SmILE Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group

Last Monday (December 15th) we were in the (in)famous Stata Center at MIT in order to give a talk at the Elsevier Grand Challenge semifinals. Ed Hovy, the chair of the committee judging the challenge contestants, had a nice remark in his brief morning key-note. He said he was feeling good and alive in the crazy Gehry's building, looking forward to hear about crazy projects that have, however, already spiced their initial visionary craziness up by a great deal of maturity and sophistication. And he was absolutely correct in his estimate, as far as I can tell. I guess I've never attended such an intriguing, exciting and diverse meeting, and this opinion was shared by most if not all the challenge judges and contestants who were present there.

The talks of our "competitors" were as follows.

• Sean O'Donoghue presented a talk with title Reflect@Elsevier: Automated Annotation of Scientific Terms about a tool (working as a simple browser plug-in) for annotation of online scientific resources by terms from domain vocabularies and various additional info.
• David Newman was talking about Effective Retrieval and Visualisation of Information in Large Collections of Biomedical Literature based on automatic generation of key term clusters.
• Luis Pedro Coelho gave a presentation on Structured Literature Image Finder based on caption and context information processing.
• Stephen Wan introduced a project aimed at Citation Sensitive In-Browser Summarisation of Cited Documents: A Research Prototype for Browsing Academic and Scholarly Literature, offering quick previews of cited resources in
  online publications.
• Roderic Page's talk was about Visualising a scientific article by means of adding visual summarisations, key concepts' overview, geographical authorship annotations, etc.
• George Thoma and Glen Ford presented their Interactive Publication: The document as a research tool project consisting primarily of tools for authoring and browsing innovative multi-media scientific publication formats.
• Michael Greenacre gave a talk on Guided Tours in N-Dimensional Space: Dynamic Visualization of Multivariate Data focused on concise and appealing display and presentation of complex statistical data in life science articles.
• Alexander Garcia delivered a presentation of A tale of two cities in the land of serendipity: The semantic web and the social web heading towards a living document in life sciences, introducing a vision of open semantic annotations of scientific content shared within online communities.

I presented our challenge project CORAAL - Dive into Publications, Bathe in the Knowledge. It is aimed primarily at knowledge-based search for and browsing of life science publications, with the knowledge being purely automatically extracted and refined based on the publications themselves. You can find more information on CORAAL in our semifinal report, and also in a more detailed technical report. The main difference between the reports is that the latter one contains an extended information on our emergent knowledge processing framework, an essential innovation powering the CORAAL prototype.

According to Siggi (my supervisor, who also attended the meeting) and a couple of other people, my semifinal CORAAL talk seemed to be well received. Judges were asking quite a lot of pertinent questions. Fortunately enough, none of them were really nasty, much rather they were pointing to the crucial elements of necessary future work we know of... It was really an appreciated and illuminative experience for me to present our crazy stuff in front of such a highly interested and learned audience in such a nice crazy building :) .

Ah, I almost forgot to tell what is this Christmas present from the title about! Well, I sincerely don't have any clue on how the judges could select the final four teams continuing in the challenge. I guess the selection could have been even tougher for them than to present all the stuff for the contestants. But from the rather selfish point of view, we are very satisfied with the job the judges delivered in the end ;) . I've never jumped as high within my modest volleyball carrier as when I learned that we've made it, being one of the four challenge finalists selected after the cool day at MIT. I'm very glad that the great job of the whole team was so wonderfully rewarded. Tudor, Ioana and Siggi really deserve it just because they were so patient with my increasing annoyance when the semifinal deadline was approaching, let alone the efforts and sleepless nights they all dedicated to CORAAL. Great kudos to them all, I've never worked with such a nice, skillful and determined team. Let's see where can we bring the whole thing to in the future!