Microsoft Research Announces the Speller Challenge

Microsoft Research in partnership with Bing has announced the Speller Challenge. The challenge’s website asks, “Do you have what it takes to build the best speller? Enter the Speller Challenge by developing a speller that generates the most plausible spelling alternatives for a search query.” Entrants have the opportunity to “try out your speller using real world data; see how it compares to the rest of the community’s spellers; [and] be eligible to win a cash prize.” Read more

Semantic Technology Conference

Use hashtag #semtech Join us June 5-9 in San Francisco for five days of semantic web intelligence from cross-industry experts including Mark Greaves (Vulcan), Dennis Wisnosky (U.S. Dept. of Defense), Bill Guinn (Amdocs Business Unit), and more. View the program and sign up today.

Semantic Jobs in Big-Name Companies

GE Global Research in New York is looking for a Semantic Engineer to “work with multi-disciplinary teams to develop tools and ontologies for application to a diverse set of industrial, service, and financial problems.” Tasks that will fall on the Semantic Engineer include “Build and reason over formal models, such as IEEE Common Logic (CL) or OWL/RDF. Identify and construct solutions to enterprise-wide problems for industrial, service and finance business problems. Create and documents ontologies and semantic rules and knowledge-bases. Guide and participate in the development team in implementing knowledge-based, web-based and advanced semantic applications to specific application needs. Develops strategic plans, manages projects and guides teams to create innovative solutions.” Read more

ADmantX Goes Public

A while back we reported on a new startup from Expert System called ADmantX. Yesterday ADmantX announced that they’re moving out of beta: “Publicly available beginning today, ADmantX‘s unique Web service goes beyond what competitors offer and helps advertisers quickly and easily develop effective online advertising campaigns, without using cookies and other traditional tracking mechanisms. Using advanced semantic targeting that incorporates emotions, motivations and behaviors, ADmantX intelligently matches content to advertisements, increasing campaign reach and success.” Read more

Semantic Tagging and Link Curation with the Tagging Robot

MySpace veterans Joe Munoz and Todd Leeloy have launched “a semantic tagging network and link curation service” known as Tagging Robot: “Tagging Robot currently crawls your Facebook newsfeed and separates your links based on topics, as well as giving you relevant topics data for each link.” Read more

Hot Jobs in Semantics

OSCBThe Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel is offering a Junior Research Position in the field of knowledge management, open data, and linked data: “The candidate will be working on the Open Semantic Cloud for Brussels (OSCB) project funded by the Brussels Institute for Research and Innovation… Open Semantic Cloud for Brussels aims to cover Brussels, metaphorically speaking of course, with a cloud of structured and interlinked information elements produced by “atomizing” a collection of relevant databases and other resources.” This salaried one-year position calls for someone with at least a Master’s in Computer Science. Read more

Phase2′s OpenPublic Goes Public

Phase2 – a company that has been in our headlines recently – yesterday announced the public demo and beta release of OpenPublic, “a Drupal platform that enables government to publish content and engage constituents more easily and securely online.” Jeff Walpole, CEO of Phase2 Technology, stated, “We designed, built, and released OpenPublic to help government and other public-policy groups to more easily support their mission-critical content and interact with citizens… We wanted to do our part to encourage technology innovation, further the nation’s participation in civic endeavors, and generate new open source tools that can propel our nation forward.” Read more

Announcing the Spanish Linked Data Thematic Network

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid has announced that, “twenty Spanish research groups, employing over 150 researchers from 18 higher education institutions, have set up the Spanish Linked Data Thematic Network, with the aim of improving knowledge exchange and transfer between Spanish researchers working in Spain or abroad on related fields, as well as increasing the international visibility of Spanish research on linked data.” Read more

Do You Really Need a CMS?

Dropbox on AndroidDropPages.com offers an intriguing alternative to using a traditional CMS, with an innovative approach using tools that many people already have at their disposal.  BONUS: it supports Semantic Technology file types (more on that in a minute)!

DropPages leverages DropBox, the popular document-synching platform, to publish content. This eliminates the need for separate site login, FTP information, sharing functionality, or file backup systems.  These features are already part of DropBox, so the whole process of creating, editing, and publishing web content is streamlined.

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New Online Advertising Managed Service Makes Both Audience and Content Environment Count

Online advertising network ad pepper media has introduced a managed service based on its Semantic Behavioral and Retargeting platform. The idea is to leverage its proprietary page-level semantic analysis, which hails from Crystal Semantics (which it acquired back in 2006) in combination with its behavioral/retargeting capabilities, in order to bring some balance between the camps who believe in environment vs. audience segmentation.

“It’s a combination where we let the technologies ultimately dictate what is the most important factor to success vs. set up a presupposition that one will out-power or outweigh the other,” says Jonathan Slavin, President, North America of ad pepper media.

The fact, ad pepper contends, is that there really is no one right answer of which approach works best. Advertisers, for example, can target audience segments based on anonymous data that indicates characteristics, behavior or preferences, such as those leading to a “luxury auto enthusiast” grouping that an automotive company would be interested in.

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Jobs in Semantics Abroad and at Home

Datalift, the new research project we recently reported on out of France, is looking for, as they put it, a data geek. The actual job title is Scientific Developer: “The position, offered in the context of the Datalift project, is opened to a candidate having knowledge of the French language and owning a Master’s degree in computer science. The position is for three years. The job will consist of various data manipulation and programming tasks around the topic of linked-data publication, vocabulary and ontology design, data interlinking, and linked-data infrastructures. Newbies to the linked-data world are welcome as soon as they have significant experience in Web engineering, data cleansing, databases.” Read more

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