Planet ISKCON

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

The basic unit of measurement in the Vedic literature is the yojana. Thompson has calculated a yojana to be 8.59 miles long. One yojana is 32,000 hastas. One hasta is 432 millimeters (the number 432 should be familiar to anyone well read in the Vedic literature).

One might ask why there such a correspondence between the Vedic and Western distance measurement units? It surely is not simply coincidence?

The answer is that both a latitude based, that is, they are based on the size of Earth. The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes was (supposedly) the first person to calculate the size of earth. He used a well (in Syene) with the sun directly overhead as a reference point, measured the length of a shadow from a post some distance away (in Alexandria) and used the angled derived to estimate the size of the Earth.

There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians knew of latitude and longitude long before Eratosthenes. Similarly, Vedic civilization seems to also have had exact knowledge of the size and shape of the Earth.

The circumference of the Earth as the poles is very close to 108 x ten-billion hastas (108 is another number which should be familiar to students of the Vedic literature).

Interestingly, the distance from the Earth to the Sun (using figures from modern astronomy) equals 10821.6 thousands yojanas. Again, a figure surprisingly close to 108. Further suggesting a connection between the map of the Earth and map of the solar system.

The Vedic civilization that the Bhagavatam describes is both mysterious and amazing. It had incredibly advanced scientific knowledge and it's traces can be found on nearly every continent of the world. Thompson urges us to be on the lookout for more evidence that may shed light on this hidden chapter of human history.

(Thus ends the book: God & Science by Richard L. Thompson. I have left out much of the detail, many of the examples and analogies and all the mathematical proofs in my short summaries. Please buy the book and support Thompson's efforts if you are at all interested in learning more.)

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

The basic unit of measurement in the Vedic literature is the yojana. Thompson has calculated a yojana to be 8.59 miles long. One yojana is 32,000 hastas. One hasta is 432 millimeters (the number 432 should be familiar to anyone well read in the Vedic literature).

One might ask why there such a correspondence between the Vedic and Western distance measurement units? It surely is not simply coincidence?

The answer is that both a latitude based, that is, they are based on the size of Earth. The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes was (supposedly) the first person to calculate the size of earth. He used a well (in Syene) with the sun directly overhead as a reference point, measured the length of a shadow from a post some distance away (in Alexandria) and used the angled derived to estimate the size of the Earth.

There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians knew of latitude and longitude long before Eratosthenes. Similarly, Vedic civilization seems to also have had exact knowledge of the size and shape of the Earth.

The circumference of the Earth as the poles is very close to 108 x ten-billion hastas (108 is another number which should be familiar to students of the Vedic literature).

Interestingly, the distance from the Earth to the Sun (using figures from modern astronomy) equals 10821.6 thousands yojanas. Again, a figure surprisingly close to 108. Further suggesting a connection between the map of the Earth and map of the solar system.

The Vedic civilization that the Bhagavatam describes is both mysterious and amazing. It had incredibly advanced scientific knowledge and it's traces can be found on nearly every continent of the world. Thompson urges us to be on the lookout for more evidence that may shed light on this hidden chapter of human history.

(Thus ends the book: God & Science by Richard L. Thompson. I have left out much of the detail, many of the examples and analogies and all the mathematical proofs in my short summaries. Please buy the book and support Thompson's efforts if you are at all interested in learning more.)

My body is still not working right, but now slightly better. Some new advice just in from Dr. Philip on how to heal the ulcer(s):

• Drastically increased dosage of Probiotics
• Drastically increased dosage of Bentonite Clay and Slippery Elm powder
• As much Aloe Vera juice as I can drink
• No food

My body is still not working right, but now slightly better. Some new advice just in from Dr. Philip on how to heal the ulcer(s):

• Drastically increased dosage of Probiotics
• Drastically increased dosage of Bentonite Clay and Slippery Elm powder
• As much Aloe Vera juice as I can drink
• No food

It has been two weeks since my trip to Canada for the K-CAP conference. Traveling to the out-of-the-way town of Banff took a total of 22 hours of continuous travel each way. The ordeal of traveling for such a length of time twice within one week certainly took its tole on my body. I'm feeling the damage now.

I've found that one faces three reactions for neglecting the body. One the next day, the next two weeks afterwards and another as a reduction in one's overall life-span. While I haven't yet experienced the last one (or I can't remember those many past lives where I have experienced it), the first two certainly hold true.

Now, two weeks after my return from Banff, my digestion system has gone on strike. "I will digest food no more!", it says. "Too much unhealthy (wheat and dairy) food, too much flying in toxic airplanes, too many long nights without adequate rest".

For the last week I've been having intense stomach pains exactly an hour after attempting to eat any type of food. The undigested food passes straight through me.

I know what this is, of course. It's not like it hasn't happened before. A newly formed ulcer is sabotaging my colon. Ulcerative colitis in all its glory. The result: I've lost what little weight I had (now weight 57 kg), sleep for 12 hours a day, have no energy and am really irritable when I am awake.

Solution?

I'm (again) taking a colon cleansing juice-mix that Dr. Philip Weeks recommends:

• juice of 3 apples
• juice of 3 carrots
• 1/4 of a lemon
• thumbnail size chunk of fresh ginger
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 4 cloves of garlic

I hate this juice and certainly don't recommend it for anyone. The garlic especially wreaks havoc on my consciousness. It has great healing properties, but has equally great disturbing effects on any kind of meditation practice. I can't concentrate on anything.

Anyway, lets hope my body starts working again soon. It's really annoying when this happens. I'll have to start all-over, slowly building the body back up. If nothing else, it is a good lesson for what the time of death is like.

It has been two weeks since my trip to Canada for the K-CAP conference. Traveling to the out-of-the-way town of Banff took a total of 22 hours of continuous travel each way. The ordeal of traveling for such a length of time twice within one week certainly took its tole on my body. I'm feeling the damage now.

I've found that one faces three reactions for neglecting the body. One the next day, the next two weeks afterwards and another as a reduction in one's overall life-span. While I haven't yet experienced the last one (or I can't remember those many past lives where I have experienced it), the first two certainly hold true.

Now, two weeks after my return from Banff, my digestion system has gone on strike. "I will digest food no more!", it says. "Too much unhealthy (wheat and dairy) food, too much flying in toxic airplanes, too many long nights without adequate rest".

For the last week I've been having intense stomach pains exactly an hour after attempting to eat any type of food. The undigested food passes straight through me.

I know what this is, of course. It's not like it hasn't happened before. A newly formed ulcer is sabotaging my colon. Ulcerative colitis in all its glory. The result: I've lost what little weight I had (now weight 57 kg), sleep for 12 hours a day, have no energy and am really irritable when I am awake.

Solution?

I'm (again) taking a colon cleansing juice-mix that Dr. Philip Weeks recommends:

• juice of 3 apples
• juice of 3 carrots
• 1/4 of a lemon
• thumbnail size chunk of fresh ginger
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• 4 cloves of garlic

I hate this juice and certainly don't recommend it for anyone. The garlic especially wreaks havoc on my consciousness. It has great healing properties, but has equally great disturbing effects on any kind of meditation practice. I can't concentrate on anything.

Anyway, lets hope my body starts working again soon. It's really annoying when this happens. I'll have to start all-over, slowly building the body back up. If nothing else, it is a good lesson for what the time of death is like.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

The Srimad-Bhagavatam describes the Bhu-mandala, the Universe. At first glance these descriptions are inconsistent and constantly contract one another. However, when viewed with the correct understanding, it all makes sense.

