I’m leading
IBM team participation in the EU 6-th framework project Nepomuk, which aims to
build social semantic desktop.
GALAXY
Galaxy is IBM Dublin project, which I initiated in IBM Dublin Software Lab as
People asked me to explain the name
of the project, Stéphane Laurière from XWIKI suggested to publish this
explanation.
There are several reasons why I choose
the name Galaxy: pleasant memories of my work in Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur
on the south of France, methods for numerical simulation which I developed
working in this research center, my ideas about building semantic models of
texts as “clouds of concepts”, applications of Galaxy to social network
analysis for community detection (“You are a star”? – we’ll find out “in which
Galaxy you are a star”). I’ll try to explain this in some details.
My work as a visiting professor in Observatoire
de la Côte d'Azur was related to the numerical simulation of the process of
galaxies and stars formation. Basically, stars appear as the results of collision/adhesion
of small dust particles created by the Big Bang. Numerical simulation of this
process might be done rather straightforwardly by the algorithm1:
a)
one
computes trajectories of all particles,
b)
detect
the moment of the first collision,
c)
compute
trajectories of the new particle resulted from this collision
d)
go
the step b)
I invented
better algorithm (Fast Legendre transform), physicist Sergei
Gurbatov gave physical insight into my algorithm, and we published the paper "The decay of multiscale signals – deterministic model of the Burgers turbulence" ([physics.flu-dyn] 22 Feb 2000).
The idea of my algorithm came to me after
deliberation on two principles of locality. Algorithm1 violates principle of
locality in computer sciences: step b) incurs huge memory traffic to extract
trajectories of particles. From the other hands, principle of locality in
physics tell us that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate
surroundings. This observation gave me inspiration that it might be possible to
model the global phenomena in my domain by local computations (and all
graphmining algorithm in Galaxy follow this principle).
IBM LanguageWare Miner for
Multidimensional Socio-Semantic Networks
a unified
API that helps in creating solutions for combining social computing, semantic
processing, and activity-centered computing for networks of people, documents,
tasks, etc.
Centre for Next Generation Localisation