Building SkyNet for Science - presentation for NISO Discovery Tools Forum

My presentation is available at

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/building-skynet-for-science-discovering-new-frontiers-using-embedded-knowledge/

A lot of it is conceptual, so you may want to wait until the audio is available from the http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/ NISO site - http://www.niso.org/news/events/2008/discovery08/ (hopefully next week).

UPDATE 2009-04-16: I don't think audio was made available.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2008-03-28: I forgot to mention that all some of the supporting links for the presentation (will be) are available at http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/nisodiscovery2008  ENDUPDATE

I thought it went well, although as first speaker up there is a disadvantage of not seeing how other people set up.  I was in a bit of a rush to get started so that I would finish on time, so I didn't do a great job of attaching my mike and I just held the wireless transmitter in my hand.  With the transmitter in one hand and my laser pointer gripped in the other for the entire 50 minutes, it's possible I looked a bit of a prat.

I usually try to remember to keep my hands free for presentations so that I can use more natural body language, anyway lesson learned.

I also forgot to say "The future is not set.  There's no fate but what we make for ourselves." before the last slide.

There are some common themes emerging from the presentations, I'm always amazed when a bunch of people develop presentations in isolation and then they actually all fit together when presented.

I've posted some photos of the presenters in my Flickr under nisodiscovery2008 (my cameraphone can upload directly to Flickr over WiFi), they also show up because of the machine tag linkage on the Upcoming page.  No pics of Chapel Hill yet as I don't have a car and it turns out while we're only about 4km from the town, the most direct route for me to get there I think would be to walk beside a six-lane divided highway, which is not too appealing.

UPDATE 2008-03-28: The carbon offset for my flights from myclimate.org (including the trip to Open Repositories) was about C$118.

Comments

[Peter Murray]

Great presentation, Richard. I'm still pondering your "New Laws" for library science ("Produce information in formats that machines can easily understand, in parallel, with formats that are human readable" and "Have a limited number of formats, keep them simple, and enable easy interchange of information"). While some structure will certainly help the machine process the content, it is also true that machine capacity is increasing faster than human intelligence. At some point I'm not sure if we will need to make it easier for machines. Would we quibble about the amount of time between now and then?

[Richard Akerman]

I guess I'm a bit of a cynic as machines that are better with natural language have been "just around the corner" for something like 20 years. So far, assuming the machine will be fast, but dumb, is a winning approach. That's what drives my advocacy of microformats as the way to break through this impasse in the short term.