Boanerges Aleman-Meza

Last Blog Entry

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-12-27

2007-12-27
Earlier on August 2007 I graduated. I took a research fellowship at the Institute for Infocomm Research (in Singapore). Hence, I will rarely (if at all) update my webpage at the LSDIS Lab (but I'm not removing it). My new website is at: Boanerges Aleman-Meza (more updates there soon).
The (personal) email account I am using is bam75 (at yahoo).
This will be my last blog entry here (surely the last of year 2007).

I am looking forward to my career as researcher (after PhD). Happy New Year 2008!

Few updates in the creation of SwetoDblp ontology

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-05-03

2007-05-03
I just posted the May-2007 version of SwetoDblp Ontology of Computer Science Publications. A few updates in the code were made, including the following:
(i) A (new) dataset of 'organizations' is used for creating affiliation relationships
(ii) Fixed URL creation for cases of names that end with 'Jr.'

The dataset of organizations (see organizations in RDF) is used to create 'affiliation' relationships based on the homepage of a person or based on a note containing an organization name. See example of Michael D. Schroeder.
These forms of creating 'affiliation' relationships are not new. We had done it since the first version of SwetoDblp but had used only datasets of Universities (that is, it did not include companies nor research institutes).

Few people had asked me what is in SwetoDbp besides translating the data from XML to RDF. One of the benefits of SwetoDblp is that it incorporates other datasets (e.g., Organizations, Universities, Publishers) to create more relationships that are not in the input dataset. This results in over 21,000 relationships. This might be a small number considering that the total number of relationships in the dataset is 3.5 million, but it helps on making the ontology a bit more diverse in terms of the types of relationships it contains.

People from DBLP that appear in Wikipedia

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-04-24

2007-04-24
According to dbpedia.org , there are nearly 200 researchers from DBLP that appear in Wikipedia. However, the links to them point to the D2R Server of DBLP data. In order to obtain the link to the actual DBLP entry of each researcher, we took the name from the URI (e.g., Tim Finin from http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Finin) and queried DBLP's site for that name. Only in a handful of cases, DBLP returned various matches or none at all. We looked at these cases manually to obtain the right URL for the DBLP entry of the person in question. Here's a text file containing DBLP researchers that apper in Wikipedia and here's the actual list anyways.

Samson Abramsky, Jean-Raymond Abrial, Frances E. Allen, Eric Allender, James Anderson, Michael A. Arbib, Eric Bach, David A. Bader, John Barnes, Friedrich L. Bauer, Rudolf Bayer, Ian Bell, Tim Berners-Lee, Jonathan Bishop, Jeff Bonwick, Grady Booch, Andrew Donald Booth, Richard Bornat, Allan Borodin, Bob Braden, Selmer Bringsjord, Alan Bundy, Alan Burns, Michael J. Butler, Bryan Cantrill, Eugene Charniak, Surajit Chaudhuri, David Chaum, Bernard Chazelle, Wesley A. Clark, John Cocke, Edgar F. Codd, Fred Cohen, Alain Colmerauer, Lynn Conway, Stephen A. Cook, Thomas H. Cormen, Pascal Costanza, Patrick Cousot, Simon Cozens, Olivier Danvy, Donald Davies, Alan M. Davis, Michael Deering, Damien Doligez, Jack Dongarra, Nate Edwards, David Eppstein, Matthias Ettrich, David J. Farber, Stuart I. Feldman, Tim Finin, Josh Fisher, John Fitch, John Fitzgerald, B. J. Fogg, Charles Forgy, Alain Fournier, Edward Fredkin, Yolanda Gil, Shafi Goldwasser, Michael J. C. Gordon, James Gosling, Robert M. Graham, David Gries, J. Storrs Hall, Les Hatton, Patrick J. Hayes, Matthew Hennessy, Andrew Herbert, Carl Hewitt, Bill Hibbard, Geoffrey E. Hinton, C. A. R. Hoare, Owen Holland, Gerard J. Holzmann, Andy Hopper, Jim Horning, David A. Huffman, Earl Hunt, Robert Hyatt, Jean Ichbiah, Neil Immerman, Russell Impagliazzo, Ralph Johnson, Simon L. Peyton Jones, Patrick Juola, Richard M. Karp, Stan Kelly-Bootle, Ken Kennedy, Leonid Khachiyan, Gary Kildall, Stephen Cole Kleene, Leonard Kleinrock, Ralf Klinkenberg, Cris Kobryn, Markus Kuhn, Leslie Lamport, Peter J. Landin, John Lansdown, Lawrence L. Larmore, Steve Lawrence, Newton Lee, Xavier Leroy, Ted Lewis, Jochen Liedtke, Barbara Liskov, Zhiming Liu, Julian Lombardi, Michael Luby, Udi Manber, David May, Joel McCormack, Carver Mead, Robert Metcalfe, David L. Mills, Robin Milner, Marvin Minsky, Faron Moller, Phil Moorby, Charles H. Moore, Joel Moses, Enid Mumford, Frieder Nake, Wolfgang Nebel, Nicholas Negroponte, Anil Nerode, Peter G. Neumann, Rafail Ostrovsky, Oren Patashnik, David A. Patterson, Eric Paulos, Alex Pentland, Ken Perlin, Louis Pouzin, Michael O. Rabin, Brian Randell, Jef Raskin, Mike Reed, Joyce K. Reynolds, Dennis Ritchie, Peter Robinson, Bill Roscoe, Douglas T. Ross, Gerard Salton, Jerome H. Saltzer, Dietmar Saupe, Michael D. Schroeder, Michael L. Scott, Ted Selker, Jeffrey Shallit, Bruce Shriver, Abraham Silberschatz, Michael D. Smith, Diomidis Spinellis, William Stallings, Mark Steedman, Guy L. Steele Jr., Clifford Stein, Karl Steinbuch, Adrian Stephens, Wayne Stevens, Joe Stoy, Christopher Strachey, Rudi Studer, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Austin Tate, Ken Thompson, Sebastian Thrun, Tom Truscott, Edward Tsang, John V. Tucker, David Turner, Leonard Uhr, George Varghese, Philip Wadler, Stephen Warshall, Mark Weiser, David Wheeler, Andrew B. Whinston, Stephen Wolfram, Jan Wolter, Jim Woodcock, John Yen, Rodnay Zaks, Konrad Zuse.

