2008 Press Releases

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Director to deliver Annual Boole Lecture in Informatics
24.04.2008

This year's annual Boole Public Lecture will be delivered by SFI Director Professor Fionn Murtagh, a world-leading authority on clustering, data analysis and data mining.

Titled "The Correspondence Analysis Platform for Uncovering Deep Structure in Data and Information", the lecture takes place on Tuesday, April 29th at 8pm in Boole III Lecture Theatre, UCC.

Fionn Murtagh is Director of the Information, Communications and Emergent Technologies Directorate at Science Foundation Ireland.  Among his many activities, he has held chairs at the University of London and Queen's University Belfast, served with the European Space Agency's Space Science Department, on the Hubble Space Telescope project, and founded MultiResolutions Ltd. which was established to commercialise image and signal processing software, with sales worldwide.

The work that Professor Murtagh will discuss in his lecture is based on two different aspects of information semantics: the collection of all relationships, and tracking and spotting anomaly and change. The first is implemented by endowing all relevant information spaces with a Euclidean metric in a common projected space.  The second is modeled by an induced ultrametric. A very general way to achieve a Euclidean embedding of different information spaces based on cross-tabulation counts (and from other data) is provided by Correspondence Analysis.  From there, the induced ultrametric takes a sequential ordering of the data into account. Such a perspective is employed to look at narrative, "the flow of thought and the flow of language" in W. Chafe's description.  An ideal template for many domains of application is provided by filmscript.  Taking Robert McKee's book on "Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting" as his framework, Professor Murtagh will show how many qualitative perspectives can be converted into a quantitative analysis of semantics. In a short review of the global economic conjuncture related to Ireland's Celtic Tiger and more recent period, based on the annual Taulbee Survey Report of the Computing Research Association, he will address two preliminary issues that are important for the analysis of deep structure in technology trends: Do we have a mechanism available to focus description and characterization of these trends in a small number of dimensions?  And arising from two significant recent technology upswings, can we suggest the basis for the next one?

The Annual Boole Lecture was established and is sponsored by the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics, the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, the Department of Computer Science, and the School of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics at University College Cork.  The series is named in honour of George Boole, the first professor of Mathematics at UCC, whose seminal work on logic in the mid-1800s is central to modern digital computing.  To mark this great contribution, leaders in the field of computing and mathematics are invited to talk to the general public on directions in science, on past achievements, and on visions for the future.

Admission to the lecture is free and all are welcome.   A draw for an iPod Touch, kindly donated by Apple, will take place on the evening.

Image:  George Boole

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