O'Really?

November 30, 2012

The University of Mo-chester, UK: Scientific Movember Team

Filed under: education,funny,Science — Duncan Hull @ 12:16 pm
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Movember is now in its tenth year but like many men, I’ve resisted the urge to grow a Mo because of

  1. an inability to grow a decent moustache
  2. a reluctance to look like a p0rn star / seventies pervert / gay cowboy [delete as appropriate]
  3. a fear of scaring off potential collaborators, customers, undergraduates, postgraduates, friends etc
  4. a long history of fine facial foliage from Errol Flynn to Tom Selleck, Henry Wellcome to Freddie Mercury, Charlie Chaplin to Lemmy from Motörhead. How can you compete with distinguished facial hair like that?

Then I looked around me and thought, what the heck,  that’s not stopping anyone else. So with a few colleagues we got together and created the University of Mo-chester, CSMCR team. So far we’ve raised over £1000 for prostate and testicular cancer and you can still sponsor us. There’s a group photo of us below – you can’t actually see my moustache in that picture because it is blonde. Honest guv’.

csmcr mobros

CSMCR Mo Bros, from left to right: Bijan Parsia, Sean Bechhofer, Alan Stokes, Nicolas Matentzoglu, Dimitri Tsarkov, Kristian Garza (cheating with a beard!), Matthew Makin, Simon Harper, Jim Miles, Yours Truly, Michele Filannino and Toby Howard.

There’s an interesting back story to Movember, told here by its Aussie founder, Adam Garone:

Movember isn’t just about raising money, it’s about raising awareness too. If you’re a bloke, have you felt your balls lately, for testicular cancer (obviously)? Do you know about prostate cancer? With a few caveats [1], Movember is having a generally positive effect on human health [2] – and its a lot of fun too!

References

  1. McCartney, M. (2012). Is Movember misleading men? BMJ, 345 DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e8046
  2. Jeffcott, M., Cagiannos, I., & Zorn, K. (2012). Movember update: The Canadian perspective Canadian Urological Association Journal, 6 (3) DOI: 10.5489/cuaj.12037

October 30, 2008

Congratulations Matthew Horridge!

Filed under: semweb — Duncan Hull @ 9:28 pm
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George Best Genius by sahmeepeeSo, congratulations are due to Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Ulrike Sattler from The University of Manchester for winning the keenly fought best paper prize at the International Semantic Web Conference [ISWC 2008] in Karlsruhe for their paper “Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL”. An abstract of the paper is reproduced below:

“A justification for an entailment in an OWL ontology is a minimal subset of the ontology that is sufficient for that entailment to hold. Since justifications respect the syntactic form of axioms in an ontology, they are usually neither syntactically nor semantically minimal. This paper presents two new subclasses of justifications—laconic justifications and precise justifications. Laconic justifications only consist of axioms that do not contain any superfluous “parts”. Precise justifications can be derived from laconic justifications and are characterised by the fact that they consist of flat, small axioms, which facilitate the generation of semantically minimal repairs. Formal definitions for both types of justification are presented. In contrast to previous work in this area, these definitions make it clear as to what exactly “parts of axioms” are. In order to demonstrate the practicability of computing laconic, and hence precise justifications, an algorithm is provided and results from an empirical evaluation carried out on several published ontologies are presented. The evaluation showed that laconic/precise justifications can be computed in a reasonable time for entailments in a range of ontologies that vary in size and complexity. It was found that in half of the ontologies sampled there were entailments that had more laconic/precise justifications than regular justifications. More surprisingly it was observed that for some ontologies there were fewer laconic justifications than regular justifications.”

But what does it all mean? One of the results of this research project has been an explanations plug-in for the Protégé ontology editor, see explanation in OWL at http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk. This helps users to understand when and why the reasoning goes all pear-shaped through better explanations than has previously been possible. So this is another step toward making building better ontologies with the Web Ontology Language (OWL) easier and less confusing. Yay!

References

And the winner is... by guitarfish

  1. Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Ulrike Sattler (2008). Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL Lecture Notes in Computer Science, LNCS Volume 5318/-1 The Semantic Web – ISWC 2008 DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-88564-1_21

[Picture of Manchester United player George Best by Sammy, Best paper prize picture by guitarfish]

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