Daniela Hernandez of Wired reports, “There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm. The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks. About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. ‘For the first time in my life,’ Ng says, ‘it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime’.” Read more

Cynthia Haven of Stanford News reports, “The first winners of the Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries are the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France) and the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library in Spain. The Stanford Libraries’ new annual award celebrates groundbreaking programs, projects and services for research libraries anywhere in the world. Commendations of merit went to Australia’s Griffith University and the New York Public Library. About two dozen proposals competed for the modest cash prize of $5,000, underwritten by Logitech, that went to each of the winning institutions.” Read more

The 2013 Stanford Prizes for Innovation in Research Libraries (SPIRL) were announced this week, and among the recipients and commended institutions are those where semantic web technology and Linked Data are on display.

One of the recipients is the Bibliothèque nationale de France (National Library of France), for both its Gallica and Data Digital Libraries. The discovery service, Data (data.bnf.fr), has integrated numerous BnF catalogues and finding-aids using a Semantic Web approach, so that the BnF’s collection holdings, including those of Gallica (which promotes French cultural heritage in digital form), “are visible through a single, high-tech lens,” according to the announcement of the awards.

“Together, both efforts drive a wider audience to the digital library from search engines,” the SPIRL announcement reports.

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Kyle Gschwend of The Stanford Daily recently reported, “After 18 months of planning, the Dean of the School of Humanities & Sciences, Richard Saller, recently gave final approval for a new center that will fill the need for a unified genomics research center on campus. Led by genetics professor Carlos Bustamante and biology professor Marc Feldman Ph.D. ’69, the new Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics is predicted to improve the University’s reputation in the field, as well as draw top talent to Stanford. While the official University announcement has not yet been made, outgoing School of Medicine Dean Philip Pizzo shared news about the center in his last full newsletter, which was published on Nov. 5. ‘There was a recognition among the administration of how significant and vital it was to support this project and take a risk,’ Saller said.” Read more

Stanford is offering another free online course: this time, the subject is Natural Language Processing taught by Chris Manning and Dan Jurafsky. According to the description, “The course covers a broad range of topics in natural language processing, including word and sentence tokenization, text classification and sentiment analysis, spelling correction, information extraction, parsing, meaning extraction, and question answering, We will also introduce the underlying theory from probability, statistics, and machine learning that are crucial for the field, and cover fundamental algorithms like n-gram language modeling, naive bayes and maxent classifiers, sequence models like Hidden Markov Models, probabilistic dependency and constituent parsing, and vector-space models of meaning.” Read more

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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According to a new article, “HighWire Press, Stanford University’s provider of hosting and web publishing platforms to scholarly publishers, has partnered with TEMIS, a leading provider of Semantic Content Enrichment enterprise solutions. Under the strategic technology and business partnership, HighWire will integrate the full suite of Luxid software within its ePublishing Platform to provide automated content annotation, enrichment, and linking to its customers.” Read more

Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are teaching an online course entitled Introduction to Artificial Intelligence from September 26 through December 16, 2011. The course, also taught in-class at Stanford University, is a popular intro level examination of AI. “For the online version,” the description states, “the instructors aim to offer identical materials, assignments, and exams, and to use the same grading criteria. Both instructors will be available for online discussions.” Read more

Stanford University is looking for a Web UI and Backend Server Developer in Palo Alto, CA: “Stanford University is the home for a national center to apply advances in computing to improve the effectiveness of biomedical research and health care. The user-facing part of our center is primarily an open-source web portal for collecting, categorizing, and applying medical and biological terminologies in innovative ways (http://bioportal.bioontology.org). In addition, we provide programmatic access to this information to allow others to build upon our technology. One of the applications of this system provides search of biomedical literature and clinical records that is much more effective than has previously been possible.” Read more

Diffbot, a semantic start-up in Palo Alto, CA, is looking for Machine Learning Interns and Web Development Interns. According to the post, “At Diffbot, we apply computer vision techniques to web documents to extract out semantic metadata. These services are used within hundreds of products at companies such as Cisco, Evernote, StumbleUpon, and AOL. We also offer free access to our technology to developers via an open API. Internally, we are using our technology to develop the next generation semantic results engine for the web. Check out http://diffbot.com for more information about our technology and APIs.” Read more