Gender divide growing in computer science - Just witnessed this in the 2007 Georgia Science and Engineering Fair

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-04-02

2007-04-02
An article about Gender divide growing in computer science is quite right about the decline of women in CS. In fact, I just witnessed this issue in the 2007 Georgia Science and Engineering Fair, which took place last week in Athens, Georgia. I have volunteered as judge in the past but had been assigned to the Engineering category (due to judge shortage). This year they assigned me to the Computer Science category, where I reviewed 2 junior projects and about 6 senior projects. There was only one project that included a female student. Such project was also the only one consisting of two students (all other projects were 1 student projects). It so happens that the female student was not involved in coding at all. Her (substantial) contribution to the project was in other aspects that did not required her of coding skills. In summary, 1 female student in all CS projects of the GSEF this year.

Brahms RDF-Database on OSX

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-02-09

2007-02-09
Have you used Brahms RDF Database? Just got it to work under OSX. The C++ installation is pretty straight forward: (i) download xCode from apple.com's OSX's developer section
(ii) download Raptor and install it in three steps (./configure, make, sudo make install);
(iii) download Brahms and install it in similar manner as Raptor
The installation of Brahms's Java-Bindings requires similar steps (./configure, make, sudo make). However, there are a couple of details. To get 'configure' to work, it has to find Brahms, so, you need to add the directory where it was installed into the path (such as in .bash_profile as follows: export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/bin - assuming Brahms was installed in /usr/local/bin). It is also good to define at this time the LD_LIBRAY_PATH variable (in similar manner to setting the pat). It might be necessary to create a symbolic link to jni h-files, in /usr/local/include/ I created two symbolic links to jni.h and jni_md.h, which are located in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.Framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Headers/ (the JDK version was 1.5.0).

This would be all needed to get the Brahms java-bindings to compile and install. To use Brahms in a Java program, you need to use the jar file located in the java-bindings directory from where you installed/created the java-bindings library. At running time, a Java program using Brahms will look for the library (something like libbrahms_bindings_semdisapi) and the way I solved this was by creating symbolic link in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Libraries/ pointing to the libbrahms_bindings_semdisapi.1.0.1.dylib in /usr/local/lib/, however, the name of the symbolic link only worked when named libbrahms_bindings_semdisapi.jnilib . I believe there is a way to avoid creating such links in these 'admin'-only directories (you gotta sudo them) but by the time I remember to try some of the java jvm-settings it was not needed, since Brahms under Java on OSX works smoothly now.

ExpertFinder Workshop papers and presentations available online

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-01-20

2007-01-20
The First International ExpertFinder Workshop took place a couple of days ago. All papers and presentations are available online. The post-workshop notes are also available
We can expect to see few papers appearing in upcoming Semantic Web conferences along the lines of the ExpertFinder topics and use cases.

DBLP makes note of plagiarism in a few papers

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-01-02

2007-01-02
DBLP has started to add notes to indicate papers where plagiarism has been detected. I've seen this in a paper by Y. Weng and Z. Zhu as well as an indication of plagiarism by C.V. Papadopoulos. I noticed this when creating January's version of the SwetoDblp ontology

Best luck for LSDIS Members w.r.t Wright State University

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2007-01-01

2007-01-01 This new year marks the time when several members of the LSDIS Lab move to Wright State University. It all started when someone decided to allocate some extra funds for higher education in the state of Ohio. Next thing you know is that there's something called Ohio's Third Frontier initiative for the area of data integration and analysis. And now, Prof. Amit Sheth (IEEE Fellow) starts his new appointment as LexisNexis Eminent Scholar. Best luck for all LSDIS Lab members in this new adventure!