Bhu-mandala simultaneously describes four things:

• a topographical map of south-central Asia
• a polar-projection map of the Earth
• a map of the solar system
• a map of the celestial heavens of the demigods

Bhu-mandala can be seen as a topographical maps of south-central Asia. The various peaks of the Himalayan mountains are accurately depicted on the North/top of the map.

The Bhagavatam certainly doesn't have the primitive idea that the Earth flat. There are plenty of indirect references to a globe-shaped Earth. Bhu-mandala, understood as a map of the Earth, is an astrological map. Lines on the map show the exact orbital paths of various stars and planets from the Earth's perspective.

Bhu-mandala can also be taken as a map of the solar system up to Saturn. The orbits of the planets in the solar system lie on a nearly flat plane, so the flatness of the map does not cause any trouble here. Furthermore, the distances given in the Bhagavatam closely match the recent astronomical measurements.

Finally, Bhu-mandala, viewed as a map of the paradisiacal lands of the demigods, explains the extremely large distances which are sometimes quoted in the text. For example: India is described to be 72,000 miles across (3 times the circumference of the Earth). This is no mistake, after all demigods like Lord Siva are said to be nearly the size of Europe.

The various maps are overlaid because they are interconnected. Mystic yogis could use the various points of interconnection as "short-cuts" through space in order to very quickly transport themselves between Earth, the celestial realms and other planets.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

The Srimad-Bhagavatam describes the Bhu-mandala, the Universe. At first glance these descriptions are inconsistent and constantly contract one another. However, when viewed with the correct understanding, it all makes sense.

Bhu-mandala simultaneously describes four things:

• a topographical map of south-central Asia
• a polar-projection map of the Earth
• a map of the solar system
• a map of the celestial heavens of the demigods

Bhu-mandala can be seen as a topographical maps of south-central Asia. The various peaks of the Himalayan mountains are accurately depicted on the North/top of the map.

The Bhagavatam certainly doesn't have the primitive idea that the Earth flat. There are plenty of indirect references to a globe-shaped Earth. Bhu-mandala, understood as a map of the Earth, is an astrological map. Lines on the map show the exact orbital paths of various stars and planets from the Earth's perspective.

Bhu-mandala can also be taken as a map of the solar system up to Saturn. The orbits of the planets in the solar system lie on a nearly flat plane, so the flatness of the map does not cause any trouble here. Furthermore, the distances given in the Bhagavatam closely match the recent astronomical measurements.

Finally, Bhu-mandala, viewed as a map of the paradisiacal lands of the demigods, explains the extremely large distances which are sometimes quoted in the text. For example: India is described to be 72,000 miles across (3 times the circumference of the Earth). This is no mistake, after all demigods like Lord Siva are said to be nearly the size of Europe.

The various maps are overlaid because they are interconnected. Mystic yogis could use the various points of interconnection as "short-cuts" through space in order to very quickly transport themselves between Earth, the celestial realms and other planets.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

The Greek author Aratos wrote tales of progressively more degraded ages. In the final bronze age "they tasted the meat of cows, the first who did it". Protecting cows is a prominent theme in the Vedic literature, but not so common in Europe. It is therefore surprising to find a classical author highlighting these principles. Unless, of course, he got the idea from the Vedic culture. The Vedic literature also describes cycles of ages called yugas: Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. Each with progressively shorter human life-spans (100000, 10000, 1000 and 100 years respectively).

The Sioux Native American Indians say they were visited by a celestial woman who gave them their religion. She was said to have talked about four ages and a sacred buffalo that loses one leg during each age. In the present age the buffalo has only one leg. This story will sound familiar to anyone who has read the Srimad-Bhagavatam's story of Maharaja Pariksit and the bull of Dharma.

The Bible describes only a very short time-span of human history. Still, it is interesting that the people in the early Biblical stories lived for around 1000 years, as we might expect for people living in Dvapara-yuga:

• Adam: 930 years
• Seth: 912 years
• Enos: 905 years
• Noah: 950 years
• Jared: 962 years
• Kenan: 910 years

After the great flood life spans gradually decreased to the around 100 years we have today.

• Shem: 600 years
• Salah: 438 years
• Abraham: 175 years
• Issac: 180 years
• Jacob: 147 years
• Moses: 120 years

The flood is generally believed to have taken place sometime in the second or third millennium B.C. Similarly, the date given in the Vedic literature for the beginning of Kali-yuga is February 18th, 3102 B.C.

Norse mythology is also surprisingly similar to the Vedic world-view. The Norse Ragnarok, for example, tells of the destruction of the Earth. Its timeline fits in well with the Vedic period of 1000-yuga cycles, called a day of Brahma, after which the most of the Universe is destroyed.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

The Greek author Aratos wrote tales of progressively more degraded ages. In the final bronze age "they tasted the meat of cows, the first who did it". Protecting cows is a prominent theme in the Vedic literature, but not so common in Europe. It is therefore surprising to find a classical author highlighting these principles. Unless, of course, he got the idea from the Vedic culture. The Vedic literature also describes cycles of ages called yugas: Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. Each with progressively shorter human life-spans (100000, 10000, 1000 and 100 years respectively).

The Sioux Native American Indians say they were visited by a celestial woman who gave them their religion. She was said to have talked about four ages and a sacred buffalo that loses one leg during each age. In the present age the buffalo has only one leg. This story will sound familiar to anyone who has read the Srimad-Bhagavatam's story of Maharaja Pariksit and the bull of Dharma.

The Bible describes only a very short time-span of human history. Still, it is interesting that the people in the early Biblical stories lived for around 1000 years, as we might expect for people living in Dvapara-yuga:

• Adam: 930 years
• Seth: 912 years
• Enos: 905 years
• Noah: 950 years
• Jared: 962 years
• Kenan: 910 years

After the great flood life spans gradually decreased to the around 100 years we have today.

• Shem: 600 years
• Salah: 438 years
• Abraham: 175 years
• Issac: 180 years
• Jacob: 147 years
• Moses: 120 years

The flood is generally believed to have taken place sometime in the second or third millennium B.C. Similarly, the date given in the Vedic literature for the beginning of Kali-yuga is February 18th, 3102 B.C.

Norse mythology is also surprisingly similar to the Vedic world-view. The Norse Ragnarok, for example, tells of the destruction of the Earth. Its timeline fits in well with the Vedic period of 1000-yuga cycles, called a day of Brahma, after which the most of the Universe is destroyed.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of botany and evangelical Christian, was a friend of Charles Darwin's. Gray accept evolution, but insisted that God had to have designed and created the bodily forms of all living beings. However, the laws of physics, as we know them, do not allow for some supernatural being influencing physical events. Other theologians such as George Frederick Wright, a geologist and Calvinist minister, argued that God is only interested in the ultimate cause of nature. God merely set up the laws of nature and then let nature unfold naturally.

Science has not been able to show that all universal events follow the laws of nature as we know them. The Vedic view of creation may give us more insights:

Saint Augustine (borrowing an idea from Plotinus) described seeds of creation. Similary, the Srimad-Bhagavatam described God injecting bijas, creative seeds, that hold the information to form the Universe into the material world at the moment its creation. Brahma and other subtle beings then use this information, much like user might use a virtual reality computer program, to build the Universe as we know it.

This solves Gray's and Wright's dilemma. God doesn't violate the laws of nature and still plays a significant role in the creation of the Universe. However, it does involve subtle laws of nature which are outside the purview of modern science.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of botany and evangelical Christian, was a friend of Charles Darwin's. Gray accept evolution, but insisted that God had to have designed and created the bodily forms of all living beings. However, the laws of physics, as we know them, do not allow for some supernatural being influencing physical events. Other theologians such as George Frederick Wright, a geologist and Calvinist minister, argued that God is only interested in the ultimate cause of nature. God merely set up the laws of nature and then let nature unfold naturally.

