The news this week that Google is merging its two AI initiatives, Deep Mind, and Google Brain caused a stir, but commentators have struggled to interpret this development consistently. According to the Financial Times (““Deep …
Academic studies of reading appear to be influenced by romantic ideas about how we read print (Corot, Woman reading in the country, around 1868-70, Metropolitan Museum)
Where did this idea come from, and is it valid? It seems to me an …
Reading Time: 4minutesThe barn-like SEC, where UKSG was held
Now that the UKSG annual conference has got back to something like normality following the pandemic years, it seems a good moment to explore some fundamental questions. What is UKSG for?
The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) seems to have emerged from the pandemic stronger than ever. This year, in Dublin, saw the highest number of attendees ever, I’m told, at over 380 in-person and virtual attendees. I’m not a computing …
We can all agree that a lot of research, perhaps most research, starts with asking questions. Does smoking cause cancer? What are the causes of the French Revolution? What causes inflation? The next step is …
Reading Time: 3minutesSubject coverage of some of the collections evaluated. “GSC”, Google Scholar, has the largest collection, fairly evenly spread across subjects. Others, such as PubMed (PMD), are heavily focused on medical subjects.
Choosing where to search is a central part of the …
Reading Time: 4minutesThe ad-hoc atmosphere: We stood while they stood and presented
The STM Startup Fair (London, 6 December 2022), billed by STM as “our first ever”, was a fascinating event. There were 23 startups, each given five minutes to present what they …
It was just like old times: for the first time in three years we were talking face to face, rather than feeling locked into the anaesthetized environment of a conference call. At the Search Solutions 2022…
