Simplifying knowledge creation and access for end-users on the SW

In this position paper, we argue that improved mechanisms for knowledge acquisition and access on the semantic web (SW) will be necessary before it will be adopted widely by end-users. In particular, we propose an investigation surrounding improved languages for knowledge exchange, better UI mechanisms for interaction, and potential help from user modeling to enable accurate, efficient, SW knowledge modeling for everyone

Smart Tea Project

Conference poster. The lab book is a big block to publication@source, if it’s not digital, it’s difficult to share. Most experimental information is recorded in a lab book in a highly personal way. We have created a new analogy to fully understand the use of the lab book and successfully built and evaluated a working electronic replacement

Orchestrating musical (meta)data to better address the real-world search queries of musicologists

The dispersal of musicology’s diverse array of primary and secondary sources across countless libraries and archives was once an enormous obstacle to conducting research, but this has largely been overcome by the digitisation and online publication of resources in recent years. Yet, while the research process has undoubtedly been revolutionised, the current situation is far from perfect, as the digitisation of resources has often been accompanied by their segregation—according to media type, date of publication, subject, language, copyright holder, etc.—into a myriad of discrete online repositories, often with little thought having been given to interoperability. Given that musicological research typically cuts across such artificial divisions, this segregation of data means that accessing basic factual information or running multi-part search queries remains endlessly complicated, needlessly time consuming, and sometimes impossible. This barrier to tractability is only exacerbated by the limited capabilities of currently deployed search interfaces. There is one seemingly obvious solution to this query dilemma: enable integrated real-time querying over all the available metadata from as many sources as possible, and allow users to use that metadata to guide their queries. This solution implies that all data that could feasibly be construed as useful, but which is buried in the records, is extracted in some way, and that there is an interaction approach that enables metadata to be explored effectively and allows for the formulation of rich compound queries. The musicSpace project has taken a dual approach towards realising this solution. At the back-end we are developing services to integrate and, where necessary, surface (meta)data from many of musicology’s most important online resources, including the British Library Music Collections catalogue, the British Library Sound Archive catalogue, Cecilia, Copac, Grove Music Online, Naxos Music Library, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), and Répertoire International des Sources Musicale (RISM) UK and Ireland. While at the front-end, in order to optimise the exploration of this integrated dataset, we are developing a modern web-based faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX, and which is based on the existing ‘mSpace’ codebase. Our poster outlines the approach we have taken to importing, enriching and integrating the metadata provided by our data partners, and gives examples of the real-world musicological research questions that musicSpace has enabled

Bringing the Semantic Web home: a research agenda for local, personalized SWUI

We suggest that by taking the Semantic Web local and personal, and deploying it as a shared "data sea" for all applications to trawl, new types of interaction are possible (even necessitated) with this heterogeneous source integration. We present a motivating scenario to foreground the kind of interaction we envision as possible, and outline a series of associated questions about data integration issues, and in particular about the interaction challenges fostered by these new possibilities. We sketch out some early approaches to these questions, but our goal is to identify a wider field of questions for the SWUI community in considering the implications of a local/social semantic web, not just a public one, for interaction

Macroprudential Policy in a Recovering Market: Too Much too Soon?. ESRI WP500. May 2015

The aftermath of the 2007/08 financial crisis has resulted in many Central Banks and regulatory authorities examining the appropriateness of macroprudential policy as an effective and efficient policy option in preventing the emergence of future credit bubbles. Specific limits on loan-to-value (LTV) and loan-to-income (LTI) ratios have been assessed and applied in a large number of markets both in developing and developed economies as a means of ensuring greater financial stability. The Irish property and credit market were particularly affected in the crisis as the domestic housing market had, since 1995, experienced sustained price and housing supply increases. Much of the activity in the Irish market was fuelled by a sizeable credit bubble which was greatly facilitated by the growth of international wholesale funding post 2003. After a period of pronounced declines, Irish house prices in late 2013 started to increase significantly. In early 2015, the Irish Central Bank responded by imposing new LTV and LTI limits to curb house price inflation. However, the introduction of these measures comes at a time when housing supply and mortgage lending are at historically low levels. In this paper we use a newly developed structural model of the Irish property and credit market to examine the implications of these measures for house prices and key activity variables in the mortgage market

Combat and Warfare in the Early Paleolithic and Medically Unexplained Musculo-Facial Pain in the 21st Century War Veterns and Active-Duty Military Personnel