Science has not been able to show that all universal events follow the laws of nature as we know them. The Vedic view of creation may give us more insights:

Saint Augustine (borrowing an idea from Plotinus) described seeds of creation. Similary, the Srimad-Bhagavatam described God injecting bijas, creative seeds, that hold the information to form the Universe into the material world at the moment its creation. Brahma and other subtle beings then use this information, much like user might use a virtual reality computer program, to build the Universe as we know it.

This solves Gray's and Wright's dilemma. God doesn't violate the laws of nature and still plays a significant role in the creation of the Universe. However, it does involve subtle laws of nature which are outside the purview of modern science.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

In 1987 an article in Nature seemed to show, by studying the mitochondrial DNA of people from all continents, that they all had a common ancestor, one woman living in African 200,000 year ago. However, in 1992 Alan Templeton from the University of Washington showed that the original computer simulations were inaccurate and both the time and place of "Eve" were incomputable.

Humans and apes are not, as evolutionist believe, similar because they descended from the same creature. Instead, as the Srimad-Bhagavatam reveals, Brahma, the original superhuman being, generated beings called prajapatis, who, in turn, created generations of lesser creatures: plants, animals, humans, etc.

These living beings are similar to each other because they are modified versions of the same original template. Just as a computer programmer might re-use a program he has written in the past, the intelligent designer who created us worked from a basic design which he modified to suit different purposes.

This theory of intelligent design overcomes the difficulty that evolutionists have in explaining how some organisms have complex structures. Given complex feature, there often is no clear chain of mutations that could have produced it by evolution, nor is there evidence of an intermediate form.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

In 1987 an article in Nature seemed to show, by studying the mitochondrial DNA of people from all continents, that they all had a common ancestor, one woman living in African 200,000 year ago. However, in 1992 Alan Templeton from the University of Washington showed that the original computer simulations were inaccurate and both the time and place of "Eve" were incomputable.

Humans and apes are not, as evolutionist believe, similar because they descended from the same creature. Instead, as the Srimad-Bhagavatam reveals, Brahma, the original superhuman being, generated beings called prajapatis, who, in turn, created generations of lesser creatures: plants, animals, humans, etc.

These living beings are similar to each other because they are modified versions of the same original template. Just as a computer programmer might re-use a program he has written in the past, the intelligent designer who created us worked from a basic design which he modified to suit different purposes.

This theory of intelligent design overcomes the difficulty that evolutionists have in explaining how some organisms have complex structures. Given complex feature, there often is no clear chain of mutations that could have produced it by evolution, nor is there evidence of an intermediate form.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Stanley Miller of the University of Chicago did a famous experiment in which he created amino acids from methane, ammonia and hydrogen by electrifying a test tube. Artificial life by chemistry! Not quite, these elements weren't readily available on primordial earth. But supposing they were and amino acids could form:

Amino acids can not randomly form into complex organisms capable of self-reproduction. Even a semi-random formation process semi-guided by the rules of chemical bonding will tend to gravitate to very simple stable structures. Complex formations are only possible if a very specific initial state is set up purposefully [see John Conway's Game of Life to illustrate this: try some of the given examples and then try inputting some random patterns].

So a complex self-reproducing DNA-based organism cannot come about by chance. So, simple RNA-based organism might have been created. However, RNA can only be formed from amino acids by very specialized coaxing from scientists. But supposing RNA-based life-forms did form, they still would have to evolve into sometime more complex than themselves. Evolution does not however create new features [again, the Game of Life as well as Ripple-Down Rules illustrate this]. An RNA-based self-reproducer will only exhibit slight variations by random mutation.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

Stanley Miller of the University of Chicago did a famous experiment in which he created amino acids from methane, ammonia and hydrogen by electrifying a test tube. Artificial life by chemistry! Not quite, these elements weren't readily available on primordial earth. But supposing they were and amino acids could form:

Amino acids can not randomly form into complex organisms capable of self-reproduction. Even a semi-random formation process semi-guided by the rules of chemical bonding will tend to gravitate to very simple stable structures. Complex formations are only possible if a very specific initial state is set up purposefully [see John Conway's Game of Life to illustrate this: try some of the given examples and then try inputting some random patterns].

So a complex self-reproducing DNA-based organism cannot come about by chance. So, simple RNA-based organism might have been created. However, RNA can only be formed from amino acids by very specialized coaxing from scientists. But supposing RNA-based life-forms did form, they still would have to evolve into sometime more complex than themselves. Evolution does not however create new features [again, the Game of Life as well as Ripple-Down Rules illustrate this]. An RNA-based self-reproducer will only exhibit slight variations by random mutation.

Second session of Vedicsoc today. I'm not too happy with how it went.

11 people came, down from 25 in the first session. That was a nice manageable amount of people. The slow-deep aerobic yoga went well (though these students are seriously unfit, I dare not attempt a full power yoga session). Chanting of Hare Krishna afterwards went okay, but people found it hard to concentrate. It might have had something to do with some crazy guy practicing on his huge drum kit next door.

The carob cake I made was well received. 6 people bought chanting beads to take home with them.

However, my talk on "stress" was forced, confusing, lacked cohesion and didn't really say anything. I struggled for words, often pausing several times mid-sentence. Most of the audience seemed bored. I couldn't explain even the simplest philosophical concepts in a user-friendly way. Has all my Krishna consciousness evaporated in Canada? It certainly seems that way. Lack of prasadam and lack of uninterrupted, attentive chanting have certainly taken their toll. My soul needs a serious detox.

I also didn't allow people to speculate enough. Especially initially, University students like to feel like they know everything already. I need to encourage more open non-judgmental discussion. Surrender can come later.

Also, (note to self) there is nothing wrong with people just chatting amongst themselves. It builds the social fabric of the club. One observation however: men are wolves.

Second session of Vedicsoc today. I'm not too happy with how it went.

11 people came, down from 25 in the first session. That was a nice manageable amount of people. The slow-deep aerobic yoga went well (though these students are seriously unfit, I dare not attempt a full power yoga session). Chanting of Hare Krishna afterwards went okay, but people found it hard to concentrate. It might have had something to do with some crazy guy practicing on his huge drum kit next door.

The carob cake I made was well received. 6 people bought chanting beads to take home with them.

However, my talk on "stress" was forced, confusing, lacked cohesion and didn't really say anything. I struggled for words, often pausing several times mid-sentence. Most of the audience seemed bored. I couldn't explain even the simplest philosophical concepts in a user-friendly way. Has all my Krishna consciousness evaporated in Canada? It certainly seems that way. Lack of prasadam and lack of uninterrupted, attentive chanting have certainly taken their toll. My soul needs a serious detox.

I also didn't allow people to speculate enough. Especially initially, University students like to feel like they know everything already. I need to encourage more open non-judgmental discussion. Surrender can come later.

Also, (note to self) there is nothing wrong with people just chatting amongst themselves. It builds the social fabric of the club. One observation however: men are wolves.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

In quantum mechanics the observer supposedly has the power to affect the experiment. For example, a cat in a sealed box may be both alive and dead at the same time until an observer (man or machine) checks. However, from the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita it seems that the supersoul should be able to observe all occurrences. This creates some trouble in relation to quantum mechanics. Therefore we might consider that just as classical physics was incomplete until the discovery of relativity and relativity was superseded to some extent by quantum mechanics, so there is another, more complete, physics reality beyond quantum mechanics which we have yet to discover. The science of mind manipulating matter.

