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As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling. Storytelling Alice includes high-level animations that enable users to program social interactions, a gallery of characters and scenery designed to spark story ideas, and a story-based tutorial.

Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. The salient property of Pig programs is that their structure is amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turns enables them to handle very large data sets.

Qwaq provides 3-D virtual collaboration solutions for enterprises. Qwaq Forums are virtual environments used to facilitate interactive online meetings, workflow, project and program management processes, real-time document editing, document sharing, and online training. Qwaq Forums are deployed as virtual workspaces for virtual offices, program management, virtual operations centers, facilitated meetings, and corporate training.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

Trends in programming language development and adoption point to Python as the high-level systems integration language of choice. Python leverages a vast developer-base external to the Neuroscience community, and promises leaps in simulation complexity and maintainability to any neural simulator which adopts it. As more and more simulators support Python, model development times can be drastically reduced by promoting code sharing and reuse across simulator communities. As a result, modellers can devote their software development time to innovating new simulation tools such as network topology databases, stimulus programming, analysis and visualisation tools, and simulation accounting, to name a few.

Interdisciplinary research programs at Harvard and elsewhere naturally tend to be distributed geographically, across campuses and departments. Effective collaboration for these programs requires the ability to bridge distance, which in turn implies digital collaboration, and therefore abilities to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives; to provide semantic context to on-line content for more powerful interactions within multiple sub-disciplines and to integrate as well as distinguish the individual contributions of many scientific workers.

BioJava is an open-source project dedicated to providing a Java framework for processing biological data. It includes objects for manipulating biological sequences, file parsers, DAS client and server support, access to BioSQL and Ensembl databases, tools for making sequence analysis GUIs and powerful analysis and statistical routines including a dynamic programming toolkit.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium of leading biologists, clinicians, informaticians, and ontologists who develop innovative technology and methods allowing scientists to create, disseminate, and manage biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. Our visionis that all biomedical knowledge and data are disseminated on the Internet using principled ontologies, such that they are semantically interoperable and useful for improving biomedical science and clinical care. Our resources include the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) library, the Open Biomedical Data (OBD) repositories, and tools for accessing and using this information in research. The Center collaborates with biomedical researchers conducting Driving Biological Projects to enable outside research and stimulate technology development in the Center. The Center undertakes outreach and educational activities (Biomedical Informatics Program) to train future researchers to use biomedical ontologies and related tools with the goal of enhancing scientific discovery.

Zemanta is a service that's focused on helping the blogger/content creator make the process of creating their content simpler and easier. As you write, Zemanta processes all of your text (like a spell checker in a word processing program does) and suggests things to you. Currently, Zemanta suggests stories/posts/research you might want to read as you compose your post, images you might want to include in the post, words you might want to hyperlink out with, and tags for search engines and other services to use to discover your content.

This present report summarizes the insights and recommendations of a symposium on sensemaking, sponsored by the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence, and held in Vienna, Virginia, on 23-25 October 2001.

See also: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Apr/0005.html NaturalOWL is an open-source natural language generation engine written in Java. It produces descriptions of individuals (e.g., items for sale, museum exhibits) and classes (e.g., types of exhibits) in English and Greek from OWL DL ontologies. The ontologies must have been annotated in RDF with linguistic and user modeling resources. We demonstrate a plug-in for Protege that can be used to produce these resources and to generate texts by invoking NaturalOWL. We also demonstrate how NaturalOWL can be used by robotic avatars in Second Life to describe the exhibits of virtual museums. NaturalOWL demonstrates the benefits of Natural Language Generation (NLG) on the Semantic Web. Organizations that need to publish information about objects, such as exhibits or products, can publish OWL ontologies instead of texts. NLG engines, embedded in browsers or Web servers, can then render the ontologies in multiple natural languages, whereas computer programs may access the ontologies directly.

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data - think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

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.

The Knowledge Annotator is a Java program that allows users to mark-up web pages with SHOE knowledge without having to worry about the HTML-like codes. The Annotator is available as an applet or a stand-alone Java application.

CENDI's vision is to provide its member federal STI agencies a cooperative enterprise where capabilities are shared and challenges are faced together so that the sum of accomplishments is greater than each individual agency can achieve on its own. CENDI's mission is to help improve the productivity of federal science- and technology-based programs through effective scientific, technical, and related information-support systems. In fulfilling its mission, CENDI agencies play an important role in addressing science- and technology-based national priorities and strengthening U.S. competitiveness. CENDI is an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 13 U.S. federal agencies

Scratch is a simple, easy-to-learn programming language designed at MIT's Media Lab that lets anyone create and share video games and animated stories. Introduced just over a year ago, it has already attracted a wide following--particularly among kids aged 8 to 15--and a variety of uses that its creators never imagined. Now, Scratch users from around the world are gathering for the first of what is planned as an annual conference to discuss the software and its uses and to share ideas.

The content of Informal Coalitions is summarized below. Preface * Highlights the high failure rate of organizational change programs. * Sets out the background to, and origins of, the informal coalitions perspective. * Identifies some of the key features that distinguish Informal Coalitions from other books that repackage the more conventional approaches to organizational change. * Outlines the broad structure of the book and how readers can get the best out of it.

How do chess players make decisions? How do they avoid the combinatorial explosion? How do we go from rooks and knights to abstract thought? What is abstract thought like? These are some of the questions involving the Capyblanca project. The name, of course, is a blend between José Raoul Capablanca, and Hofstadter's original Copycat Project implemented by Melanie Mitchell, which brought us so many ideas. Well, after almost 5 years, we have a proof-of-concept in the form of a running program, and we are GPL'ing the code, so interested readers might take it to new directions which we cannot foresee.

OpenCog aims to provide research scientists and software developers with a common platform to build and share artificial intelligence programs.

The 2008 NMC Conference Proceedings features ten papers including case studies; a tutorial; introductions to current topics such as storytelling, digital media, and fair use; descriptions of special services, tools, and information technology support programs developed at member schools; and discussions of new media and pedagogy.