Group items tagged

Wanted: Better Wikipedia coverage of theoretical computer science

The aims of clinical and translational research are to achieve a better understanding of the pathogenesis of human disease in order to develop effective diagnostic, therapeutic and prevention strategies. Biomedical informatics can play an important role in supporting this research by facilitating the management, integration, analysis and exchange of data derived from and related to the research problems being studied. A key aspect of this support is to bring clarity, rigor and formalism to the representation of 1. disease initiation, progression, pathogenesis, signs, symptoms, assessments, clinical and laboratory findings, disease diagnosis, treatment, treatment response and outcome, and 2. the interrelations between these distinct entities both in patient management and in clinical research, thus allowing the data to be more readily retrievable and shareable, and more able to serve in the support of algorithmic reasoning.

The Semantic Web is necessary, but not sufficient to provide better technological support for online communities. Web services cannot be described independently of how they are used, because communities of practice use services in novel, unexpected ways. Although semantics are very important to create more 'intelligent' web services, what has been lacking so far is some formal notion of context of use. As Piers Young summarizes it, "that's where the problem of effectiveness starts getting addressed." Contextual elements like the community of use, its objectives and communicative interactions are thus important starting points for conceptualizing the pragmatic layer.

understanding this content and making decisions based on it (especially in mission-critical situations) is not just a simple matter of consuming information. To effectively "make sense" of large, heterogeneous, and often unstructured content collections requires: - efficient, accurate, and context-based ways of extracting, filtering, and summarizing information; - better and more meaningful ways of organizing, visualizing, and interacting with the information; - faster, more objective methods for investigating hypotheses, detecting trends or patterns across multiple sources, and otherwise analyzing or interpreting information.

"This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complimentary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries. 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society. 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of "online citizenship" for the Information Age."

Way ahead of its time, and I believe Facebook's (and LinkedIn's, and Plaxo's, and...) successes largely substantiate the emphasis the authors place on the significance of rich support for social trust and identity mechanisms.

If companies cannot develop a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, it's primarily because they are having a hard time measuring the benefits. All metrics of intangibles -and KM in particular- are shaky, and the most promising ones, based on network analysis (VNA) still have a long way to go before they become generally accepted practices. In the meantime, organizing a knowledge market might be the best way to go. Let's imagine what it would look like… First, a separate organization for shared knowledge services would have to be set up, if it doesn't exist already. For lack of a better phrase, let's cal it the corporate university. The problem is that corporate universities, when they exist, are focused on executive programs, which is a very small part of the problem.

"Cyber English is a pedagogical experiment in practical theory in developing an alternative option to tradition education and a project to answer the various voices of America for better educational practice"

Ned.com is a global, all-volunteer, member-governed, online social network (in combination with real-world locations) that is made up of social entrepreneurs, activists, artists, social purpose enterprises, grassroots nonprofit, non-governmental, and community-based organizations, and is collaborating and taking action locally, nationally & globally, in order to make the world a better place.

Cognitive Edge is focused on rejuvenating management practices to better equip organisations when addressing intractable problems or seizing new opportunities in uncertain and complex situations. Where traditional approaches have failed to deliver success, Cognitive Edge techniques enable the emergence of fresh and insightful solutions seen from multiple perspectives.

I've been running Simpy for almost 4 years now. Every once in a while I get the "Why should I use Simpy?", "Why is Simpy better than, say, del.icio.us?" This post answers those questions in the form of "Why I use Simpy" answer. This are my personal reasons for using Simpy, but you can also read other people's opinions. I also encourage you to add your reasons in the comments, so I can add your reasons to this list.

We believe individuals from the general public have a vital role to play in making personal genomes useful. We are recruiting volunteers who are willing to share their genome sequence and many types of personal information with the research community and the general public, so that together we will be better able to advance our understanding of genetic and environmental contributions to human traits and to improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent illness. Learn more about how to participate in the Personal Genome Project.

This is a guide to effective compliance with the GNU General Public License (GPL) and related licenses. In accordance with the Software Freedom Law Center's (SFLC's) philosophy of assisting the community with GPL compliance cooperatively, this guide focuses on avoiding compliance actions and minimizing the negative impact when enforcement actions occur. It introduces and explains basic legal concepts related to the GPL and its enforcement by copyright holders. It also outlines business practices and methods that lead to better GPL compliance. Finally, it recommends proper post-violation responses to the concerns of copyright holders.

Research funding decisions and research evaluation are currently almost exclusively based on peer-review. Peer-review is well suited to ensure quality, but helps little to achieve impact. ParticipatoryResearch adds the stakeholder dimension to research funding and evaluation. In an ideal world those research projects should get funded which will ultimately benefit its stakeholders most. Individuals (such as peer reviewers) can often hardly realistically access the potential benefit of a certain research proposal. Better results can be achieved by relying on the intelligence of a whole community by employing prediction markets (being the best general institutions we know for aggregating information). In such a prediction market for research ideas stakeholders bet or vote about which research results will benefit them most. The highest-ranked research ideas according to the stakeholder benefit should ultimately get funded.

We enable people to know who knows. We take a people-centric view on information and provide links to people that are knowledgable about your question at hand. Thereby we help organizations to better leverage the knowledge of their members and work more efficiently.

The technology to make biobutanol, a non-food based biofuel, cost-competitive with gasoline isn't here yet, but companies in the know say that it could be by 2010.

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.

So here's the real trick: cloud computing is real. Everything is moving into the cloud, in whole or in part. The utility layer of cloud computing will be just that, a utility, without outsized profits. But the cloud platform, like the software platform before it, has new rules for competitive advantage. And chief among those advantages are those that we've identified as "Web 2.0", the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

We should be and we can be doing a much better job to predict and prevent pandemics. But the really bold idea is that we could reach a point-and this is a distant point in the future-where we become so good at this that we really reach a point where we have the "final plague," and where we are really capable of catching so many of these things that new pandemics become an oddity. I think that is something that we should certainly have as an ideal.

Cognitive Edge is focused on rejuvenating management practices to better equip organisations when addressing intractable problems or seizing new opportunities in uncertain and complex situations. Where traditional approaches have failed to deliver success, Cognitive Edge techniques enable the emergence of fresh and insightful solutions seen from multiple perspectives.

The relationship among data, information and knowledge is often depicted as a pyramid. With data at the base, it's converted to information and information converted to knowledge. This metaphor of a pyramid or ladder to explain these concepts is unhelpful because you start to believe one is better than the other and there is a tendency to extrapolate to the next level believing that knowledge is simply extrapolated to form wisdom-I have even heard people talk about wisdom management. My two days at the meaning making symposium has helped me see this relationship differently, that is, viewing data, information and knowledge as a system.