(chapter summary from God and Science by Richard L. Thompson)

In quantum mechanics the observer supposedly has the power to affect the experiment. For example, a cat in a sealed box may be both alive and dead at the same time until an observer (man or machine) checks. However, from the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita it seems that the supersoul should be able to observe all occurrences. This creates some trouble in relation to quantum mechanics. Therefore we might consider that just as classical physics was incomplete until the discovery of relativity and relativity was superseded to some extent by quantum mechanics, so there is another, more complete, physics reality beyond quantum mechanics which we have yet to discover. The science of mind manipulating matter.

People's attention is a very limited resource in today's day and age. So many things compete for one's attention that one is forced to pay "partial continuous attention" to everything. It drives people crazy!

The highest complement is therefore to pay full attention to someone. Paying attention to Krishna while chanting the Maha-Mantra is exactly that. Paying full attention to other people gives them a feeling of trust, protection and belonging. The newest thinking in advertizing today is to evoke such feelings in the people. Those feelings are what people are missing. They are what people are craving.

People's attention is a very limited resource in today's day and age. So many things compete for one's attention that one is forced to pay "partial continuous attention" to everything. It drives people crazy!

The highest complement is therefore to pay full attention to someone. Paying attention to Krishna while chanting the Maha-Mantra is exactly that. Paying full attention to other people gives them a feeling of trust, protection and belonging. The newest thinking in advertizing today is to evoke such feelings in the people. Those feelings are what people are missing. They are what people are craving.

19|1After 22 hours of travel I'm back in the UK. Damage from an irregular diet is starting to heal, my sleeping patterns are slowly getting back to normal, the spontaneous bleeding of my hands has stopped and I'm slowly getting some energy once again.

Most people would consider this temporary relief from suffering true happiness. Suckers!

Take a look at some of the pictures of the Mother Nature's beautiful artistry in Banff, Canada.

19|1After 22 hours of travel I'm back in the UK. Damage from an irregular diet is starting to heal, my sleeping patterns are slowly getting back to normal, the spontaneous bleeding of my hands has stopped and I'm slowly getting some energy once again.

Most people would consider this temporary relief from suffering true happiness. Suckers!

Take a look at some of the pictures of the Mother Nature's beautiful artistry in Banff, Canada.

Today, over breakfast, I was at a table with various high-powered researchers. One of them has been up all night writing an "emergency paper" for the boss of a friend. The topic of schmoozing came up.

They enlightened me that it is very important to complement even the most senior speaker on their keynote presentation. The may seem like they are all-powerful and supremely intelligent, but, in reality, they are just as insecure as everyone else about whether they did a good job and people liked their talk. The trick is to boost their ego, become their friend and get them to help you out.

Research is mostly funded by various government agencies (EPSRC and JISC in the UK and DARPA and NASA in the US). At big conferences there are invite-only "brainstorming" sessions where the agency??(TM)s officers discuss with the researchers what the next big research grant should focus on. This is a chance for the University professors to argue that their line of research is best and should be funded (even if it isn??(TM)t ??¦ in fact: especially if it isn??(TM)t).

The key in these brainstorming sessions is to injecting one's ideas into as many other peoples??(TM) mind as possible before these meetings. It??(TM)s a horrible thing to do and one may have to have a shower afterwards to wash off the slime, but the more people argue one??(TM)s case, the better the chance of getting the money.

However, in the end, all this is somewhat of a pretense. The actual decision is made in the pub after the session. The grant officers will give the contract to their friends. Their friends are their drinking buddies. The really successful researchers are those that manipulate the social scene to make everyone their friend. For example, people like Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt are primarily famous not because they are brilliant researchers (though, of course, that must also be there), but because they knows everyone and everyone knows them.

What, if you don't drink? Well, better start soon.

It works the same in most industries. Film producers for example spend most of their time in the five year production cycle of a film going to cocktail parties meeting the potential funders, potential actors and potential directors. They negotiate the production crew over a few drinks. Sometimes a key member will pull out of the agreement and they need to go to more parties to recruit new staff.

Ministers in the Greek government spend most of their time at the ministry drinking coffee with one another. The do this because they need to know that they can pick up the phone, talk to a friend, ask for a report and get it delivered to them next morning.

In the UK and USA beer replaces coffee. Each country has its own style.

When one then finally has the grant money one often can't spend it fast enough. If one doesn't spend all of the money one has been granted, then one obviously didn't need it in the first place, so one will get less next time. Some projects therefore need to get very creative in how they can burn money. They will, for example, finance trips overseas for the entire research group. Even then, sometimes one simply cannot spend enough of the government grant money. In such cases one needs to extend the grant due to "staffing issues". In other words, in order to fudge the records one, once again, needs to be in cahoots with the right people.

Today, over breakfast, I was at a table with various high-powered researchers. One of them has been up all night writing an "emergency paper" for the boss of a friend. The topic of schmoozing came up.

They enlightened me that it is very important to complement even the most senior speaker on their keynote presentation. The may seem like they are all-powerful and supremely intelligent, but, in reality, they are just as insecure as everyone else about whether they did a good job and people liked their talk. The trick is to boost their ego, become their friend and get them to help you out.

Research is mostly funded by various government agencies (EPSRC and JISC in the UK and DARPA and NASA in the US). At big conferences there are invite-only "brainstorming" sessions where the agency??(TM)s officers discuss with the researchers what the next big research grant should focus on. This is a chance for the University professors to argue that their line of research is best and should be funded (even if it isn??(TM)t ??¦ in fact: especially if it isn??(TM)t).

The key in these brainstorming sessions is to injecting one's ideas into as many other peoples??(TM) mind as possible before these meetings. It??(TM)s a horrible thing to do and one may have to have a shower afterwards to wash off the slime, but the more people argue one??(TM)s case, the better the chance of getting the money.

However, in the end, all this is somewhat of a pretense. The actual decision is made in the pub after the session. The grant officers will give the contract to their friends. Their friends are their drinking buddies. The really successful researchers are those that manipulate the social scene to make everyone their friend. For example, people like Wendy Hall and Nigel Shadbolt are primarily famous not because they are brilliant researchers (though, of course, that must also be there), but because they knows everyone and everyone knows them.

What, if you don't drink? Well, better start soon.

It works the same in most industries. Film producers for example spend most of their time in the five year production cycle of a film going to cocktail parties meeting the potential funders, potential actors and potential directors. They negotiate the production crew over a few drinks. Sometimes a key member will pull out of the agreement and they need to go to more parties to recruit new staff.

Ministers in the Greek government spend most of their time at the ministry drinking coffee with one another. The do this because they need to know that they can pick up the phone, talk to a friend, ask for a report and get it delivered to them next morning.

In the UK and USA beer replaces coffee. Each country has its own style.

When one then finally has the grant money one often can't spend it fast enough. If one doesn't spend all of the money one has been granted, then one obviously didn't need it in the first place, so one will get less next time. Some projects therefore need to get very creative in how they can burn money. They will, for example, finance trips overseas for the entire research group. Even then, sometimes one simply cannot spend enough of the government grant money. In such cases one needs to extend the grant due to "staffing issues". In other words, in order to fudge the records one, once again, needs to be in cahoots with the right people.

Today Udo Hahn gave an interesting presentation on a new methods of extracting technical terms from a large text corpus. Traditional methods work by statistical analysis of how often a phrase occurs. His new method used limited paradigmatic modifiability to test the frequency of each single word of a given phrase and thereby compute how likely it is that a phrase is part of a term and not just a chance combination of frequently used words. The new p-mod method beat the t-test and c-value methods in testing on the UMLS meta-thesaurus. Supplementary tools used were the GENIA POS tagger, YAMCHA (support vector machine) chunker and a stop-words filter.

