Department of Chemistry

Murray-Rust Research Group

Visions of a (Semantic) Molecular Future

15-17th January 2011 - Hackfest/Unconference and Symposium

The event looks forward (and PMR is not "retiring"). Scholarship (universities, research, teaching, publishing) has been slow to take up the opportunities of this digital century. This is an opportunity to identify and build the future.

Saturday/Sunday 15/16th January - Hackfest/Unconference

This event is what you make it. It builds on the recent culture of unconferences (where people turn up and decide on a program early in the event) and hackfests (where hackers set themselves the goal of achieving a significant creation or advance in a limited amount of time). For this event you will need:

  • An open mind and a sense of adventure
  • To work in small groups with people you (may not) know.
  • A laptop
  • Ideas of something to work on (optional, but Open Semantic resources are welcome).
  • A communal read-write RESTful Open server.

You will have chairs, tables, Open wi-fi, power points, hacker food and drink, human-acceptable ambient temperature, and a 400 m walk to the Panton Arms (real ale, open fire, reservable private room).

The starting points for the hackfest include:

  • PMR semantic libraries and framework for computational chemistry and materials
  • The Blue Obelisk products
  • The Open Knowledge frameworks including CKAN, Open Bibliography / Bibliographica
  • Climate Code

We also expect involvement from the DevCSI (JISC community of developers) and some of our eScience collaborators.

The self-forming groups will design their own informatic tasks and explore/build systems that will liberate knowledge. These could include:

  • Unilever Centre Open projects
  • scraping and textmining of published knowledge,
  • mash ups (Open chemistry and bioscience resources, bibliographies, government data, Linked Open Data).
  • enhancement with geo-location and time- lines (“space-time”)
  • Computational frameworks (Lensfield, Quixote).
  • Blue Obelisk mashups in chemistry
  • Toolkits for crowdsourcing.

The Unilever projects will be showcased at the Monday symposium, including during the reception. There should be space and display to allow other groups to show results if they wish.

The University Library has organized bespoke tours for us on Saturday morning of particular relevance to bibliographic knowledge.


Monday 17th January - A Symposium to celebrate the ideas of Peter Murray-Rust

We’ve invited visionary scientists and given them free rein to say where they think the semantic revolution is taking science.

Programme

09:30 Introduction – Professor Robert Glen

09:45 Professor Sir Tom Blundell, University of Cambridge, Department of Biochemistry - Structural Molecular Biology: Travels between Academia and Industry

10:30 Dr Dan Zaharevitz, National Cancer Insitute/NIH, Bethesda - Adventures in Public Data

11:15 Coffee

11:30 Professor Henry Rzepa, Imperial College London - The past, present and future of scientific discourse (TALK AVAILABLE ONLINE)

12:15 Video Tribute (Semantic Revolutionary) from Professor Tony Hey, Corporate Vice President of External Research at Microsoft and Talk by Alex Wade, Principal Programme Manager, Microsoft Research

13:00 Lunch and Demos

14:15 Skype presentation by Dr John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science, Creative Commons

14:45 Dr Cameron Neylon, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory - Three stories about communicating research: One past, one future, and one present

15:30 Professor Douglas Kell, Chief Executive, BBSRC - Metabolomics, semantics and systems biology: applications to pharmaceutical drug uptake

16:15 Tea

16:30 Professor Peter Murray-Rust

17:00 Close – Professor Robert Glen, followed by a Reception