Thyago Duque

If you are interested in neuroscience but do not have too much time to dedicate to the subject I highly recommend the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s 2008 Holiday Lectures in Science.

The holiday lectures in science are usually composed of four lectures on a specific topic presented by HHMI investigators from universities in US. The lectures (at least the ones from 2008) are very well produced both in a scientific aspect as in the technical/cinematographic aspect and they condense an impressive amount of information in little less than 4 hours. I was impressed with how much I learned very little time.

You can watch the lectures in HMMI’s website :
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/lectures/

or download then for your ipod:

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/researchchannel.org.1420284301.01420284308.2149823379?i=1754545314

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/researchchannel.org.1420284301.01420284308

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/researchchannel.org.1420284301.01420284308

http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Feed/researchchannel.org.1420284301.01420284308

Enjoy

Pier Luca Lanzi, from the Politecnico di Milano university made his lectures on data mining available on the web trough Vimeo. It is a good resource if you whant to learn some principles of data mining. The lectures can be found here. You can also visit Pier Luca’s website here.

Genetic Algorithms are actually my primary research interest (not semantic web) but I have been in the field for quite long time and I haven’t looked on basic/interesting stuff for a while. My plan is to start blogging more about GAs in the near future but for now I have a bunch of semantic web topics in my queue.

However, today I came across this video that performs the strange crossover between GAs and Semantic Web and, although the results are bad, I think it is strange enough to deserve a post.

This video (here) is a presentation on the IWSC08 of the paper Anytime Query Answering in RDF through Evolutionary Algorithms, by Eyal Oren and colleagues, which can be found here.

Note that I do not recommend using this method for your RDF queries, but still found the paper strange, if not interesting.

Continuing the series of videos about semantic technologies, a good suggestion is this video (here) . In this video Barry Smith walks through some basic concepts of ontology engineering and scientific ontology. The Basic Formal Ontology and the RCT Trial bank are used as a base for a Clinical Trial ontology.

Message in a Bottle or: How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing?
http://videolectures.net/iswc08_decker_mib/
Stefan Decker, DERI Galway

Description

Enormous resources are poured into projects like the Large Hadron Collider, the Hubble space telescope, or the Iter fusion reactor. Computer science resources pale in comparison – the European Semantic Web effort is tiny compared to those projects. Why is this the case? In this talk Stefan Decker will argue that the Physicists are much better in formulating an engaging mission and message. Especially the Semantic Web community has not been very good in coming up with a convincing mission directed to the public. We need to and we can do better.

I recently got introduced to technologies and concepts related to the Semantic Web and to Ontology Engineering, two areas that are much more interesting than I believed they could be. As a consequence, Semantic Web became one of my areas of interest and I decided to start bloging about it. As a start, this video (here) talks about the question: “Why Semantics?”. Learn and Enjoy =D.