Blog of Random Thoughts and Pictures

Bumper FP7 Call Open Day

July 30th, 2009

What a day for open calls on the FP7 site Transport, Space, Socio-economic sciences and Humanities, Energy, Nanosciences, Nanotechnologies, Materials and new Production Technologies, Research Infrastructures, Environment, Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology Health and my very own favourite Information and Communication Technologies.
So EU FP7 ICT Call 5 is finally open today with a deadline of 26 October 2009 at 17.00.00 (Brussels local time) and an indicative budget: EUR 732 million
FP7- ICT -2009-5 is going to cover

Challenge 1: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures

ICT 2009.1.1 The Network of the Future
ICT 2009.1.2 Internet of Services, Software & virtualisation
ICT 2009.1.3 Internet of Things and enterprise environments
ICT 2009.1.4 Trustworthy ICT
ICT 2009.1.6 Future Internet Experimental Facility and Experimentally-driven Research
Challenge 3: Components, systems, engineering
ICT 2009.3.1 Nanoelectronics Technology
ICT 2009.3.5 Engineering of Networked Monitoring and Control Systems
ICT 2009.3.7 Photonics
ICT 2009.3.9 Microsystems and Smart Miniaturised Systems
Challenge 4: Digital Libraries and Content
ICT 2009.4.2 Technology- Enhanced Learning
ICT 2009.4.3 Intelligent information management
Future and emerging technologies
ICT 2009.8.4 Human-Computer Confluence
ICT 2009.8.5 Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems
ICT 2009.8.6 Towards Zero- Power ICT
ICT 2009.8.9 Coordinating Communities, Plans and Actions in FET Proactive Initiatives
ICT 2009.8.10 Identifying new research topics, Assessing emerging global S&T trends in ICT for future FET Proactive initiatives
Horizontal support actions
ICT 2009.9.2 Supplements to support International Cooperation between ongoing projects
ICT 2009.9.5: Supplements to Strengthen Cooperation in ICT R&D in an Enlarged Europe
The competition in this call is going to be massive, you have on avaerage a 16% chance of being successfully from the call and when looking at the stats from EU FP7 Call 4 getting scored above the threshold will not be an easy task!

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Interactive data visualisation

July 19th, 2009

While compiling my last entry on the map of science it did make me think that in this day and age data visualisation in the ICT world should be more interactive, like this visualisation of the Linux kernel.
What caught my eye was this work by Tony Hirst on visualising the lap time data from Australian F1 grand-prix in 2009 using ManyEyes, which has led onto some very interesting social commentary on the visualisation of UK MP’s expenses.
But is all these cases of visualisation research an after the fact activity with steady data sets and results.
Copyright of UC Regents 2009
But I wonder can macro architectural network patterns married with micro network component specifications and fused in a data visualisation tool, be a way to address future Internet design, pre-deployment?
And to make this happen, what exact “steady” data would I need to realise such a wonder?

Map of Science

July 12th, 2009

I’ve always had an interest in data visualisation, one of my most viewed blog entries is on a data visualisation of the relationships between different scientific disciplines, which is currently framed and hanging on my home office wall (the only one!), so this recently published map of a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains has had me interested again.
This time the data visualisation is based on the collection

of nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia. The resulting reference data set covers a significant part of world-wide use of scholarly web portals in 2006, and provides a balanced coverage of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A journal clickstream model, i.e. a first-order Markov chain, was extracted from the sequences of user interactions in the logs. The clickstream model was validated by comparing it to the Getty Research Institute’s Architecture and Art Thesaurus. The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains ….

and is full recorded in a paper by Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel, Aric Hagberg, Luis Bettencourt, Ryan Chute, Marko A. Rodriguez, Lyudmila Balakireva, “Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science”
What results is a map that

represents the structure of scholarly activity from an observational perspective, not from a prescriptive or motivational one. User interactions with scholarly web portals are shaped by many constraints, including citation links, search engine results, and user interface features. In this paper we do not attempt to explain or motivate these interactions, but merely to demonstrate how their overall structure can be charted and described from clickstream maps of science.

Watch out the image is large
The PLoS site related to this paper has some interesting comments and the related article from the NY Times: Map of Knowledge offers some further insight from the authors.

Innovation, research & innovation what’s the formula for a smart economy?

July 5th, 2009

There’s a debate raging at the moment in Ireland about the smart economy and it appears in these undoubtly tough times we are struggling with the innovation idea.
Photo Credit: miguelpdl on flicker http://www.flickr.com/photos/miguelpdl/3691759174/ industry collaboration and academic research or is the pursuit of IP a distraction.
Can it be that shearing Ireland’s science budget would be a mistake of monumental proportions because the figures are only coming to light now, or are these really all the facts and figures.
Maybe this new Innovation Taskforce will get to the bottom of it and set us on the right track, that’s of course assuming that Ireland cares!
At least the science parks are in place, which maybe the key.
I leave these thoughts with a quote via @Leslie Lamport

Jean Renoir wrote in his autobiography that someone once asked his father, the painter Auguste, why he painted from nature. Renoir père answered that if he were to try painting a tree in the studio, he would be able to draw four or five different kinds of leaves, and the rest would all look like them. But nature creates millions [his count] of different kinds of trees.