Semantic Annotation and Browsing at ISWC2006

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2006-11-23

2006-11-23 Recently, I led an effort to put together a demo for Semantic Annotation and Browsing at the ISWC2006 Conference. The demo is best explained by visiting the live pages containing the reddish annotations that are created on the fly, for example: Industry Track Talks Keynote Talks (T. Gruber, R. Studer and J. Fountain) as as all pages linked from the accepted Research and In-Use papers. Technical Details are available

LSDIS Graduates for Summer 2006

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2006-06-30

2006-06-30 Several students graduating this summer 2006 from the LSDIS Lab. With Dr. Arpinar as Advisor, two MS students: David Hooge with Thesis titled: Extraction and Indexing of Triplet-Based Knowledge Using Natural Language Processing; and Jed Hassell with Thesis titled: Ontology-Driven Automatic Entity Disambiguation in Unstructured Text.
With Dr. Sheth as Advisor, two MS students: Bilal Gonen with Thesis titled: Semantic Browser; and Ravi Pavagada with Thesis titled: Supporting Keyword Search on Semantic Web Documents.
Last but not least, Kunal Verma defended his PhD Thesis titled: Configuration and Adaptation of Semantic Web Processes. Dr. Verma co-advisors are Dr. Sheth and Dr. Miller. As a point of reference, this is his Dblp entry as of 2006-06-30.

At the lab, we're looking forward to papers under review of their respective research and wish the best to these graduating students.

Typical topics of ACM TechNews

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2006-04-17

2006-04-17 ACM News seems to cover certain topics/themes quite frequently. These are the frequently mentioned themes:
- U.S. decline world competitiveness in Science, salaries, fuzz about H1-B Visas, global sourcing, etc
- Women's partipation in engineering and computer science
- Robots, typically involving some A.I. aspect
- Wireless technology (such as municipal-wide wireless)
- Results of grants funding, such as NSF, IST programs
- E-Voting technologies
- Web technologies, Semantic Web, Internet standards
- Security, Cyberattacks, phishing, privacy issues,
- Other topics: software patents, open source software, quantum computing,

ITConversations

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2005-11-23

2005-11-23 - Are you a Computer Science student (undergrad/MS/PhD) and not listening to ITConversations? - then you're missing a good opportunity to hear good talks on a variety of IT topics. My favorites include: Paul Graham on how business can learn from open source - "the average office is a miserable place to get work done"; Adam Bosworth on scaling MySQL-like queries by simplifying the problem; Jonathan Schwartz at Supernova'2005 - "if you want to be a leader, I can't see surviving without a blog"; Roger McNamee on the 'new normal' - "nothing new about migration of mature comodity jobs"

Semantic Web missing the Web 2.0?

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2005-10-17

2005-10-17 - Has the Semantic Web lost a tremendous opportunity of being (at least) part of the Web 2.0 technologies?

Outsorcing Intellectual Property

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2005-09-19

2005-09-19 - A recent article in E-Week mentions the issues that globalsourcing brings with respect to Intellectual Property

Photographs of Chihuahua

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2005-07-08

2005-07-08 - While visiting the NY Public Library Digital Gallery and doing a search for "Chihuahua" (my hometown) only two items are retrieved. The first item is on the Cathedral Square of the city of Chihuahua. The second item is retrieved because the keyword "chihuahua" appears in one of the "note" textual descriptions of the item. The note mentions that the item is part of a photograph collection yet this item is not a photograph of Chihuahua

One meaning of 'Boanerges'

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2005-07-03

2005-07-03 - My name, Boanerges, supposedly can be translated to the following: "constant noise, disturbance, violent anger, or rage." - as described by Hiskia Israil Missah

eChronicles

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-10-03

2004-10-03 - Check out the world map in this presentation eChronicles

Andrew Sullivan's Lecture

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-09-29

2004-09-29 - "all what matters is that you are a citizen", "it is not about sex, it's about love" - Andrew Sullivan's Lecture on gay marriage issue, Georgia Hall, Tate Center, 7:30pm (somehow I got Ticket No. 1)

Chihuahua Beach

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-08-29

2004-08-29 Got these pictures by email: Chihuahua Beach
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Distributed Web server

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-08-24

2004-08-24 Do you need a distributed Web server... try You-Serve

Movie night

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-08-14

2004-08-14 Movie: Chicago

Still Snail Mail?

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-08-09

2004-08-09 Graduate School still sends letters by snail mail, and not only that, they request confirmation by only providing a telephone number. How come they do not use email for such process?

Movie night

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-08-08

2004-08-08 Went to the movies: I, robot with Weiwei

Movie night

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-08-07

2004-08-07 Went to the movies: The Village with Weiwei. We also watched DVD of Scary Movie 3

Visit to Sun's Menlo Park Campus

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-08-04

2004-08-04 - Visited Sun's Menlo Park Campus. After a welcome talk by Whitfield Diffie (VP, Sun Fellow, Chief Security Officer), the talks included 'A Multi-Tasking Virtual Machine' (Grzegorz Czajkowski); 'Next Generation Internet Security' by Sheueling Chang-Shantz; 'High Productivity Computing Systems' by James G. (Jim) Mitchell; 'Wireless Sensor Research at Sun Labs' by Randy Smith and Rob Tow.

Visit to PARC

Boanerges Aleman-Meza — 2004-07-14

2004-07-14 - Visited PARC