Winter 2014 Meetings: Mondays at 3:30-4:30pm, Starting Jan. 6

Dec. 17, 2013:

• Finals Week: those who can, come; those who can't, no pressure
• Joseph: made some minor updates to heuristic code, etc.; finished most of FROntIER rule editor
• Dr. Liddle: new granddaughter! Has to-dos with paper and annotator
• Thomas: coding and debugging (on step 9 of about 20 in the pipeline)
• Dr. Woodfield: working on agreement of definitions for “power levels” in conceptual modeling
• Dr. Embley: family history lunch; spoke with Dave Brown at tech transfer – we'll license our technology to Church for $0 cost

Sidebars: which pages are we going to process;

Dec. 10, 2013:

• Dr. Liddle: progress on logging
• Peter: wrestled with LG parser, planned algorithm for semantic work, worked on apps for PhD programs
• Dr. Lonsdale: also worked on obituaries data; need to be able to publicly serve obituaries
• Tae-Woo: had been working on proposal, but found an issue to resolve first; fixed issue and back on proposal
• Thomas: continuing with simplified grammar induction approach – reimplemented first few of several steps
• Shin: outlining paper for ER 2014; working on SQL queries over multiple databases; schedule: will leave USA on Jan. 15
• Dr. Embley: negotiate schedule for Winter 2014; Family History lunch; chapter officially accepted (sidebar)

Sidebars: chapter accepted

Dec. 3, 2013:

• Plan on meeting with Church History group at 2:30pm

Nov. 26, 2013:

• Happy Thanksgiving! No research meeting today.

Nov. 21, 2013:

• Dr. Embley is doing the CS colloquium at 11:00am.

Nov. 19, 2013:

• Tae-Woo: Working on proposal; almost done; hopes Dr. Embley feels the same.
• Joseph: Worked on improving rel-phrase heuristics, specifically for obituaries, to use actual matched text; needs further discussion with Dr. Embley perhaps; also worked on version numbers for FROntIER 1.1 and OntoES 2.4; HyKSS still works, but with OntoES 2.3
• Dr. Lonsdale: sent around newer listing of randomized pages; still needs to do skip pages piece
• Peter: code is working for a couple of simple examples to go all the way through, end-to-end; needs to discuss some elements with Dr. Lonsdale
• Shin: found that RDB annotator has some problems; there are some object- and relationship-sets that aren't being recognized; still working on SQL generator; needs to sketch out a paper; Dr. Embley has feedback for Shin from ER2013
• Thomas: might be done with the math he's been working on for several weeks; has finished several proofs; next step is to try to do the empirical part; still trying to follow up on Dr. Barrett's suggestion to meet with Dr. Ringger
• Dr. Liddle: ER 2013 was nice; working with Christopher on annotation tool
• Dr. Embley: ditto; found some issues with the annotator – some form isn't working right; has written some things in the backlog; also found an issue with relationship-set display in the Ontology Editor

Sidebars: sync up for annotation project

Nov. 5, 2013:

• Peter: working on code; most is working; but progress feels slow (2 days jury duty, GRE, oral & written Mandarin midterms); needs to apply this month to PhD programs
• Tae-Woo: working on proposal
• Thomas: still working on minimum description length principle; trying to code what he's seen in other papers; can understand why what others have done won't work in his situation; is focusing on the mathematics behind it
• Shin: ran into some problems processing free-form queries (HyKSS not recognizing object or relationship sets in heterogeneous context); isn't quite sure how to make HyKSS do what he needs it to do; needs to identify whether the problem is in his code or in the HyKSS code
• Dr. Woodfield: working on extensions to conceptual models to handle family history concepts; e.g. crisp cardinality constraints in CM vs. distributions with confidence intervals in family history context
• Dr. Embley: continued working on keynote; continues to work on obituary project
• Dr. Lonsdale: has another set of random page ranges for us; is aware of every-other-page-blank situation now
• Dr. Liddle: getting ready for ER2013; Matthew Sheets did submit an ORCA proposal

Sidebars/blockers: Tae-Woo & Thomas (negative example – false positive – where did precision fail?); Shin & Dr. Embley at 3:30pm; ground-truthing tool

Oct. 29, 2013:

• Plan to hear dry run of Dr. Embley's keynote presentation

Oct. 22, 2013:

• Dr. Embley: spending almost all time on keynote presentation; up soon: training missionaries (four forms for missionaries are on Joseph's account)
• Joseph: looked at Sifter-produced docs; worked on thesis
• Peter: has been working on thesis code; would like to sit in on annotation training session
• Dr. Lonsdale: has a dozen students champing at the bit to annotate some things (could do first attempt at the task we're going to eventually hand the missionaries); working with a lot of other people; wants to discuss next stage for Sifter
• Shin: still working on generating SQL queries from free-form queries; needs to figure out how to combine multiple databases (union and join issues)
• Thomas: working on grammar induction (continues forever and ever!); has learned a fair amount from this week's experiments (memory issues); will work on making sure new grammar rule formula will work for future grammar rules
• Dr. Woodfield: appreciated discussion from last week with the group; has vocabulary question about his philosophical paper: is there a word that describes the fact that we can only talk about things that our language can express? (Don't use Sapier-Whorf hypothesis, but this is in the neighorhood; perhaps the “frame problem” is somewhat in the neighborhood as well.)
• Dr. Liddle: resurrection demo; has been working with Christopher so the original Ontos (.rev2) runs again; now focusing on web-based annotation tool

Sidebars/Blockers: Where are we with annotation, what's next?