Some US Army and IBM researchers were experimenting with ways to detect if a particular speech contained a story. Their vision is to attach small recording devices to every soldier and automatically record the war stories they tell. Stories are the best way to entice people to take up military life, entertain them, keep up their moral and record the "human" side of military service. They used the WEKA toolkit to rapidly try out different machine learning algorithms and ultimately settled on support vector machines with polynomial kernels. The neural net would be used in real time on textual speech data transcribed by IBM ViaVoice 10. Certain kinds of figures of speech indicate a story is being told. The SVM was therefore trained to recognize the structure and grammar of story-speech. Ultimately, they failed in their experiment. The speech recognition was only about 70% accurate, which wasn't high enough to accurately distinguish stories from regular conversation.

Carol Goble from Manchester (the co-leader of the IMG research group) gave the closing keynote presentation. She talked about the Montagues and Capulets, the two families from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The Montagues are equivalent to the logicians and knowledge engineers in the realm of research. Ian Horrocks, for example, falls squarely into this camp. They are interested in the cool technology, advanced tools, logical rigor, writing researcher papers, solving the interesting (though often not practical) problems. The Capulets, in contrast, are the biomedical researchers such as the people that created the Gene Ontology (GO). They don't care about the theory, but do care about solving practical problems. They also tend to be better at the social engineering necessary to get people to actually use the tools they provide. A third camp is the philosophers (like Barry Smith), who say that everyone else is doing everything completely wrong, but don't offer any practical advice or help in how to do it better. Her conclusion: let's not all kill each other and instead try to work together and have a happy ending.

Need: a seemless ontology authoring and annotation tool that lets people annotate data and extend the ontology at the same time. At the moment we not only need to switch between tools to accomplish this talk, we also need to switch between people. Currently only the biologists can do the annotation and only the logicians can build the ontologies.

Jim Hendler's principle: "A little bit of semantics goes a long way". Just using OWL as a common knowledge interchange format is of great benefit to the e-science community.

Today Udo Hahn gave an interesting presentation on a new methods of extracting technical terms from a large text corpus. Traditional methods work by statistical analysis of how often a phrase occurs. His new method used limited paradigmatic modifiability to test the frequency of each single word of a given phrase and thereby compute how likely it is that a phrase is part of a term and not just a chance combination of frequently used words. The new p-mod method beat the t-test and c-value methods in testing on the UMLS meta-thesaurus. Supplementary tools used were the GENIA POS tagger, YAMCHA (support vector machine) chunker and a stop-words filter.

Some US Army and IBM researchers were experimenting with ways to detect if a particular speech contained a story. Their vision is to attach small recording devices to every soldier and automatically record the war stories they tell. Stories are the best way to entice people to take up military life, entertain them, keep up their moral and record the "human" side of military service. They used the WEKA toolkit to rapidly try out different machine learning algorithms and ultimately settled on support vector machines with polynomial kernels. The neural net would be used in real time on textual speech data transcribed by IBM ViaVoice 10. Certain kinds of figures of speech indicate a story is being told. The SVM was therefore trained to recognize the structure and grammar of story-speech. Ultimately, they failed in their experiment. The speech recognition was only about 70% accurate, which wasn't high enough to accurately distinguish stories from regular conversation.

Carol Goble from Manchester (the co-leader of the IMG research group) gave the closing keynote presentation. She talked about the Montagues and Capulets, the two families from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The Montagues are equivalent to the logicians and knowledge engineers in the realm of research. Ian Horrocks, for example, falls squarely into this camp. They are interested in the cool technology, advanced tools, logical rigor, writing researcher papers, solving the interesting (though often not practical) problems. The Capulets, in contrast, are the biomedical researchers such as the people that created the Gene Ontology (GO). They don't care about the theory, but do care about solving practical problems. They also tend to be better at the social engineering necessary to get people to actually use the tools they provide. A third camp is the philosophers (like Barry Smith), who say that everyone else is doing everything completely wrong, but don't offer any practical advice or help in how to do it better. Her conclusion: let's not all kill each other and instead try to work together and have a happy ending.

Need: a seemless ontology authoring and annotation tool that lets people annotate data and extend the ontology at the same time. At the moment we not only need to switch between tools to accomplish this talk, we also need to switch between people. Currently only the biologists can do the annotation and only the logicians can build the ontologies.

Jim Hendler's principle: "A little bit of semantics goes a long way". Just using OWL as a common knowledge interchange format is of great benefit to the e-science community.

This evening was the official conference banquet at a restaurant called "the Keg Steakhouse" (groan). The conference organizers had informed them of one vegan guest within the dinner party. One of the waiters asked me if it was me and joked that he wouldn't tell anybody. He considered it quite a ridicules idea. Nevertheless, they had prepared a special meal for me: tofu in soy sauce appetizer, green salad with tomato and raw peppers, brown rice with little bits of chopped vegetables mixed throughout, no dessert (the idea of a vegan cake/dessert was completely beyond them). These people really need to learn to cook! I guess they specialize in killing innocent animals and distilling poisonous liquids.

More interestingly, I got a chance to talk with a professor from Jena Universit??t in Germany. He is at the forefront of automated text mining and natural language processing (NLP) research. The next day he gave a very interesting presentation on automatically extracting the important technical terms from a large corpus of text.

The professor was talking about his lifestyle. He loved the isolation of the New Zealand South Island, which he has visited three times. Untouched nature. Not a human in sight for miles.

This is very much in contrast to Tokyo, Japan. In Tokyo everything is grey. You cannot tell where you are. Grey concrete everywhere. He was staying on the eighth floor of a hotel and the motor-highway was just three meters away from his window. How so? In Tokyo, due to lack of space, they stack their highways vertically. Outside his window was the fourth level of a super-highway. A true vertical city. Even at 3am there was continuous traffic on a seven lane highway going into the city. After all, the 36 million people in the world's largest city need to somehow be feed every day. Metropolitan life in the very extreme. I wonder what it does to the people?

Still, he was attached to life in Europe. He would never want to live anywhere but there. The cities have so much more history than anywhere else. Each place has a distinct history and personality.

Life as a professor isn't rosy. He travels around the world presenting his research in so many exotic places, but doesn't have any time to enjoy them. Here he is in Canada, but doesn't have time to enjoy any of the sites, because he is too busy preparing his next presentation. Giving a keynote address at a conference is a great honor, but giving five of them per year very quickly turns into a burden. Then there is reviewing other people's papers. Well known researchers need to review their peer's work. For example, he needs to write an elaborate explanation for each research paper from Asian researchers which doesn't meet the western standard of innovative research. Japanese researchers tend to take a too mechanistic approach to research, which doesn't teach anyone anything new. Then there are the many academic funding committees. He needs to help determine if a particular project gets government research grant money. On top of that comes his own research. He needs to write and publish papers of his own to stay in business. Then, of course, comes the job of teaching his students. PhD and Masters students need to be supervised. Undergraduates need to be lectured to and their exams marked. Sometime between all of that there is (maybe) a little thing called family life.

Still, such a life certainly isn't boring. Discovering truly new things and significantly enhancing the knowledge of humanity has its appeal.

This evening was the official conference banquet at a restaurant called "the Keg Steakhouse" (groan). The conference organizers had informed them of one vegan guest within the dinner party. One of the waiters asked me if it was me and joked that he wouldn't tell anybody. He considered it quite a ridicules idea. Nevertheless, they had prepared a special meal for me: tofu in soy sauce appetizer, green salad with tomato and raw peppers, brown rice with little bits of chopped vegetables mixed throughout, no dessert (the idea of a vegan cake/dessert was completely beyond them). These people really need to learn to cook! I guess they specialize in killing innocent animals and distilling poisonous liquids.

