Electronic libraries and electronic librarians: Who does what in a national electronic community

This talk will have two parts: First, I'm going to describe very briefly what this new kind of library technology is like through a discussion of the Worm Community System (WCS), why it is going to be very important, and why it will involve a lot of money. What I want to emphasize at the start is that while WCS may seem like an esoteric research project, in fact it is one of the flagship information projects funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition, the National Information Infrastructure Act looms in the immediate future, authorizing an enormous amount of money to be spent in the development of digital libraries in specialized areas. Digital libraries will require information systems like WCS. This project has become a national model of this new kind of information system, but its primary content is really just a special collection, in the same sense you already know. It is an important national effort, but there will be lots of other efforts like this in many different subject areas. Second, I'm going to discuss in more detail what kinds of people are required to do this kind of activity. The roles range from traditional librarians all the way to systems architects. Similarly, the roles range from those that involve no computer knowledge at all to those that involve very intensive computing. My expectation is that people who call themselves "librarians" in the foreseeable future will actually span this entire range, even though now they are significantly skewed towards the traditional end.published or submitted for publicatio

A European research roadmap for optimizing societal impact of big data on environment and energy efficiency

We present a roadmap to guide European research efforts towards a socially responsible big data economy that maximizes the positive impact of big data in environment and energy efficiency. The goal of the roadmap is to allow stakeholders and the big data community to identify and meet big data challenges, and to proceed with a shared understanding of the societal impact, positive and negative externalities, and concrete problems worth investigating. It builds upon a case study focused on the impact of big data practices in the context of Earth Observation that reveals both positive and negative effects in the areas of economy, society and ethics, legal frameworks and political issues. The roadmap identifies European technical and non-technical priorities in research and innovation to be addressed in the upcoming five years in order to deliver societal impact, develop skills and contribute to standardization.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl

1st INCF Workshop on Sustainability of Neuroscience Databases

The goal of the workshop was to discuss issues related to the sustainability of neuroscience databases, identify problems and propose solutions, and formulate recommendations to the INCF. The report summarizes the discussions of invited participants from the neuroinformatics community as well as from other disciplines where sustainability issues have already been approached. The recommendations for the INCF involve rating, ranking, and supporting database sustainability

Isabelle/PIDE as Platform for Educational Tools

The Isabelle/PIDE platform addresses the question whether proof assistants of the LCF family are suitable as technological basis for educational tools. The traditionally strong logical foundations of systems like HOL, Coq, or Isabelle have so far been counter-balanced by somewhat inaccessible interaction via the TTY (or minor variations like the well-known Proof General / Emacs interface). Thus the fundamental question of math education tools with fully-formal background theories has often been answered negatively due to accidental weaknesses of existing proof engines. The idea of "PIDE" (which means "Prover IDE") is to integrate existing provers like Isabelle into a larger environment, that facilitates access by end-users and other tools. We use Scala to expose the proof engine in ML to the JVM world, where many user-interfaces, editor frameworks, and educational tools already exist. This shall ultimately lead to combined mathematical assistants, where the logical engine is in the background, without obstructing the view on applications of formal methods, formalized mathematics, and math education in particular.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Reducing the Barrier to Entry of Complex Robotic Software: a MoveIt! Case Study

Developing robot agnostic software frameworks involves synthesizing the disparate fields of robotic theory and software engineering while simultaneously accounting for a large variability in hardware designs and control paradigms. As the capabilities of robotic software frameworks increase, the setup difficulty and learning curve for new users also increase. If the entry barriers for configuring and using the software on robots is too high, even the most powerful of frameworks are useless. A growing need exists in robotic software engineering to aid users in getting started with, and customizing, the software framework as necessary for particular robotic applications. In this paper a case study is presented for the best practices found for lowering the barrier of entry in the MoveIt! framework, an open-source tool for mobile manipulation in ROS, that allows users to 1) quickly get basic motion planning functionality with minimal initial setup, 2) automate its configuration and optimization, and 3) easily customize its components. A graphical interface that assists the user in configuring MoveIt! is the cornerstone of our approach, coupled with the use of an existing standardized robot model for input, automatically generated robot-specific configuration files, and a plugin-based architecture for extensibility. These best practices are summarized into a set of barrier to entry design principles applicable to other robotic software. The approaches for lowering the entry barrier are evaluated by usage statistics, a user survey, and compared against our design objectives for their effectiveness to users

Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems : framework and formative methods

Peer reviewedPostprin