Harry Halpin

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Harry Reeves Halpin
Collaborative and Communicating Systems
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
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+44-131-650-4421 +44-131-650-4421

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Short Bio

I'm a researcher and postgraduate student of Henry S. Thompson and Andy Clark at the University of Edinburgh. I'm interested in the intersection of philosophy and the Web. In particular, what exactly are the secrets to the success of the Web and what lessons does this hold for computing in general, and especially artificial intelligence? In my current work I am analyzing both the underlying architecture of the Web using notions from information theory, type theory, the philosophy of computation. As a side interest, I'm also interested in how we can use machine-learning and natural language processing to make the massive amount of text on the Web easier to use, in particular through automatic ontology creation. This application comes from my interest in narrative analysis, which I did my MSc. thesis. I can usually be found in Edinburgh, but have been known to make guest appearances in New York City and the forests of North Carolina.

Re-occuring Events

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Previous Events and Activities

  • May 6th -13th Giving a paper on The Complex Dynamics of Collaborative Tagging as well as a tutorial on Deploying Web-scale Mash-ups by Linking Microformats and the Semantic Web at WWW2007 Conference (Banff, Canada).
  • May 8th Chairing the I3: Identity, Identifiers, Identification Workshop at WWW2007 (Banff, Canada).
  • April 19th -22nd Chairing the World Wide Web Evolves Panel at HASTAC Conference (Duke University in Durham, NC).
  • August 7 -11th Giving the plenary talk at Extreme Markup Languages (Montreal, Canada) on "XMLVS: Using Namespace Documents for XML Versioning".
  • August 12- 13th Yet another talk at The North American Conference on Computing and Philosophy (Troy, NY, USA) on "Towards a Philosophy of the Web"
  • September 13th- 15th A talk on "Argontonaut: An Ontology for Intelligent Mailing List Discussion" (is there such a thing?) at AIMSA 2006 (Varna, Bulgaria).
  • November 5th- 9th Giving a presentation at the Doctoral Consortium at the International Semantic Web Conference (Athens, GA, USA) on "From Typed Functional Semantic Web Services to Proofs".
  • December 5- 7th At XML 2006 (Boston, MA USA) for a presentation on "Social Semantic Mashups".
  • I was (and will be when I return to Edinburgh!) organizer with Andy Clark of the Philosophy, Psychology, and Informatics Group.
  • Drop by Infoseed, an independent media centre and free software lab in Edinburgh City Centre that I administrate.
  • July 18-21st: Presenting a paper on a follow-up study from my MSc. degree on "Event Extraction in a Plot Advice Agent" at the Associaton for Computational Linguistics (Sydney, Austrailia).
  • Rest of June: Complex Systems Summer School(Sante Fe, New Mexico) with a self-proposed project on studying the evolution of tagging as a complex system.
  • June 4th: ALife X: Presenting a paper on "Representationalism: The Hard Problem for Artificial Life."
  • May 26th: WWW 2006 - XML and Web Services Track: Presenting paper with Henry Thompson on "One Document to Bind Them: Combining XML, Web Services, and the Semantic Web" on our functional approach to web service composition.
  • May 24th: Chair of Web Services and Security Track at WWW2006(Edinburgh,UK). These are quite interesting papers on a topic of crucial importance to the future of the Web.
  • May 23rd: IRW WWW2006 Workshop (Edinburgh, UK): Co-Chair with Pat Hayes, presenting a summary on "Identity, Reference, and the Web of Meaning."
  • April 29: Immaterial Labour Conference(Cambridge,UK). Presenting paper on " Digital sovereignty: The immaterial aristocracy of the World Wide Web ", lots of postmodern fun. and I'll be in charge of audio streaming the whole conference.

Address

Harry R. Halpin (ICCS)
2 Buccleuch Place
Edinburgh EH8 9LW
Scotland UK
55.942709
-3.185994

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