In a series of recent articles, we suggest that family dentists, military dentists and psychiatrists with expertise in posttraumatic stress disorder (especially in the Veterans Health Administration) are likely to see an increased number of patients with symptomatic jaw-clenching and early stages of tooth- grinding (Bracha et al., 2005). Returning warfighters and other returnees from military deployment may be especially at risk for high rates of clenching- induced masticatory muscle disorders at early stages of incisor grinding. The literature we have recently reviewed strongly supports the conclusion that clenching and grinding may primarily be a manifestation of experiencing extreme fear or severe chronic distress (respectively). We have recently reviewed the clinical and paleoanthropological literature and have noted that ancestral warfare and ancestral combat, in the early Paleolithic Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) may be a neglected factor explaining the conservation of the archaic trait of bite-muscle strengthening. We have hypothesized that among ancestral warriors, jaw clenching may have rapidly strengthened the two primary muscles involved in biting, the masseter muscles and the much larger temporalis muscles. The strengthening of these muscles may have served the purpose of enabling a stronger, deeper, and therefore more lethal, defensive bite for early Paleolithic humans. The neuroevolutionary perspective presented here may be novel to many dentists. However, it may be useful in patient education and in preventing progression from jaw-clenching to chronic facial pain

Parallel Search with no Coordination

We consider a parallel version of a classical Bayesian search problem. $k$ agents are looking for a treasure that is placed in one of the boxes indexed by $\mathbb{N}^+$ according to a known distribution $p$. The aim is to minimize the expected time until the first agent finds it. Searchers run in parallel where at each time step each searcher can "peek" into a box. A basic family of algorithms which are inherently robust is \emph{non-coordinating} algorithms. Such algorithms act independently at each searcher, differing only by their probabilistic choices. We are interested in the price incurred by employing such algorithms when compared with the case of full coordination. We first show that there exists a non-coordination algorithm, that knowing only the relative likelihood of boxes according to $p$, has expected running time of at most $10+4(1+\frac{1}{k})^2 T$, where $T$ is the expected running time of the best fully coordinated algorithm. This result is obtained by applying a refined version of the main algorithm suggested by Fraigniaud, Korman and Rodeh in STOC'16, which was designed for the context of linear parallel search.We then describe an optimal non-coordinating algorithm for the case where the distribution $p$ is known. The running time of this algorithm is difficult to analyse in general, but we calculate it for several examples. In the case where $p$ is uniform over a finite set of boxes, then the algorithm just checks boxes uniformly at random among all non-checked boxes and is essentially $2$ times worse than the coordinating algorithm.We also show simple algorithms for Pareto distributions over $M$ boxes. That is, in the case where $p(x) \sim 1/x^b$ for $0< b < 1$, we suggest the following algorithm: at step $t$ choose uniformly from the boxes unchecked in ${1, . . . ,min(M, \lfloor t/\sigma\rfloor)}$, where $\sigma = b/(b + k - 1)$. It turns out this algorithm is asymptotically optimal, and runs about $2+b$ times worse than the case of full coordination

BKM Lie superalgebra for the Z_5 orbifolded CHL string

We study the Z_5-orbifolding of the CHL string theory by explicitly constructing the modular form tilde{Phi}_2 generating the degeneracies of the 1/4-BPS states in the theory. Since the additive seed for the sum form is a weak Jacobi form in this case, a mismatch is found between the modular forms generated from the additive lift and the product form derived from threshold corrections. We also construct the BKM Lie superalgebra, tilde{G}_5, corresponding to the modular form tilde{Delta}_1 (Z) = tilde{Phi}_2 (Z)^{1/2} which happens to be a hyperbolic algebra. This is the first occurrence of a hyperbolic BKM Lie superalgebra. We also study the walls of marginal stability of this theory in detail, and extend the arithmetic structure found by Cheng and Dabholkar for the N=1,2,3 orbifoldings to the N=4,5 and 6 models, all of which have an infinite number of walls in the fundamental domain. We find that analogous to the Stern-Brocot tree, which generated the intercepts of the walls on the real line, the intercepts for the N >3 cases are generated by linear recurrence relations. Using the correspondence between the walls of marginal stability and the walls of the Weyl chamber of the corresponding BKM Lie superalgebra, we propose the Cartan matrices for the BKM Lie superalgebras corresponding to the N=5 and 6 models.Comment: 30 pages, 2 figure

Integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources for better exploration

Musicologists have to consult an extraordinarily heterogeneous body of primary and secondary sources during all stages of their research. Many of these sources are now available online, but the historical dispersal of material across libraries and archives has now been replaced by segregation of data and metadata into a plethora of online repositories. This segregation hinders the intelligent manipulation of metadata, and means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. To counter this barrier to research, the “musicSpace” project is experimenting with integrating access to many of musicology’s leading data sources via a modern faceted browsing interface that utilises Semantic Web and Web2.0 technologies such as RDF and AJAX. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, enable musicologists to use their time more efficiently, and aid the discovery of potentially significant information that users did not think to look for. This paper outlines our work to date