Posts and notes Cardiffuniversity

Whilst working on the ITA Project - a collaborative research programme between the UK MoD and the US Army Research Laboratory - over the last few years, one of my primary areas has been to research around controlled natural languages, and working with Cardiff University and IBM UK’s Emerging Technology team to develop CENode.

As part of the project - before I joined - researchers at IBM developed the CEStore, which aims to provide tools for working with ITA Controlled English. Controlled English (CE) is a subset of the English language which is structured in a way that attempts to remove ambiguity from statements, enabling machines to understand ‘English’ inputs.

his week I begin lecturing a module for Cardiff School of Computer Science and Informatics’ postgraduate MSc course in Advanced Computer Science.

The module is called Web and Social Computing, with the main aim being to introduce students to the concepts of social computing and web-based systems. The course will include both theory and practical sessions in order to allow them to enhance their knowledge derived from literature with the practice of key concepts. We’ll also have lots of guest lectures from experts in specific areas to help reinforce the importance of this domain.

Last weekend I went to CFHack Open Sauce Hackathon. I worked in a team with Chris, Ross and Matt.

We started work on eartub.es, which is a web application for suggesting movies based on their sound tracks. We had several ideas for requirements we wanted to meet but, due to the nature of hackathons, we didn’t do nearly as much as what we thought we would!

Next week I, along with others in a team, am taking part in Cardiff Open Sauce Hackathon.

If you’re in the area and feel like joining in for the weekend then sign up at the link above.

he hackathon is a two-day event in which teams work to ‘hack together’ smallish projects, which will be open-sourced at the end of the weekend. Whilst we have a few ideas already for potential projects, if anyone has any cool ideas for something relatively quick, but useful, to make, then please let me know!

Each January the School of Computer Science hosts a poster day in order for the research students to demonstrate their current work to other research students, research staff and undergraduates. The event lets members of the department see what other research is being done outside of their own group and gives researchers an opportunity to defend their research ideas.

This year, I focused on my current research area, which is to do with inferring how interesting a Tweet is based on a comparison between simulated retweet patterns and the propagation behaviour demonstrated by the Tweet in Twitter itself. The poster highlights recent work in the build-up to this, a general overview of how the research works, and finishes with where I want to take this research in the future.

We recently held our DigiSocial Hackathon. This was a collaboration between the Schools of Computer Science and Social Sciences and was organised by myself and a few others.

The website for the event is hosted here.

The idea of the event was to try and encourage further ties between the different Schools of the University. The University Graduate College (UGC) provide the funding for these events, which must be applied for, in the hope that good projects or results come out of it.