Oct. 15, 2013:

• Dr. Embley: finally got down to Moab to visit Arches with his family! ML-OntoES paper revision is submitted
• Joseph: Look at JsonToOsmx, disabled unit tests to allow build to complete successfully, appears to be working aside from faulty unit tests; did some work on object existence rules for specialization objects
• Dr. Lonsdale: has two sample sets; worked on ML-OntoES paper; worked with Peter
• Dr. Liddle: worked on ML-OntoES paper; worked with Christopher (Java done, C++ infer program nearly done; next up: web programming); worked with Michael Bean
• Peter: has a new granddaughter! spent time refactoring SOAR bits; did some work on Big Data bits
• Tae-Woo: tried to tackle ontology snippet problem; worked on rewriting input to a simpler form
• Thomas: has been working on debugging and fixing grammar induction issues (micro issues, not macro)
• Shin: working on SQL generator; checking whether it works on a set of pre-formed queries across multiple databases with different schemas; looking for efficient new methods for generating keyword phrases over object sets in specific domains
• Dr. Woodfield: working further on extending conceptual modeling project; looking at intersection of family history and conceptual modeling

• Discussion of “right” label for modeling in a human way, not a programmer way; mention of Alan Newell's book (Unified Theories of Cognition) and the use of the term “band” (Newell defines four bands: neural, cognitive, rational and social)

Sidebar: Steve & Deryle, Steve & Thomas

Oct. 8, 2013:

• Dr. Embley: paper submitted, progress on OntoES-ML paper, interesting obituaries task to address (NDA)
• Joseph: made some progress on JSON-to-OSMX, but it needs more work (doesn't produce expected)
• Peter: finished thesis proposal, made more progress on writing; back to coding
• Dr. Lonsdale: working with Peter, retrained Sifter; needs input on what to train on and what pages to randomly pick (estimates 2/3 good books in the set of 200); has a dozen students in Linguistics Tools class ready to do annotation
• Shin: adopting new method for handling keyword phrases; has tried to compile LaTeX independently of his system, but no luck so far
• Tae-Woo: working on how to handle many patterns; it's a challenge to deal with many patterns; trying various approaches
• Thomas: continuing to work on redesigning pattern-finding code; getting closer, but it's slow [reminder: will need to set up meeting with committee in December]
• Dr. Woodfield: lots of interesting side issues are popping up (the pyramid isn't as clean as hoped)
• Dr. Liddle: reprocessed PDF examples; Founders Conference, E-Week were a success, progress with Christopher on old Ontos (not OntoES)

Sidebars: OntoES-ML paper Blockers: object-existence rules for specializations problem; font or character set in obituaries (Spanish characters) giving trouble in using Frontier (may need to run through iconv to convert to UTF-8)

Oct. 1, 2013:

• Presentation from Dr. Lonsdale on sifter process
• Shin: fixed some bugs, updated SQL generator so it generates UNION operations for gen/spec and SQL statements for INNER JOIN
• Dr. Woodfield: worked on philosophical view on Family History Research
• Dr. Embley: got Frontier running, ran in to some bugs/blockers that Joseph knows about (or will know about soon); couldn't run directly from PDF; needs to try version from Jenkins; revived the product backlog
• Dr. Lonsdale: working with Peter
• Joseph: did some work on help parameter for Frontier; got sidetracked otherwise
• Dr. Liddle: hired Dr. Woodfield's student, made progress on getting him going in the porting project; discovered some issues with Antlr; etc.; worked with Michael Bean on other project
• Peter: finalizing thesis proposal; trying to get clarity on the mapper; wrote up ideas on evaluation component
• Tae Woo: working on issue of having 1000s of patterns; has some ideas to discuss
• Thomas: working through some data structures and algorithms on grammar induction; has almost given up on Kae build problems

Sidebars: almost out of time on the paper, Peter's thesis, Jenkins Kae build

Sep. 24, 2013:

• Dr. Woodfield: has a solution in search of a problem and some interesting directions to study
• Tae Woo: working on GreenFIE project, found some cases where it makes erroneous suggestions and other issues; made pattern to recognize paragraph info structure; that pattern could be useful for processing next page in Ely book
• Thomas: working on coding, pattern-finding, bug-fixing, etc. Needs to figure out how to export png in graph tool. Questions on Jenkins.
• Shin: new daughter!! Still recovering from long hospital stay and Mr. Mom duties. (Congratulations, Shin!)
• Peter: working on clarifying algorithm for semantic/linguistic data matching; hopes to send something to Dr. Embley before Thursday (1152 TMCB for Thu mtg)
• Dr. Embley: trying to run software; things didn't work out with annotator.ss; working with Joseph on trying to run Frontier; wants to make progress on obituary extraction project
• Joseph: worked with Dr. Embley on Frontier end-to-end run; close, but a few more changes needed
• Dr. Lonsdale: installed French Obituary folder and ran into troubles; now running; worked on sifter and produced linked output file of valid data (3-page runs, sometimes several in a good doc)
• Dr. Liddle: worked on Samantha's & Stephen's code for annotator; worked on old Gold Annotator; checked on old Ontos.rev2 code (4244 l.o.c.)

