurity in the World report, it revised its figures of undernourished people to closer to 870 million, about the same as it is today, according to reports.

The report actually presents new estimates of the number and proportion of undernourished people going back to 1990, finding that progress in reducing hunger has been more pronounced than previously believed – especially before 2007-2008. “The revised results imply that the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing world by 2015 is within reach, if appropriate actions are taken to reverse the slowdown since 2007–08,” the report states.

The U.N. isn’t the only organization tracking the state of global hunger, though. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) demo is a tool adapted and developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) to comprehensively measure and track global hunger – and standing behind it is LODSPeaKr (Linked Open Data Simple Publishing Kit).

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is looking for two Department of Computer Science faculty members in Troy, NY. The post states, “The Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y. seeks to hire two faculty members to join a strong and growing faculty. The first opening, the Hamilton Development Chair in Computer Science, is intended for an associate or exceptional assistant professor in the area of “cyber risk,” including but not limited to information/data security, privacy, accountability, trust, and forensics for computers, networks and cyber-physical systems. Applicants for this chaired position must demonstrate an outstanding record of research accomplishments as well as a strong commitment to teaching.” Read more

A call for comments is out for a proposal for a ‘Datasets‘ addition to schema.org, via the W3C’s Web Schemas task force group that is used by the schema.org project to collaborate with the wider community.

The proposal extending schema.org for describing datasets and data catalogs introduces three new types, with associated properties, as follows:

Writing at the Schema.org blog, Dan Brickley calls it a “small but useful vocabulary,” with particular relevance to open government and public sector data.

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World wide web expert and frequent SemTechBiz speaker Professor Jim Hendler has become the new head of the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The school reports, “Hendler is currently a senior constellation professor in the Tetherless World Constellation and program director of the Information Technology and Web Science (ITWS) program at Rensselaer. He will be stepping down from his leadership of the ITWS Program to assume the department head post.” Read more

A million data sets. That’s the number of government data sets out there on the web that we have closed in on.

“The question is, when you have that many, how do you search for them, find them, coordinate activity between governments, bring in NGOs,” says James A. Hendler, Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor, Department of Computer Science and Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a principal investigator of its Linking Open Government Data project lives, as well as Internet web expert for data.gov, He also is connected with many other governments’ open data projects. “Semantic web tools organize and link the metadata about these things, making them searchable, explorable and extensible.”

To be more specific, Hendler at SemTech a couple of weeks ago said there are 851,000 open government data sets across 153 catalogues from 30-something countries, with the three biggest representatives, in terms of numbers, at the moment being the U.S., the U.K, and France. Last week, the one million threshold was crossed.

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Courtesy: Flickr/prusakolep

What’s on the horizon for the semantic web? It was a question pondered by expert panelists last week at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco.

Siri – and its possible clones and descendents – came up as a signpost on the road ahead, pushing the notion of personal assistance ever forward.  “Siri made a huge splash. It opened eyes to the idea of not just using semantics to move information around but using a natural language system with some semantic interpretation to perform actions, like putting reminders on your phone,” noted Mark Greaves, director of knowledge systems at Vulcan.

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