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

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!

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

[Editor's note: As Semantic Web continues to gain traction, we are seeing an increase in hiring activity for positions demanding knowledge and skills in Semantic Technologies.  Moving forward, we're going to devote some editorial energy to looking at this segment of the job market.  My colleague, Angela Guess, will be gathering a few of the more interesting Semantic Technology job listings she comes across and posting them here on a regular basis.  As always, let us know what you think. We want to hear from you! -- Eric Franzon]

The Stanford University School of Medicine is looking for a Semantic Web Senior Software Engineer. According to the post, “The Stanford University School of Medicine is the home for a National Center for Biomedical Computing. Our effort is a multi-institution collaboration funded by the US National Institutes for Health… We are looking for a senior software engineer with outstanding technical skills who is interested in a hands-on development position.” This position doesn’t require any biology or medical experience but calls for at least seven years in software engineering. Read more

The 2009 Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) took place June 14-18, 2009 in San Jose, California. SemTech is produced by Semantic Universe and brings together the entire marketplace of semantic technology vendors, developers, researchers, start-ups, investors and customers. Here is a small sample of the hundreds of companies who signed up to attend:

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The official attendance count for SemTech 2009 was 1170 individuals, from the following organizations (note many organizations were represented by multiple attendees).

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We’ve known about the Dublin Core (www.dublincore.org ) pretty much forever. We know it has a following in Library Science, and content management systems, and Adobe uses their tags as the basis for the XMP (www.adobe.com/products/xmp/). And we knew that at least one of the original architects for the Dublin Core, Eric Miller (www.w3.org/People/EM/ ) is now deeply invested in the Semantic Web.

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