Sidebars/Blockers: annotator web tool, obituary extraction process

Sep. 17, 2013:

• Dr. Liddle: worked on issues with PDFIndexer, obituaries, Jenkins
• Dr. Woodfield: worked on things not related to this group
• Dr. Embley: trying to get set up, code running, etc., thinking about obituary processing; worked on ML-OntoES paper
• Joseph: got sick last week, didn't get as much accomplished; uploaded workbench jar file into Google Drive
• Peter: working on OntoSOAR, installed some tools on his machine and Linguistics Lab machine (Eclipse plugin for SOAR); wrote some multi-sentence Java code
• Dr. Lonsdale: improved OntoSOAR parser; made progress on ML-OntoES paper; set up the classification system – the sifter – and found issues with PDFIndexer; ported sifter to supercomputer (mostly); how do we report 3-page ranges?
• Tae Woo: working on TWK – possibly GreenFIE; working through some of the synergistic interaction questions
• Thomas: working on grammar induction still;

Sidebars: obituaries, sifter, Jenkins Blockers: Jenkins isn't cooperating (Thomas to look into this)

Sep. 10, 2013:

• Joseph: looked over David's code, found conflicts on update, is working on resolution; not as simple as just commenting out test cases; has more of that to do
• Dr. Liddle: has been working on ER 2013 travel arrangements, PDF indexer – blocker with splitting PDFs
• Dr. Lonsdale: has made progress on his part of the paper (draft); needs to get together with Steve; may have till Oct. 13
• Peter: is looking at Harwood book, combination of parser & segmenter still has problems with the sample texts; will visit with Dr. Lonsdale; also has reconstructed summer code, getting some matches
• Thomas: working on grammar induction, debugging
• Dr. Woodfield: has continued discussions on paper – talking about power, why extend/add to conceptual models; when does a construct become first class
• Dr. Embley: back in town; need candidates to hire as RAs

Sidebars: resolve PDF splitting questions, end-user interface Blockers: PDFIndexer, HyKSS demo, other demos?, Joseph needs data, Dr. E has trouble with WinSCP

Sep. 3, 2013:

• Peter: spent summer at SOAR Tech, gave brief report on experiences
• Dr. Lonsdale: ported family history classifier on dithers; ready to process text files (blocked by PDFIndexer multi-page tool); remember 9/21 deadline for paper; teaching undergrad class on linguistics tools – would like to get students on the annotator tool
• Tae Woo: has been in Korea, working on personal and family business; back in the saddle now; has 2 classes this semester
• Thomas: presented HIP paper a couple weeks back (nice job!), Jake offered to help get more data; working on extending simple list grammar induction process to handle more complex record types
• Shin: almost done with SQL generation, but has some bugs to fix, adapting WordNet similarity for Java to handle keyword phrases
• Dr. Embley: attended HIP and ICDAR: someone is doing online handwriting recognition (could apply to detection of novel features, like early signs of Alzheimer's or autism – often the things we do have far-reaching implications, beyond what you first think); wanted to tackle the problem of grand unification in terms of pattern recognition (Rejean Plamondon, Ecole Polytecnique de Montreal); Golden Age of Manuscript Studies and Imaging Technologies (reuse of papyrus, ability to pick up various writing layers with multi-spectral imaging); ICDAR had competitions – we should see if we can sponsor one (similar to WEPS, like what we're doing with Church now); talked with ABBY rep there, and ability to zone – should be able to handle it; HIP would like to be more practical in the sense of being useful to end users; needs HyKSS demo restarted
• Joseph: has committed changes to evaluator on rev. 1.1 so original evaluator; blocker: needs data
• Dr. Liddle: read through reviewer comments on HyKSS paper and read recommended additional references, needs to spend more time on PDFIndexer and resetting the demo tools
• Dr. Woodfield: is working on domain-specific conceptual modeling; (1) conceptual models don't let you represent certain things (e.g. probability distributions on participation constraints), (2) conceptual models are quite crisp, but we want to be able to override constraints sometimes, (3) evidence/probability modeling constructs are not first-class features; primary question is “what are the problems with current conceptual models?”

Sidebars: sifter, main line (Liddle needs to deal with the blockers here)

Blockers: PDFIndexer, HyKSS demo, other demos?, Joseph needs data