More interestingly, I got a chance to talk with a professor from Jena Universit??t in Germany. He is at the forefront of automated text mining and natural language processing (NLP) research. The next day he gave a very interesting presentation on automatically extracting the important technical terms from a large corpus of text.

The professor was talking about his lifestyle. He loved the isolation of the New Zealand South Island, which he has visited three times. Untouched nature. Not a human in sight for miles.

This is very much in contrast to Tokyo, Japan. In Tokyo everything is grey. You cannot tell where you are. Grey concrete everywhere. He was staying on the eighth floor of a hotel and the motor-highway was just three meters away from his window. How so? In Tokyo, due to lack of space, they stack their highways vertically. Outside his window was the fourth level of a super-highway. A true vertical city. Even at 3am there was continuous traffic on a seven lane highway going into the city. After all, the 36 million people in the world's largest city need to somehow be feed every day. Metropolitan life in the very extreme. I wonder what it does to the people?

Still, he was attached to life in Europe. He would never want to live anywhere but there. The cities have so much more history than anywhere else. Each place has a distinct history and personality.

Life as a professor isn't rosy. He travels around the world presenting his research in so many exotic places, but doesn't have any time to enjoy them. Here he is in Canada, but doesn't have time to enjoy any of the sites, because he is too busy preparing his next presentation. Giving a keynote address at a conference is a great honor, but giving five of them per year very quickly turns into a burden. Then there is reviewing other people's papers. Well known researchers need to review their peer's work. For example, he needs to write an elaborate explanation for each research paper from Asian researchers which doesn't meet the western standard of innovative research. Japanese researchers tend to take a too mechanistic approach to research, which doesn't teach anyone anything new. Then there are the many academic funding committees. He needs to help determine if a particular project gets government research grant money. On top of that comes his own research. He needs to write and publish papers of his own to stay in business. Then, of course, comes the job of teaching his students. PhD and Masters students need to be supervised. Undergraduates need to be lectured to and their exams marked. Sometime between all of that there is (maybe) a little thing called family life.

Still, such a life certainly isn't boring. Discovering truly new things and significantly enhancing the knowledge of humanity has its appeal.

Today Nuno, a researcher from Porto, Portugal, asked me about my distinct hairstyle (sikha) and why I seem so peaceful and relaxed. While asking he was constantly apologizing, thinking that I might be offended. I told him a little bit about Krishna consciousness.

One presentations was about image analysis on 3D cell slices. Matlab's image toolkit is very good for this purpose. The researchers from Amsterdam used RuleML to capture shape classification rules from medical image interpretation experts. However, they suggested using SWRL instead, since RuleML is quite a clunky rules engine. Post-presentation questions raised the issue of rules vs. machine learning. Many people preferred the neural net approach, though a few people defined rules as they allow for better provenance, logging and examination.

Pat Hayes presented the COE ontology editor. This was originally a concept map creation tool, but has been expanded into a fully featured graphical OWL ontology editor. The major advantage COE has is that it is very intuitive to use. Like HTML, people can "view source" on ontologies and "steal" other people's designs/modeling tricks. COE doesn't work with ontologies larger than about 2000 classes. This is another area where my segmentation work might come in handy.

Here a list of some top-level ontologies: DOLCE, CYC, OpenCyc, OntoClean, SUMO.

There was a panel discussion about machine learning vs. manual knowledge capture. The conclusion was to do both:

Improve the volume of manual K-CAP by mass-collaboration
Automatically capture knowledge and manually clean up any mistakes (in this case it is very important to use codes that indicate where a particular piece of knowledge data came from)
Use manual methods to guide (but not haul) large knowledge acquisition methods

Revolutionary concept: make knowledge capture fun by making the task into a game. Carol Goble in particular was very impressed by this idea from Tim Chklovski from USC. She intends to build this into her bio-annotation tools.

An interesting presentation was about estimating the health of pigs by the consistency of their feces. The researchers worked with veterinarians to build a Bayesian network of external circumstances and pig disease. The interesting part was their use of a combination of statistical data and expert rules of thumb. They used isotonic regression to bias the statistical data to match their expert's intuitions. Ultimately, the graphical structure of the Bayesian network matters much more than the exact probabilities on the nodes.

Today Nuno, a researcher from Porto, Portugal, asked me about my distinct hairstyle (sikha) and why I seem so peaceful and relaxed. While asking he was constantly apologizing, thinking that I might be offended. I told him a little bit about Krishna consciousness.

One presentations was about image analysis on 3D cell slices. Matlab's image toolkit is very good for this purpose. The researchers from Amsterdam used RuleML to capture shape classification rules from medical image interpretation experts. However, they suggested using SWRL instead, since RuleML is quite a clunky rules engine. Post-presentation questions raised the issue of rules vs. machine learning. Many people preferred the neural net approach, though a few people defined rules as they allow for better provenance, logging and examination.

Pat Hayes presented the COE ontology editor. This was originally a concept map creation tool, but has been expanded into a fully featured graphical OWL ontology editor. The major advantage COE has is that it is very intuitive to use. Like HTML, people can "view source" on ontologies and "steal" other people's designs/modeling tricks. COE doesn't work with ontologies larger than about 2000 classes. This is another area where my segmentation work might come in handy.

Here a list of some top-level ontologies: DOLCE, CYC, OpenCyc, OntoClean, SUMO.

There was a panel discussion about machine learning vs. manual knowledge capture. The conclusion was to do both:

Improve the volume of manual K-CAP by mass-collaboration
Automatically capture knowledge and manually clean up any mistakes (in this case it is very important to use codes that indicate where a particular piece of knowledge data came from)
Use manual methods to guide (but not haul) large knowledge acquisition methods

Revolutionary concept: make knowledge capture fun by making the task into a game. Carol Goble in particular was very impressed by this idea from Tim Chklovski from USC. She intends to build this into her bio-annotation tools.

An interesting presentation was about estimating the health of pigs by the consistency of their feces. The researchers worked with veterinarians to build a Bayesian network of external circumstances and pig disease. The interesting part was their use of a combination of statistical data and expert rules of thumb. They used isotonic regression to bias the statistical data to match their expert's intuitions. Ultimately, the graphical structure of the Bayesian network matters much more than the exact probabilities on the nodes.

Pat Hayes, a famous AI research started off today's conference day. His keynote, while somewhat entertaining and somewhat insightful was extremely scattered and altogether gave the impression that he had prepared it the night before (which indeed he had). He talked about his "9 deadly sins of AI". These are as follows (and yes, I know there are only four):

Not wanting to accept that the ship has sunk: some researchers still hang on to trying to make techniques and ideas work that where bad ideas when they were first invented and have caused no end of trouble since.

Worshipping philosophy (or, for that matter, worshipping anything): philosophy is useful, but it is a different field to knowledge representation. Just because something is important in philosophy doesn't mean that we have to pay any attention to it in KR.

Taking paradoxes too seriously: A logical paradox is just a humorous distraction for a Sunday night. Just because Kurt G??del's incompleteness theorem shook the very foundations of logic and mathematics, doesn't mean that a paradox is something we have to worry about in practical system. Yeah, so OWL-full allows for paradoxes. Just don't create them and stop complaining about it.

Worshipping logic: (first-order) Logic is attractively simple. Everything in the world can be expressed using AND, NOT and FOR-ALL. However, this is too much of an abstraction from real useful things. It requires too large a framework of axioms on top of it to make it do something useful. We should push more expressivity into the logic layer, thereby bringing it closer to the ontology layer.

