I’ve written about some of the talks at Everybody Technology which was an event about how to make technology inclusive.
I gave a short talk there, too. It was about my Conversational Internet project. I’ve written about it a few times already now, so I won’t rehash it here, but I talked about the Extreme Blue prototype and some of the work that’s been done since.
Luckily for fans of funny voices everywhere, it was recorded.
This summer, I was the mentor for a team of interns on an Extreme Blue project. I’ve written about the project, using machine learning and natural language processing to build a smarter screenreader. But I didn’t explain “Extreme Blue”.
Promotional stuff about Extreme Blue is on ibm.com, but aimed at students who could apply to be interns. I want to talk about what it’s like to be a mentor, as it’s one of the best things I’ve done at IBM.
Overview
Extreme Blue is IBM’s summer internship programme. Every year, IBM locations around the world give teams of students projects to work on.
It’s explained on ibm.com but in a nutshell, a team is four students: three with a technical background, one with a business background. Each team are given one project to work on, a challenge they spend their summer trying to solve.
I went to London today to be interviewed for a radio programme on the BBC.
The topic was a project that I’ve been working on over the summer.
I’m not a typical spokesperson, certainly not for something the size of IBM. I’m definitely happier as the behind-the-scenes geek type. The prospect of going on the radio to represent the project, let alone IBM, was more than a little terrifying.
But my best efforts to get someone more able to talk coherently failed horribly, and this afternoon I dutifully got the train up to London to go to Broadcasting House.
Overview
UIMA stands for Unstructured Information Management Architecture. It’s an Apache technology that provides a framework and standard for building text analytics applications. I’ve mentioned it before.
In this post, I want to talk about an area of UIMA which isn’t covered well in the documentation.
I couldn’t find practical getting-started instructions for running UIMA-AS annotators in parallel. In this post I want to discuss why you might want to do it, and share some simple sample code to show how.
Background – the UIMA pipeline
UIMA provides a framework for managing a text analytics application. You break up the analytics functionality into discrete pieces called annotators. UIMA takes care of moving a text document through an analytics engine: a pipeline containing a series of annotators.
A document goes in one end of the pipeline, passes through a number of annotators, each of which adds some metadata to the document. What comes out the other side of the pipeline is an annotated copy of the document.
By default, you get UIMA to run these annotators one at a time – one after another.
Background – annotators in parallel
What if your annotators are quite slow – perhaps they take several seconds to run?
If there is no dependency between any or all of your annotators, then maybe running them one at a time isn’t the most efficient approach.
You can run all of them at the same time, in parallel. UIMA will merge the output from all of the annotators into a single annotated document.
My sample code
I’ve written two sample UIMA apps. Each demonstrates one of these approaches, to compare and contrast.
They are divided into three eclipse projects. You can import them into an eclipse IDE.
The UIMA eclipse plugins are very helpful if you want to make changes to the XML configuration files, but they’re not essential. If you want them, there are instructions on how to install them at uima.apache.org.
I’ve added comments to the sample code to explain how the apps work, but I’ll give an overview here.
I’ve had some trouble with Internet Explorer recently.
I was making a new web tool which looked fine in all browsers. Except Internet Explorer, where it looked a bit squiffy.
Internet Explorer has “Compatibility View”. Compatibility View makes IE behave like the older versions of Internet Explorer, the ones before Microsoft started paying more attention to web standards.
It makes sense – there are a lot of websites out there that were written to render well on old versions of Internet Explorer, and Microsoft needed to make the move to standards compliance in a way that doesn’t break all of them.
The problem is, Compatibility View can be a little… insistent.
It kept turning on, even though I didn’t want it, even though my site worked fine in new shiny standards mode, and looked horribly broken in Compatibility View.
You can manually disable it, but I don’t want to have to make users do that. As the web developer, I want to be able to disable it – to tell IE that I want the site to be rendered in standards mode.
It was a bit fiddly. Here’s how I did it.