Hi,   I am an information scientist at UC Data Archive & Technical Assistance (UC DATA) within the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI), University of California, Berkeley                                                                                                                                                     

 Get ready and participate in NTCIR GeoTime (Sept 2009-June 2010), multilingual (Japanese, English) evaluation of geographic and temporal Information Retrieval.  For more details, go here.

Recent stuff:

In July 2009 I co-chaired (with Jussi Karlgren of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and Noriko Kando of the National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo) the SIGIR 2009 workshop Information Access in a Multilingual World, held in Boston – the workshop website is here.  My workshop paper “Romanization – An Untapped Resource for Out-of-Vocabulary Machine Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval” may be found here.

In May 2009 I presented on the topic of “Combining Statistics and Text for a View of Irish Cultural Heritage” at the IASSIST 2009 conference in Tampere, Finland.  The presentation can be found here.  A paper on the topic is being written.

In fall 2008 I was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Information Science and Speech Technology at the University of Hildesheim in northern Germany.  My hosts were Professors Thomas Mandl and Christa Womser-Hacker.  I consulted with graduate students and presented lectures on “History As Events In Time And Space: Biography In Context”, “Multi-genre Search Using Common Geography”, and “How can you use a Japanese-English Technical Lexicon for Phonetic Matching?” (latter presented Oct 7, 2008 at the German “Lernen, Wissen & Adaptivität” conference at Würzburg University).

During the summer of 2007 I was a visiting researcher in Tokyo at the National Institute of Informatics working on the creation of a bilingual Japanese-English technical lexicon (dictionary) from the NTCIR scientific text collections, NTCIR-1 and NTCIR-2.  My final presentation may be found here.  A paper on the project was presented at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2008) in Morocco in late May 2008.  The lexicon can be found here.

Somewhat older stuff:

1. Geo-temporal search of

      Statistical and Bibliographic resources

• California counties and cities
• U.S. States 1790-1960 a presentation to ICPSR in Oct 2007 can be found here.

2. I was co-organizer of GeoCL:EF , the Geographic Information Retrieval Track of CLEF (What is Geographic Information Retrieval?).  Working notes from 2006 are here
3. Social Science Data Librarianship: A University Curriculum (presented at IASSIST 2006)

I am co-PI on a grant “Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies” from National Endowment for Humanities and Institute for Museum and Library Services (Oct 2007-Sept 2010).  The UC Berkeley press release about the project can be found here 15 November, 2007 - UC Berkeley NewsCenter.

Current grant home pages:

1. Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies (co-PI)
2. Bringing Lives to Light: Biography in Context (co-PI)
3. Eco-informatics Project:  Semantics Management and Semantics Service  (senior person) – closely related to
4. Extensible Metadata Registries

Even older, but still neat stuff:

1.      Geotemporal Search of Russian and Hindi document collections (uses TimeMap interface), writeup found here.

2.      California Latino Demographic Data Book, 2004

3.      Historical Census Rescue

4.      Language distribution of the Web