Other topics of today:

Nokia and Airbus are working together to shorten their product development feedback cycle. They want to create more mature (useable, useful and acceptable) products more quickly. They aim to achieve this using a system of active documentation. Documentation not just for the sake of it, but in order to involve all project stakeholders in the design, prototype, evaluation and requirements capture processes.

Harith Alani uses four measures for ranking ontologies returned from an ontology search engine:

• Class match: the degree to which the searched for terms are present in the ontology
• Centrality: how close the search terms are to the middle of the is-A hierarchy
• Density: how much information context there is on the search terms (restrictions, etc)
• Semantic similarity: how many links need to be followed from one search term in order to reach another

Harith also mentioned that there is a graph query API called JUNG. I'll have to check this out for my work.

Pat Hayes, a famous AI research started off today's conference day. His keynote, while somewhat entertaining and somewhat insightful was extremely scattered and altogether gave the impression that he had prepared it the night before (which indeed he had). He talked about his "9 deadly sins of AI". These are as follows (and yes, I know there are only four):

Not wanting to accept that the ship has sunk: some researchers still hang on to trying to make techniques and ideas work that where bad ideas when they were first invented and have caused no end of trouble since.

Worshipping philosophy (or, for that matter, worshipping anything): philosophy is useful, but it is a different field to knowledge representation. Just because something is important in philosophy doesn't mean that we have to pay any attention to it in KR.

Taking paradoxes too seriously: A logical paradox is just a humorous distraction for a Sunday night. Just because Kurt G??del's incompleteness theorem shook the very foundations of logic and mathematics, doesn't mean that a paradox is something we have to worry about in practical system. Yeah, so OWL-full allows for paradoxes. Just don't create them and stop complaining about it.

Worshipping logic: (first-order) Logic is attractively simple. Everything in the world can be expressed using AND, NOT and FOR-ALL. However, this is too much of an abstraction from real useful things. It requires too large a framework of axioms on top of it to make it do something useful. We should push more expressivity into the logic layer, thereby bringing it closer to the ontology layer.

Other topics of today:

Nokia and Airbus are working together to shorten their product development feedback cycle. They want to create more mature (useable, useful and acceptable) products more quickly. They aim to achieve this using a system of active documentation. Documentation not just for the sake of it, but in order to involve all project stakeholders in the design, prototype, evaluation and requirements capture processes.

Harith Alani uses four measures for ranking ontologies returned from an ontology search engine:

• Class match: the degree to which the searched for terms are present in the ontology
• Centrality: how close the search terms are to the middle of the is-A hierarchy
• Density: how much information context there is on the search terms (restrictions, etc)
• Semantic similarity: how many links need to be followed from one search term in order to reach another

Harith also mentioned that there is a graph query API called JUNG. I'll have to check this out for my work.

I gave a talk today on my research on segmenting ontologies. It went well. There were about 20 people in the audience (in total 60 people attended the conference, but they were distributed between the three different workshops). Some people had specifically come from one of the other workshops just for my presentation.

I started off with a very good opening statement. This caught everyone's attention and got them interested. I said (view my powerpoint presentation for the graphics):

"An ontology is like a labyrinth, very complex and almost impossible to comprehend at first glance. Beneath the ancient city of Knossos on the island of Crete there was a very large and complicated labyrinth, which had a fearsome Minotaur within it. One day the hero Theseus descended into the labyrinth and killed the monster. He then found his way back out by following a trail of red yarn he had laid behind him as he was exploring the maze, thereby reducing the complex labyrinth into a simple corridor. Ontology segmentation aims to do the same thing."

After saying this I could see people nodding and agreeing. This is what Jeremy Wiessman in his book calls the "ah-ha" experience that one should aim for in any talk or presentation.

I also used the powerpoint presenter's display view. A feature which strangely no one else seems to take advantage of. It may be because it is somewhat tricky to set up. It displays a different view on my laptop's screen to what shows up on the projector. In addition to the current slide, I also get a running timer, my notes (though I didn't make any), a preview of the next few slides and the ability to jump to a specific slide immediately without having to scroll through the entire presentation (this was very useful for the Q&A session).

I wasn't particularly nervous, though I um-ed and ah-ed a bit too much for my liking. I did however manage to hold the attention of the audience for the 20 minutes of my talk. No one went to sleep, no one started checking their email, everyone was looking at me throughout. Pretty good, considering my talk was in the graveyard slot: just after lunch.

There were initially some general questions and clarifications from the audience. However, then Chris Welty bombarded me with questions. He misunderstood the filtering segmentation algorithm walkthrough I had presented. I corrected his misunderstanding of the final directed acyclic graph connectivity of my segmentation example. He also didn't understand the need for the reciprocal filtering. I answered that one by explaining that it worked well for GALEN, which is fair enough; however, on reflection, I realize that some reciprocal link filtering is necessary in every segmentation algorithm, since otherwise everything will be connected to everything else and the "segment" will end up becoming the entire ontology.

Harith Alani, one of the workshop organizers from Southampton University, told me afterwards that he liked my presentation and talked me for submitting my paper at such short notice. Another conference chair, Derek Sleeman, also seemed pleased and interested.

All in all, I'm pleased with my first conference presentation.

I gave a talk today on my research on segmenting ontologies. It went well. There were about 20 people in the audience (in total 60 people attended the conference, but they were distributed between the three different workshops). Some people had specifically come from one of the other workshops just for my presentation.

I started off with a very good opening statement. This caught everyone's attention and got them interested. I said (view my powerpoint presentation for the graphics):

"An ontology is like a labyrinth, very complex and almost impossible to comprehend at first glance. Beneath the ancient city of Knossos on the island of Crete there was a very large and complicated labyrinth, which had a fearsome Minotaur within it. One day the hero Theseus descended into the labyrinth and killed the monster. He then found his way back out by following a trail of red yarn he had laid behind him as he was exploring the maze, thereby reducing the complex labyrinth into a simple corridor. Ontology segmentation aims to do the same thing."

After saying this I could see people nodding and agreeing. This is what Jeremy Wiessman in his book calls the "ah-ha" experience that one should aim for in any talk or presentation.

I also used the powerpoint presenter's display view. A feature which strangely no one else seems to take advantage of. It may be because it is somewhat tricky to set up. It displays a different view on my laptop's screen to what shows up on the projector. In addition to the current slide, I also get a running timer, my notes (though I didn't make any), a preview of the next few slides and the ability to jump to a specific slide immediately without having to scroll through the entire presentation (this was very useful for the Q&A session).

I wasn't particularly nervous, though I um-ed and ah-ed a bit too much for my liking. I did however manage to hold the attention of the audience for the 20 minutes of my talk. No one went to sleep, no one started checking their email, everyone was looking at me throughout. Pretty good, considering my talk was in the graveyard slot: just after lunch.

There were initially some general questions and clarifications from the audience. However, then Chris Welty bombarded me with questions. He misunderstood the filtering segmentation algorithm walkthrough I had presented. I corrected his misunderstanding of the final directed acyclic graph connectivity of my segmentation example. He also didn't understand the need for the reciprocal filtering. I answered that one by explaining that it worked well for GALEN, which is fair enough; however, on reflection, I realize that some reciprocal link filtering is necessary in every segmentation algorithm, since otherwise everything will be connected to everything else and the "segment" will end up becoming the entire ontology.

Harith Alani, one of the workshop organizers from Southampton University, told me afterwards that he liked my presentation and talked me for submitting my paper at such short notice. Another conference chair, Derek Sleeman, also seemed pleased and interested.

All in all, I'm pleased with my first conference presentation.

