Helioid

Helioid Applies for NSF SDCI Grant

admin — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 20:41:01 +0000

The National Science Foundation's Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) program is dedicated to the development of widely redeployable software systems which advance the methods of research and education employed in a broad range of fields in science and engineering. SDCI directly addresses the software-centric issues laid out in NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery, seeking to fund and promote the development of innovative software solutions to issues such as the management and analysis of extremely large collections of data, collaboration across disparate disciplines and institutions, and make the use of high performance computing systems both more productive and more accessible. SDCI addresses these issues through awards given across five software focus areas (HPC systems, digital data management, broadband and networking, middleware, and cybersecurity) as well as three cross-cutting issues in software development (sustainability, self-manageability, and energy efficiency).

Helioid applies for FODAVA grant

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:01:20 +0000

The Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics (FODAVA) program at the NSF focuses on promoting innovative approaches to information visualization and representative allowing users to easily see existing patterns and to discover new patterns in their data. Particular attention is given to large and potentially dynamic data sets. Algorithms and techniques developed within the program and potentially applicable to a number of areas such as scientific, engineering, commercial, financial, and governmental. The program is operated in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security as it is expected that the tools developed will be applicable to intelligence analysis applications.

Business Intelligence must be Automated

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:16:17 +0000

Business intelligence is now taking off with companies like Endeca and NetSuite fighting for market share along with more established companies such as IBM and Microsoft. The idea of real time integration of all types of business data so that one can make more informed predictions and decisions is simple and obvious. Yet pulling this off in a business environment, with enough data format acronyms to make a reverse engineer cringe, is complex.

Helioid applies for NSF IIS grant

admin — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:47:31 +0000

This November Helioid has applied for an Information and Intelligent Systems grant valued at $3,000,000 over a 3 year period. On another note, we did not receive the STEM grant but, thankfully there are always more out there, like this IIS grant. We applied to the information integration and informatics program. Below is the project summary which we submitted: *Project Summary* The proposed project will build upon established theory in knowledge representation to develop a set of multi-view clustering algorithms; utilize these algorithms to support a set of graphical search refinement tools; systematically apply these tools to the domains in which they would be of the greatest utility. The project will develop knowledge management tools that will enable users to browse large document collections with increased dexterity, efficiency, and efficacy, by applying novel hybrid clustering/topic-modelling algorithms to the collections.

Literature Review 2008 – 2009

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:46:26 +0000

The research we do at Helioid involves a lot of reading. With some notes and summaries included, here is a list of the literature we've focused on from 2008 to 2009:

Machine Learning

G. Lebanon, Y. Mao, and J. Dillon. The Locally Weighted Bag of Words Framework for Document Representation. Journal of Machine Learning Research 8 (Oct):2405-2441, 2007.

How Helioid Benefits Users

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:45:25 +0000

The simple answer to how Helioid benefits users is that Helioid represents information and information navigation in a more efficient manner. This gets a complex when looking at how each individual uses the internet and searches for information, but still the core is the same. A current issue with web search, as Google's Marissa Mayer "explains":http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/10/marissa-mayer-clarifies-search-is-only-10-done-not-90/, is that it is undeveloped and not advanced, "Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it's a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time."

Helioid applies for NSF STEM grant

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:41:01 +0000

Back in April we applied for a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science, Technology, Engineer, and Mathematics (STEM) grant that involved building tools to help the National STEM Education Distributed Learning (NSDL) group accomplish its goals. The acronyms and obtuse titles are a bit much but the aims of the integrated services track (which we applied to) are relatively simple: "Enhance overall capabilities of the NSDL network to meet the needs of its user and developer communities including the need to demonstrate impact of content and resources." Below is the Letter of Intent that we submitted along with the grant

The Intentional Web

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:40:02 +0000

The majority of the time one browses or searches the web there is a goal in mind. Find the location of a coffee shop, learn more about cloud computing, see if there are any interesting new movies, be distracted and procrastinate. Each of these instances of web use has objectives and implicitly defines a success predicate. When one (the agent) interacts with the web, a computer or simply information (the system), that systems knowledge or discovery of an explicit representation of the agent's objectives, and the success predicates for these objectives, greatly enhances its capability to assist the agent in accomplishing its objectives. The intentional web is a community of agents interacting with each other to accomplish their goals and increase their fitness.

Asynchronous Microlearning and Microfranchising

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 07:28:55 +0000

At Helioid, we will leverage the opportunity and advantages gleaned from our search solutions to support netroots humanitarianism, in addition to our primary goal of meeting the emerging need for a new sort of web search and academic/enterprise research. Information scientists like "Chaomei Chen":http://www.beet.tv/2008/06/kosmix-topical.html have demonstrated that representations of published research in a given field – clustered by citation analysis – can so accurately characterize the field that changes in the representation can be used to predict the emergence of new research paradigms, and so these clustered representations can be used to help guide research. Others like Peter Pirolli argue that, since such representations illustrate areas in which relatively sparse research efforts have been undertaken, they can be used to optimally distribute the efforts of researchers over presently hot subject areas, and under-explored regions of the field. Moreover, there is a very clear opportunity presented by such structured knowledge representations for enabling any interested party to make some manner of contribution to such innovative networks, as such navigable representations allow users to assemble crash courses in a broad subject area, or pick and choose over specific topics in which their acumen might be lacking.

Kosmix and the Semantic Web

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 04:39:05 +0000

I just recently ran across an "interview":http://www.beet.tv/2008/06/kosmix-topical.html with Anand Rajaraman, founder of Kosmix, and something that was said toward the end of the interview piqued my interest. The subject of the Semantic Web came up, the existence of which Anand claimed would far more likely be brought about by apps "mining intelligence" out of the internet's squall of information, rather than the universal adoption of a common semantic ontology like RFL. We certainly agree with that, as we believe that the winners of the race to establish the next generation of web search will be the ones who mine intelligence the most efficiently. However, something stuck in my craw about Kosmix being held up as an example of the various expeditions presently being made in this general direction. Which isn't to say that I think Kosmix is not on such an expedition, but rather that I seem to be feeling the same vague perturbation I felt when I first made an expedition of my own through the flurry of noise on Kosmix, after hearing about the explorative experience supported by their search engine.