Doing things with data during the COVID-19 shutdown

Austria is pretty much in shutdown since midnight: in order to minimize the further spread of COVID-19, the governmenat has put severe measures in place that make us all mostly sit at home this coming week(s?). While staying home and looking after the kids, on the side, I'll try to revive this blog a bit: …

GDPR-Day: time to request your data – automate it!

So, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is in place... Great! Time for a little experiment: So, I got all these (probably pointless) emails that asked me to review privacy terms and reply immediately. I collected them and decided to turn this around: Let's rather ask all these organisations and companies what data they …

10 days to GDPR: Standards and Regulations will always lag behind Technology – We still need them…

In the light of the near coming-into-effect of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 10 days from now, there is a lot of uncertainty involved. In fact, many view the now stricter enforcement of data protection and privacy as a late repair to the harm already done, in the context of recent scandals …

Is it only me or is there something fundamentally wrong with the competitive conferences in CS and their review process?

I know we all like to complain about the academic review process every now and then, but this time, I'd like to take a slightly different angle - from a reviewer's perspective: Why not forget about our huge, competitive "flagship" conferences or organize them differently? For instance, is IJCAI (probably not least because of the …

What is “Sustainable Computing”?

A while ago, together with colleagues Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff, Sabrina Kirrane, and Ben Wagner (who joined in a bit later) we founded a joint research lab, to foster interdisciplinary discussions on how information systems can be build in a private, secure, ethical, value-driven, and eventually more human-centric manner. We called this lab the Privacy & Sustainable …

RDF Data Wrangling: How to work with huge RDF files…

When working with bio2rdf and pubchem you realize quickly that you sometimes need to deal with pretty large gzipped TTL and NQ files. Maybe though, some of the tools in your RDF tool chain don't swallow those, or you simply can't afford to unpack those files due to sheer disk space restrictions (unless you have …

On Net Neutrality and Democracy

This morning I had a nice meeting with Didi Kuo, Academic Research and Program Manager at CDDRL’s Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective at FSI (the institute which co-hosts me here at Standford), talking abouty Net Neutrality and her article recently published on the topic together with Ryan Singel, Many civil society initiatives (e.g. …

Getting your hands dirty on serious RDF/Linked Data processing – Step 2: Loading and Processing big amounts of RDF data

This continues my previous post on playing around with HDT and seeing whether we can load process some really serious data. As an example, for getting a big RDF dataset. we will use the PubChem RDF data. Thanks to Maulik Kamdar for the pointer! Maulik told me that in some earlier attempts, he had difficulties …

AI and XYZ

Not only here in Stanford, kinda everywhere we now hear various "AI and XYZ" talks, usually equating AI with ML. What I mean here is that many people feel entitled to talk about AI and its effects to humans in the closer and nearer future, but often without understanding the technologies, its limitations. So maybe …

Getting your hands dirty on serious RDF/Linked Data processing – Step 1: Setting up HDT for playing around on a Mac

Following up on all I promised yesterday on Linked Data, now let's do some more serious hands-on RDF stuff. This is what I did today... getting my hands dirty: compared to my usual in the meantime mainly administrative work, I thought I see how hard it is for someone a bit rusty o the commandline …