2,038 research outputs found
In conversation with Nigel Scrutton
No full textNigel Scrutton FRS is Professor of Molecular Enzymology and Biophysical Chemistry at the University of Manchester and former Director of the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB). He obtained a first‐class degree in Biochemistry from King’s College London and followed this with a PhD at the University of Cambridge. His doctoral research, undertaken in Richard Perham’s laboratory, yielded fundamental breakthroughs in enzyme redesign that have stood the test of time. Nigel was awarded a ScD degree by the University of Cambridge in 2003. After faculty positions at the University of Leicester, Nigel was appointed Professor at the University of Manchester in 2005. Over the last 15 years, he has cemented his reputation as a world leader in the fields of enzyme engineering and biocatalysis, synthetic biology, biophysics and biomanufacturing, notably by establishing and directing the Synthetic Biology Research Centre ‘SYNBIOCHEM’ and UK Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub. In recognition of his scientific contributions, he has received many academic awards and accolades, including being elected as Fellow of the Royal Society earlier this year. In this interview, he highlights how fundamental studies of enzymatic catalysis and mechanisms are driving key advances in biotechnology and biomanufacturing, and describes how the experiences and mentors of his formative years helped to shape his successful career at the interface between discovery and application‐focused science
Identifying communities of practice: analysing ontologies as networks to support community recognition
No full textCommunities of practice are seen as increasingly important for creating, sharing and applying organisational knowledge. Yet their informal nature makes them difficult to identify and manage. In this paper we set out ONTOCOPI, a system that applies ontology-based network analysis techniques to target the problem of identifying such communities
Also By The Same Author: AKTiveAuthor, a Citation Graph Approach to Name Disambiguation
No full textThe desire for definitive data and the semantic web drive for inference over heterogeneous data sources requires co-reference resolution to be performed on those data. In particular, name disambiguation is required to allow accurate publication lists, citation counts and impact measures to be determined. This paper describes a graph-based approach to author disambiguation on large-scale citation networks. Using self-citation, co-authorship and document source analyses, AKTiveAuthor clusters papers, achieving precision of 0.997 and recall of 0.818 over a test group of eight surname clusters
Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History of Energy Use
No full textFire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. © 2014, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved
Open data and charities
No full textOpen data involves a paradigm shift in the way organisations manage their information and data: moving from a default of charities keeping data resources locked up in underused internal systems, to building a shared ‘Web of Data’. The emergence of the open data movement has supported powerful new models of creativity, innovation and public engagement.Although most of the recent stories of progress and success in the open data field come from government and research where open data is more established, this report sets out to explain the ways in which open data is increasingly coming to play a role in the charitable sector. Existing open government data can be used by charities to add value to their work, to target services better, to improve advocacy and fundraising, and to support knowledge sharing and collaboration between different charities and agencies. Crowdsourcing of open data also offers a new way for charities to gather intelligence, and a wide range of freely available online tools can support charities to analyse open data resources. Realising the potential of open data will require charities to meet a number of technical and organisational challenges. Indeed many charities will need to address key issues relating to open data, whether they choose to pursue benefits from open data or not (as regulatory, funding and performance indication is published online by researchers, by government and by others in the sector).This report reviews open data as it relates to the charitable sector, drawing on long experience of developing open data in research and government, as well as early work exploring open data with charities and third-sector organisations. It defines open data, describes the background context of a knowledge economy, and outlines key opportunities and challenges of open data in the charity sector.On the basis of this overview and analysis of the field, the report sets out in more detail a number of options for the further development of open data practices in the charitable sector, via five recommendations derived from the analysis
Semiometrics: Applying Ontologies across Large-Scale Digital Libraries
No full textAs large-scale digital libraries become more available and complete, not to mention more numerous, it is clear there is a need for services that can draw together and perform inference calculations on the metadata produced. However, the traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) model, while efficiently constructed and optimised for many business structures, does not necessarily cope well with issues of concurrent data updates and retrieval at the scale of hundreds of thousands of papers. At the same time the growth of RDF and the increasing interest in Semantic Web technologies perhaps begins to present a viable alternative at a scalable, practical level. This paper considers a specific application of large-scale metadata analysis and conducts scalability tests using real-world data. It concludes that RDF technologies are both a scalable and performance-realistic alternative to traditional RDBMS approaches. It also shows that for relationship-based queries on large-scale metadata stores, RDF technologies can significantly out-perform traditional RDBMS approaches by allowing both retrieval and updating of data in a timely manner
Approaching Semantically-Mediated Acoustic Data Fusion
No full textOur primary hypothesis is that it should be possible to enrich data fusion by semantic processing, with wide potential application. In order to achieve our aim we need to represent the semantic data and enable reasoning about it in a framework that can be aligned with data fusion. Ontologies are most suited to this task as they allow for rich representation of data structure; some approaches include probabilistic representation. These can be aligned with data fusion approaches, such as Bayesian, which can fuse by including estimates of uncertainty. We shall describe our initial approaches towards establishing our hypothesis. We shall survey the enabling technologies, showing how they can contribute to our goal. We shall describe our selection of application data which derives from an acoustic sensor (military) scenario. We shall show how feature subset selection can reduce information-redundancy and improve efficiency in these domains, prior to fusion to enhance performance further. We shall explore the semantic attributes and the representations that can be deployed for enrichment purposes, showing how ontologies can be used in this context. In these respects we shall show how we can approach enrichment of data fusion by semantic technologies, how this can capitalise on the current stock of techniques, and illustrate the potential benefits associated with this new approach
ONTOCOPI: Methods and Tools for Identifying Communities of Practice
No full textThe paper describes ONTOCOPI, a tool for identifying communities of practice (COPs) by analysing ontologies of the relevant working domain. COP identification is currently a resource-heavy process largely based on interviews. ONTOCOPI attempts to uncover informal COP relations by spotting patterns in the formal relations represented in ontologies, traversing the ontology from instance to instance via selected relations. Experiments to determine particular COPs from an academic ontology are described, showing how the alteration of threshold and temporal settings, and the weights applied to the ontology?s relations affect the composition of the identified COP
Manure Application Standards and EQIP Payments: The Distribution of Economic and Environmental Costs and Benefits across US Hog Farms
No full textImplementation of new CAFO regulations and EQIP payments could have important implications for the structure of the hog sector. This study uses a farm-level positive mathematical programming model to estimate the distribution of the economic and environmental effects of these new policies across regional and scale typologies.Environmental Economics and Policy,
Midata: towards a personal information revolution
No full textThere has been an explosion of data on the Web. Much of this data is generated by or else refers to individuals. This emerging area of personal information assets is presenting new opportunities and challenges for all of us.This paper reviews a UK Government initiative called midata’. The midata programme of work is being undertaken with leading businesses and consumer groups in order to give consumers access to their personal data in a portable and electronic format. Consumers can then use this data to help them better understand their own consumption behaviours and patterns, as well as make more informed and appropriate purchasing and other decisions.The paper reviews the history and context, principles and progress behind midata. It describes concrete examples and examines some of the challenges in making personal information assets available in this way. The paper reviews some of the key tools and technologies available for managing personal information assets. We also summarise the legislative landscape and various legal proposals under development that are relevant to midata.We review similar efforts elsewhere in particular those underway in the US under a programme of work called Smart Disclosure. This work seeks to release personal information held by government and business back to citizens and consumers. Finally we discuss likely future developments
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