Monday, 22 August 2011

Turku, Finland

I am off to Turku, Finland on Wednesday. I am presenting a paper there on Friday at the "Information Science and Social Media" (ISSOME 2011) conference. I will be staying at the Holiday Inn until Sunday the 28th, then it's back to Germany.

The presentation is entitled "Author Disambiguation for enhanced science 2.0 services" and describes how I have implemented a simple algorithm at iFQ to split publications written by identically-named individuals into distinct groups. It's not very cutting-edge, but it has the advantage of requiring no human guidance and works with very meagre data. Hopefully that makes it of interest to the conference attendees, as the metadata associated with the community-generated content on science 2.0 websites is also pretty sparse. Such websites would be more useful if they could automatically generate new structures based upon their data.

My colleague Kalle is half-Finnish and he told me bluntly that Turku is not very pretty. I think its main purpose is to serve as a place where Swedes can get off the ferry and purchase lots of lightly-taxed vodka. Nonetheless, the city is the 2011 European Capital of Culture. There are lots of public art installations that I hope to check out (including a see-through sauna). I will look into taking a boat tour and may go for a run on the island of Ruissalo.

2 comments:

allieb said...

Hi Jeff; Best of luck with your paper. Hope it goes well. Just finished typing up my trip journal from May. I had such a great time with you. Loved every minute. Mom.

Anonymous said...

Is your friend Kalle from Helsinki region perhaps, those people don't like Turku anyways. They hate the fact that Turku was the capital before Helsinki.

Anyhow Turku is kind of place where you have to spend long time before really understanding it.

It's city of history and traditions, but it's also place of living underground culture. And Turku is also city which blooms in summer, which means in Finland June and July.

Turku is place that Finns either hate or love. And your friend obviously belongs to the first category.