I have written about the Word add-in for Ontology Recognition (the focus of the BioLit project) in the past. The project was also mentioned in my contribution to the Fourth Paradigm book and our “A ‘smart’ cyberinfrastructure for Research” article. It was one of the projects in which I was actively involved while in Microsoft Research, together with Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, and Pablo Fernicola (who took over on the technical side and did a remarkable job).

I think the project was a great success. It was lead by Phil Bourne and Lynn Fink. Lynn did an absolutely amazing job at shaping and managing the project and it was a pleasure working with her.

The work is now reported at the BMC Bioinformatics journal: “Word add-in for ontology recognition: semantic enrichment of scientific literature”. The paper is already marked as “highly accessed”, which is great to see.

Great work everyone!

Next time you get that steering wheel in your hands, think of us bikers...

Great British commercial. Check out the “making of” as well for some of the thinking...

The Zentity folks at MSR’s External Research group (Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, and Oscar Naim) and the wonderful guys at the University of Southampton, School of Engineer Sciences (Steven Johnston, Mark Scott, Kenji Takeda, Simon Cox, and Less Carr) organized a Dojo event at Dev8D around Zentity. It was great seeing the reports and the interest.

The winner of the challenge, Martin Evans, created a Web API on top of Zentity to expose JSON-formatted representations of the entities in the Zentity graph store. Cool stuff.

Well done to everyone involved, especially to Kenji, Steven, Mark, and Oscar!

Remember the “No pants light rail ride”? This time we did a “Choo Choo train” in downtown Seattle :-) Like before, it was organized by the “Emerald City Improv”. That was last Sunday and it was soooo much fun. There were so many surprised and/or laughing faces of people as the train was going around. It was great! :-)

A funny moment (at least I thought it was funny at the time), when Gina and Eric were running around the streets to catch the train :-) They were late and the Choo Choo train had already departed so I was texting them with the location and they were trying to come find it. But then our “driver” would take a sudden turns... :-)

Yes, we even had our own live “rail-cross bar” doing “din din din” noises :-)

Here’s an article and photos about the event from Seattle’s PI: “Did you catch the ‘choo-choo train’ in downtown Seattle?”

  
(source: Seattle PI blogs)