Cambridge Search Meetup - Knowledge Discovery & Wayfinding - Linguamatics

This time we have two speakers from Linguamatics (http://www.linguamatics.com/) Ltd:

Dr David Milward (Chief Technology Officer) has 20 years experience of product development, consultancy and research in natural language processing. He is a co-founder of Linguamatics, and designed the I2E text mining system which uses a novel interactive approach to information extraction. He has been involved in applying text mining to applications in the life sciences for the last 10 years, initially as a Senior Computer Scientist at SRI International. David has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and was a researcher and lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He is widely published in the areas of information extraction, spoken dialogue, parsing, syntax and semantics.

He'll be speaking on "From Document Search to Knowledge Discovery: Changing the Paradigm" : Finding documents with keyword searches is fine as far as it goes, but is inadequate in the face of large bodies of documents in technical knowledge domains, such as life sciences. This talk discusses how Linguamatics use linguistic analysis and semantic information to do better.

Robin Newton (Senior Developer) has 15 or so years of experience as a software engineer, in a variety of different companies, from small start-ups to multinational corporations. He has an MSc from Imperial College in the mathematical foundations of computing, because doing it sounded like fun.

His talk is on "Knowledge wayfinding with people: a response to Tyler Tate (https://twitter.com/tylertate)". As the saying goes, if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail. Text search may technically be a solved problem, but finding things out isn't purely a technical matter. Taking as a starting point Tyler Tate's application of the concept of urban wayfinding (http://softwareast.ning.com/events/software-east-ux-evening-at-red-gate-software) to information, this talk considers the adverse consequences of an overly formal understanding of knowledge.

There will of course also be drinks, snacks and the usual informal networking.