The first day of the conference was split into three workshops. This allows for a more focused discussion. I was in the Ontology Management: Searching, Selection, Ranking and Segmentation Workshop.

Chris Welty from IBM started off the day with a keynote on "Re-learning Ontology Management for the Web". His main point was that that each term in an OWL ontology is a uniquely addressable URI that can exist on the Internet for all eternity and be accessed by anyone, anywhere and at any time. This seemingly obvious fact is the key difference that makes ontologies much more useful anytime in the past. It changes everything. People (and machines) can now start to reuse each other's knowledge on a massive scale. And, very importantly, this reuse can happen will relative ease.

He also made an interesting point that the quality of an ontology matters, but the benefit derived from any ontology, no matter how badly engineered, is much greater than the benefit gained from having the best possible knowledge base.

Ontologies are not object oriented, or frame-based systems, though may people mistake them for these, since they are quite similar on the surface. OWL has the distinction of using URIs for all identifiers and being based on formal description logic, which allows for automated reasoning and classification.

As usual, there were some terrible talks. Some people just cannot explain themselves. They will talks for 20 minutes, giving all kinds of complicated maths, confusing everyone and, in the end, it turns out they have just done some very insignficant, minor new thing. The complexty was just to fool people into publishing the research (why explain something in one page, if you can do it in 20 and get published?).

Some researchers from Zurich presented their iRDQL query language extension that allowed for imprecise query term matching. Useful, though nothing extraordinary.

Derek Sleeman gave a strange talk on the research he plans to do. He didn't really say anything, but then, I guess, he wasn't intending to. One useful bit of information he shared was that when evaluating users' understanding of a system, it is useful to have them "think aloud". Research has proven that this speaking one's thoughts does not interfere with the normal thinking process. It is a very useful technique for understand what someone else's mental model of a situation or computer program is.

Sleeman also gave a talk on "Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web". Southampton University, Aberdeen and Sheffield have built an ontology (ontosearch) search engine that uses a PageRank-style algorithm. This offers an alternative to Jim Hendler's Maryland research group's Swoogle search engine.

F. Mostowfi gave an interesting talk on "Change in Ontology and Ontology of Change". He outlined a complex version system that relies on all changes being recorded in an ontology of change. This ontology provides an audit trail, so that one can always reconstruct the original context of any class by performing a RDQL query. The system is being used by linguists to study and preserve the semantics of all 6000 languages of the world.

The first day of the conference was split into three workshops. This allows for a more focused discussion. I was in the Ontology Management: Searching, Selection, Ranking and Segmentation Workshop.

Chris Welty from IBM started off the day with a keynote on "Re-learning Ontology Management for the Web". His main point was that that each term in an OWL ontology is a uniquely addressable URI that can exist on the Internet for all eternity and be accessed by anyone, anywhere and at any time. This seemingly obvious fact is the key difference that makes ontologies much more useful anytime in the past. It changes everything. People (and machines) can now start to reuse each other's knowledge on a massive scale. And, very importantly, this reuse can happen will relative ease.

He also made an interesting point that the quality of an ontology matters, but the benefit derived from any ontology, no matter how badly engineered, is much greater than the benefit gained from having the best possible knowledge base.

Ontologies are not object oriented, or frame-based systems, though may people mistake them for these, since they are quite similar on the surface. OWL has the distinction of using URIs for all identifiers and being based on formal description logic, which allows for automated reasoning and classification.

As usual, there were some terrible talks. Some people just cannot explain themselves. They will talks for 20 minutes, giving all kinds of complicated maths, confusing everyone and, in the end, it turns out they have just done some very insignficant, minor new thing. The complexty was just to fool people into publishing the research (why explain something in one page, if you can do it in 20 and get published?).

Some researchers from Zurich presented their iRDQL query language extension that allowed for imprecise query term matching. Useful, though nothing extraordinary.

Derek Sleeman gave a strange talk on the research he plans to do. He didn't really say anything, but then, I guess, he wasn't intending to. One useful bit of information he shared was that when evaluating users' understanding of a system, it is useful to have them "think aloud". Research has proven that this speaking one's thoughts does not interfere with the normal thinking process. It is a very useful technique for understand what someone else's mental model of a situation or computer program is.

Sleeman also gave a talk on "Searching and Ranking Ontologies on the Semantic Web". Southampton University, Aberdeen and Sheffield have built an ontology (ontosearch) search engine that uses a PageRank-style algorithm. This offers an alternative to Jim Hendler's Maryland research group's Swoogle search engine.

F. Mostowfi gave an interesting talk on "Change in Ontology and Ontology of Change". He outlined a complex version system that relies on all changes being recorded in an ontology of change. This ontology provides an audit trail, so that one can always reconstruct the original context of any class by performing a RDQL query. The system is being used by linguists to study and preserve the semantics of all 6000 languages of the world.

A long flight from Manchester to Toronto, then 3 hours to get through customs by which time I had missed my connecting flight, then a long flight from Toronto to Calgary, then a long bus ride from Calgary to Banff. After this Odyssey I've finally arrived at the Banff Center hotel and conference center for the K-CAP conference.

Canada seems very much the USA, expect for a slight, but noticeable extra degree of stylishness. Less ugly industrial concrete, but more refined. Still, the American influence is all pervading.

Banff is located in the midst of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 4500 feet (1350 meters). The natural surroundings of the center are beautiful. The Rockies are certainly majestic to behold. The mountain air is refreshing (and cold). I'm finding myself occasionally become light headed, since I'm not yet used to the thinner air at this altitude.

The Banff center staff is very professional, well organized, knowledgably, helpful and personal. They will go out of their way to accommodate almost any request. They also constantly ask if they can get you anything, or assist you in any way. Impressive.

The center also offers a range of services and activities for its guest. Most of them are free. It is equipped a swimming pool (I went swimming to get over the jet lag), classes in Yoga, Pilates, Kick Boxing, Massage; a running track, climbing wall, gym, badminton courts, a number of shops and a choice of dinning facilities. The rooms are huge (unlike the UK, there is lots of empty space in Canada, so the can afford to build stuff big). However, I have no idea why anyone would need a bed that is 2x2 meters in size. That is a bit over the top. Nevertheless, they certainly know how to make a good impression on their guests.

First order of business: Sleep.

A long flight from Manchester to Toronto, then 3 hours to get through customs by which time I had missed my connecting flight, then a long flight from Toronto to Calgary, then a long bus ride from Calgary to Banff. After this Odyssey I've finally arrived at the Banff Center hotel and conference center for the K-CAP conference.

Canada seems very much the USA, expect for a slight, but noticeable extra degree of stylishness. Less ugly industrial concrete, but more refined. Still, the American influence is all pervading.

Banff is located in the midst of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 4500 feet (1350 meters). The natural surroundings of the center are beautiful. The Rockies are certainly majestic to behold. The mountain air is refreshing (and cold). I'm finding myself occasionally become light headed, since I'm not yet used to the thinner air at this altitude.

The Banff center staff is very professional, well organized, knowledgably, helpful and personal. They will go out of their way to accommodate almost any request. They also constantly ask if they can get you anything, or assist you in any way. Impressive.

The center also offers a range of services and activities for its guest. Most of them are free. It is equipped a swimming pool (I went swimming to get over the jet lag), classes in Yoga, Pilates, Kick Boxing, Massage; a running track, climbing wall, gym, badminton courts, a number of shops and a choice of dinning facilities. The rooms are huge (unlike the UK, there is lots of empty space in Canada, so the can afford to build stuff big). However, I have no idea why anyone would need a bed that is 2x2 meters in size. That is a bit over the top. Nevertheless, they certainly know how to make a good impression on their guests.

First order of business: Sleep.