Anupam Joshi and Tim Finin have received a $200,000 research award from the NSF Division of Information and Intelligent Systems for a two-year project focused on extracting information from tables. The project, T2K: From Tables to Knowledge, will explore the feasibility of automatically extracting new knowledge directly from data found in spreadsheets, database relations, and document tables and representing it as highly interoperable linked open data (LOD) in the Semantic Web language RDF. The extraction is guided by probabilistic graphical models that use statistical information mined from current LOD knowledge resources. To demonstrate the potential payoff of the research, the system is used to extract knowledge from tables collected from medical journals and tables from web sites like data.gov.

While the W3C semantic web languages RDF and OWL are used to represent the knowledge, the results are applicable to other semantic data frameworks such as Microdata (Search Consortium), Freebase (Google), Probase (Microsoft) and the Open Graph (Facebook). The open sourced prototype software allows other researchers to experiment with automatically producing semantically enriched data from tables for their domains.

If successful, such software extraction systems are expected to become part of a new online knowledge ecology — both consuming existing LOD knowledge to understand the intended meaning implicit in a table and producing new facts and knowledge that will become part of Web. This represents a dramatic increase in the breadth and depth of public semantic data that can make “big data'' analytics more effective.

Image from NASA!

What’s on the docket for the RNC today? The WaPo lets you know!

Latest update in our continuing coverage of voter identification laws: South Carolina and student IDs.

Not your grandmother’s Grand Canyon – Curiousity takes a road trip and shows us the pictures!

Tragedy strikes on the first day of school in Maryland.

1 Corinthians 15:20-24 (NIV)

20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.

2 Corinthians 5:1-5 (NIV)

1For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. 2Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, 3because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked. 4For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 5Now the one who has fashioned us for this very purpose is God, who has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

Reflection

The first days of classes set our expectations of how the upcoming semester will be. When we read through a syllabus and sit through the first lecture we can often get a pretty good sense if a class is going to be filled with boring lectures and busywork or really engaging. This is the kind of first fruit that Paul talks about, the first taste that makes concrete what is to come. There seems to have been some confusion around how to think of life after this one and if we will actually physically come to life again. Paul’s answer is a resounding “yes”! He says look at Christ and let His resurrection set your expectations of what is to come. Furthermore, we have a second guarantee as he points out in the second passage: the Spirit! This life is not in vain. God has purposed us for something greater that we can eagerly wait for.

Responding to the Transmission

As we face struggles and longing for something more, let it be a reminder that we are to eagerly anticipate the life that is to come. But through Christ and the Spirit the future reality is already being made concrete in our lives. We are getting a very real taste of heaven. Let’s pray that we would live in this resurrection of Christ reality and also that our generation would know in real and tangible ways what heaven will be like one day.

So often does the news feature pompous, frustrating, or otherwise regrettable individuals that sometimes we bloggers find ourselves, by no choice of our own, down there in the mud with them — slinging, squishing, and building little huts of ridicule to crawl inside.

It’s as refreshing as a premoistened towlette, then, to find someone we can point our dirty fingers to and say, “Ahh yes: This is someone we can easily admire and recommend.”

Nate Silver is one such person. The thirty-four year old baseball freak-turned-election year Nostradamus runs FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog that has lived at the top of every political junkie and junkette’s Favorites List since Silver began it in 2008. (Catonsvillains will note UMBC’s own Dr. Tom Schaller is a contributor.)

Five hundred and thirty eight is the number of electors in our country’s never-a-problem electoral college. Zero is the number of people more adept than Nate Silver at supposing the outcome of their votes.

FiveThirtyEight’s recipe for calling elections is simple but yields unbelievably rich results: Silver takes a wide assortment of polling data along with other factors relevant to the contest at hand, no matter if it’s at the district, state, or national level; he mixes all those variables together in a pan and lets them bake at 350 degrees in the comprehensive statistical models of his own design; and then he takes a slice, gives it a taste, and shares what he’s got.

Sometimes the result comes closer to devil’s food and the Democrat is more likely to win; sometimes it’s closer to red velvet and the Republican is the safer bet.

No matter what he dishes up, though, Nate Silver is a very, very good baker. His predictions on who can expect to win where in any given election have been startlingly accurate (though figuring out why is always more complicated).

After his nearly flawless call of the 2008 election, the New York Times was sufficiently impressed to hire this former full-time online poker player as their fair-haired boy in the numbers department. (Yes, that’s right: Silver used to be a professional gambler. It wasn’t until a few years ago, when Congress started moving to contain the online gambling industry with legislation, that he turned his eye to the complexities of how those do-gooders get elected in the first place.) He is one of the best examples of how someone can go from blogging on his living room sofa to getting paid by the New York Times to blog on his presumably much nicer living room sofa.

Silver recently chatted with the USDemocrazy team over enchiladas at an undisclosed Mexican restaurant in suburban Baltimore. He talked about a lot of things; he’s an affable guy — not one of these people who loves to hear himself talk but someone who just has a lot to talk about.

We asked him about his new book set to be released in September by Penguin under the simultaneously dramatic and anti-dramatic name, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t. The title, he explained, comes from the tendency of pro predictors like himself to follow the wrong leads, identify patterns where there are none, see noise and mistake it for signal.

Slver shared

“In general, people overstate how well they can predict the future and how much knowledge they have about how they can apply from the past to the future.”

And in light of all the attention surrounding FiveThirtyEight and statistical projections, what about the future of predictions themselves? Are we relying on them too much?

“If people want more accurate predictions then they have some hard work to do, because that often means developing theories about the way things really work… It’s not just crunching numbers.”

We weren’t going to argue with him. After all, the numbers seem to be on his side.

Although many of us may already feel shell-shocked by the barrage of negative TV ads this election year, it seems certain the volume on these babies is about to get cranked up. Some speculate $6 Billion will be spent/wasted on this election.

A hefty sum of that colossal sum will be spent on those pesky annoying attack commercials.

If the politicians won’t turn down the volume on their political rhetoric….we will be sure out tv remote does the job for them.

MS Thesis Defense

Calculating Representativeness of
Geographic Sites Across the World

Ashwinkumar Ganesan

11:00am Friday, 31 August 2012, ITE 325b, UMBC

GLOBE is a global correlation engine, a project to study the effects of human activity on land change based on a set of parameters that include temperature, forest cover, human population, atmospheric parameters, and many other variables. The aim of this research is to understand how a land change study or set of studies of specific geographic areas generalizes to other areas of the world. The generic form of the question is – given a set of data points with a set of variables, how can we determine how much a selected subset of points represents the rest of the distribution. The research aims to answer a set of questions which include the definition of representativeness of a geographical site and how the representativeness can be computed. Land change researchers will dynamically select a subset of variables which they would like to study. Hence the method developed not only computes representativeness, but must do so in an efficient manner. For this purpose, we apply dimension reduction techniques to reduce the size of computation and analyze the effectiveness of using these techniques to calculate representativeness.

Committee: Drs. Tim Oates (chair), Tim Finin and Dr. Matt Schmill