End of Universities April 28, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in Citation.3 comments
Yesterday’s NYTimes Op. Ed. “The End of the University as We Know It” by professor Mark C. Taylor is quickly making the rounds in academic circles.
There are two elements in this article that concerned me. One is the dismissive criticism of one of his colleague’s student thesis topic as trivial:
Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
Presumably professor Taylor is not bothered that a Ph.D. student in a religion department is studying Duns Scotus – one of the most important philosophers of the middle ages. It must be, then, that he thinks it is not important to be studying how Scotus is using citations.
I know enough about citation analysis to be confident that professor Taylor is being dismissive too hastily. I wish this graduate student well in his or her use of a 21st century tool to discover new things about Scotus that were heretofore unknown about his thinking.
The other remark which I thought was ill conceived is the argument that Universities should:
Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.
Professor Taylor appears not to have headed the advice about categories in David Weinberger’s book Everything is Miscellaneous. It is indeed possible to imagine not just a “broad range” of topics, but a virtually infinite range of “zones of inquiry”, each equally worthy of consideration.
Furthermore, getting academics to agree on even on one set of such topics within which to fit their work would be an interminable excercise. Take the citation analysis of Duns Scotus’ work, for instance. It arguably belongs equally to “Information” or “Networks” or “Language” or, in categories not yet mentioned, such as the more traditional “Mathematics” or “Philosophy” or “Library Science”.
Besides, who would decide which categories are the relavent ones? The government of the day? In that case would professor Taylor have wanted to apply for grant funding under the topic “Anti-Terrorism” in the past 8 years?
NextBio Recommender Launch April 24, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in Collaborative filtering, Recommender, Recommender service.add a comment
Congratulations to NextBio, which has just launched its recommender for science articles (and data and clinical studies). And they have a new and improved UI as well! We need more portals like that.
Unlike my prototype Synthese Recommender on CISTI Lab, NextBio offers up recommendations in a piecemeal way. It looks like the recommendations depends on an overall usage profile (downloads or clickstream – I’m not sure) and there do not appear to be many ways to control what gets recommended.
In the 5 minutes that I played with it, I searched for Kawasaki’s disease (my next door neighbour’s daughter has it) and Multiple Sclerosis (several friends have it) and I was given recommendations for literature and studies on Cancer. But there isn’t an explanation for why I was given those recommendations, so I don’t know why I should trust them. Explanation is a critical feature for recommenders and I need to start working on explanations for my recommender too.
But really, it’s much too early to assess the quality of NextBio’s recommender. I expect it suffers from the cold start problem endemic to all recommender systems and acutely endemic to digital library recommenders. NextBio’s recommender will no doubt get better as its 1.6M visitors (so says their stats counter) to generate usage data!
Intelligent Librarian Agent April 2, 2009
Posted by Andre Vellino in CISTI, Citation, Data Mining, Digital library.1 comment so far
Daniel Lemire has been pining for a research tool that will notify him of anything that may be relevant to his research needs: someone citing his work, other “smilar-to-his articles” that have recently been published and anything else that might be relevant to his research.
The idea of personalized software agents has been around for at least 10 years (e.g. at the MIT Media Lab and Carnegie Mellon University) but perhaps it’s time has come. The editors of Technology Review believe that anyway and list an Intelligent Software Assistant as one of the top 10 technologies for 2009.
This got me thinking about other things besides Daniel’s suggestion that a Personalized Intelligent Librarian Agent might do for you:
- A collaborative filtering recommender such as the Synthese Recommender on CISTI Lab could be at the core of an alterting service that informs you about new articles that other people who are “like you” (based on a profile of your “bookmarked articles”) are reading / downloading / bookmarking.
- A service that informs you when a an article in your field has become a “sleeping beauty”. A “sleeping beauty” is a publication that has gone unreferenced for a long time and then suddenly attracts a lot of attention.
- A patent alert service that informs you about patents related to your recent research. This is trickier than it seems because patent descriptions often deliberately obscure the nature of their inventions.
It’s good to know what some of the work we are doing at CISTI is going to have a role to play in satisfying scientific researchers’ information needs.
