If you haven’t yet seen the recent televised guffaw by Republican Presidential candidate Rick Perry, it is worth a look.

But there was an earlier televised debate where Gov. Perry was actually talking some sense.

He was defending an executive order he had signed in Texas mandating young women be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV) the most common sexually transmitted infection.

Michele Bachmann did her best to take him to task for this.

NPR ran a story this week about the growing support among medical professionals that both girls AND BOYS should get the vaccine for human papillomavirus.

This isn’t an entirely new idea; there have been calls for both-sex vaccination for years.

The renewed debate might have to do with the desire to base medical recommendations less on normative gender roles and more on public health pragmatism.

While to many people HPV is linked only with cervical cancer, there are a number of other maladies with which the virus is associated.

Many more people are at risk that was originally thought.

So what do you think? Was Perry right to push the vaccination as an issue of public health? If not, shouldn’t we still be concerned about this issue? Does it make more sense to recommend that both men and women be vaccinated?

The UMBC Ebiquity Lab is hosting the November meeting of the Lotico Central Maryland Semantic Web Meetup from 6:00-8:00 pm on Tuesday November 15 in room 456 of the ITE building (directions).

“This is free social network and meeting community open to industry, government and academia. The goal of the organizers is to create a vendor neutral environment for open discussion and provide the membership with a valuable resource of information on industry trends and ongoing research.”

All are welcome. If you want to attend, please join the Central MD Semantic Web Meetup group and RSVP. The meeting will start with a pizza social from 6:00pm to 6:45pm and then continue with a series of short presentations of current Semantic Web research being done in our lab.

• Tim Finin: introduction and overview
• Laura Zavela: Mobile, collaborative, context-aware systems

  slides

  The Semantic Web provides the technology and knowledge constructs to create a rich notion of context that goes beyond current networking applications focusing mostly on location. The context model includes location and surroundings, the presence of people and devices, inferred activities and the roles people fill in them.

• Varish Mulwad: Automatically generating linked data from tables

  slides

  Evidence for a table’s meaning can be found in its metadata but currently requires human interpretation. We describe techniques grounded in graphical models and probabilistic reasoning to infer meaning associated with a table. Using background knowledge from the Linked Open Data cloud, we automatically infer the semantics of column headers, table cell values (e.g., strings and numbers) and relations between columns and represent the inferred meaning as graph of RDF triples.

• Lushan Han: A Question Answering System for DBpedia

  slides

  Users need better ways to explore linked open data collections and obtain information from it. Using SPARQL requires not only mastering its syntax and semantics but also understanding the RDF data model, the ontology used by the DBpedia, and URIs for entities of interest. Natural language question answering systems solve the problem, but these are still subjects of research. We are developing a compromise approach in which non-experts specify a graphical “skeleton” for a query and annotate it with freely chosen words, phrases and entity names. The combination reduces ambiguity and allows us to reliably produce an interpretation that can be translated into SPARQL.

• Karuna Joshi: Smarter semantic cloud services

  slides

  We propose a semantically rich, policy-based framework to automate the lifecycle of cloud services. We have divided the IT service lifecycle into the five phases of requirements, discovery, negotiation, composition, and consumption. We detail each phase and describe the high level ontologies that we have developed to describe them. Our research complements previous work on ontologies for service descriptions in that it goes beyond simple matchmaking and is focused on supporting negotiation for the particulars of IT services.

See this map for the building location and information on visitor parking. The recommended lot is just across from the entrance to UMBC’s campus from I-95. To access it, turn right and then turn left at the first stop sign onto Administration Drive. You can park on the lower level after 3:30pm by putting two quarters into the box at the gate. The upper level has parking meters that take quarters ($1/hr) and a change machine is located near the entrance.

If you were among the millions who bought the new iPhone 4S, then you can thank Dr. Harry Chen, the UMBC alumnus who helped develop the phone’s most notable new feature: Siri.

For those not among the millions, here’s a bit of background:  Siri is a virtual assistant that responds to voice commands. “She” can do things like make phone calls, send text messages, set alarms, and find directions. But, the remarkable thing about Siri is that she understands intent. Tell Siri “I’m drunk,” and she’ll bring up a list of cab services in the area. Tell Siri “I want a burger” and she’ll direct you to burger joints nearby, according to ratings.

Chen is a triple-play computer science UMBC alumnus, earning his bachelor’s degree in the subject in 1998, his master’s degree in 2000, and his doctorate in 2004.

Read the full story on UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering site.

Read more alumni stories on Retriever Net.