Gnosis -- a cool addon plugin for FireFox

From the documentation of the Gnosis plugin:

"With a single click, Gnosis will identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing."

Check out:ClearForest Gnosis

Companies involved in Natural Language Processing in Israel

Here are some companies that are involved in Natural Language Processing in Israel:

* Ligature Ltd
* Linguistic Agents Ltd
* infoneto
* peer39
* Semingo
* Information Retrieval Group at the IBM Haifa Research Labs
* Knowledge Center for Processing Hebrew, Technion, ITT.
* The Pudding
* ClearForest
* PureSight
* Topixa
* Targetize
* internative
* 2001
* Wizsoft
* Activepoint
* Holtran
* Idioma
* Persay
* Celebros
* Nielsen BuzzMetrics
* Melingo
* Invoke
* Nuance
* Effective-i
* Quigo
* Intuview
* Answers.com
* Pidgin
* Babylon
* Google
* Mercado
* White Smoke
* CubeEffect

My 2006 פדיחה is in the Semi-finals

Check out: תחרות הפאדיחה - חצי גמר 1

New books that I ordered

I ordered a few books from Amazon:

• Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition)
• Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation
• Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures: A Dependence-based Approach
• Querying XML, : XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in context (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems)
  

How to transliterate Hebrew in Latin script?

Have you ever had a chance to see how road signs, street signs and Hebrew text (e.g., Hebrew names) in Israel are represented in Latin Script?

If so, you probably know that there is a problem because there is more than one way to represent the Hebrew text in Latin script.

Should the city פתח-תקוה be transliterated into Petach-Tiquwa or into Ptax-Tiqwa or into Petah-Tikva...?! (there are plenty more possibilities, and those driving to that city can laugh about it while viewing the road signs...).

Apparently there are too many ways, some of them are even documented. See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Hebrew. Sadly, there are also some ad-hoc ones...

I find the suggestions made in ISO standard 259-3.1999 (Conversion of Hebrew Characters Into Latin Characters. Part 3: Phonemic Conversion. ISO/TC46/SC2) useful. However, this standard has not yet been adopted.

I recently saw an article by Prof. Uzzi Ornan, which was presented in SIGRTS in volume 13 number 1 in January 2007. Ornan discusses the problems that the Hebrew script poses and the resulting requirements on a Latin transliteration. He further lists the pros and cons of several alternatives and suggests an alternative that has more advantages then other suggested alternative.

I recommend reading this interesting text by Ornan: http://sigtrs.huji.ac.il/papers/131-ornan-072006.pdf

I also tried to start a discussion about this in Linguistics forum in Tapuz and in the Hebrew Language forum in Tapuz.

The Rule of Least Power

I read an interesting text about sharing information and a simple principle which should help facilitating information sharing: The Rule of Least Power by Tim Berners-Lee and Noah Mendelsohn (editors).

Here's the abstract of that text:

Abstract

When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Photography

You can see some of the photographs that I take on my flickr account.
I update it occasionally.

Check it out at http://flickr.com/photos/shlomoyona

The picture you see was taken in my last visit to Istanbul in December 2006.

Patent idea

For a few months now, I'm playing with an idea to a new process that helps monitor QA's tests coverage. After sharing my idea, and its applications, to a few colleagues at work, I was encouraged to either publish an academic paper about it or submit it as a patent.

Since my employer doesn't support, as far as I know, academic publications, and since I already experienced the process of submitting research work for refereed conferences and journals, I feel ready to explore the process of filing for a patent.

I wrote a letter today to my manager and to the VP R&D that I report to. In that letter I enclosed a short description of the idea and its application. Let's see how it proceeds from there on.

Introducing my family

Michal and I go way back... we're together since high school. We went together to the Technion for our B.Sc. degrees, stayed in Haifa (Ne$er, to be exact) for a few more years (Aviv was born, Michal did her M.Sc. and I started mine).

Then we moved to Hod-Ha$aron and a year later Sivan was born.

Two and a half months before we moved to our current home, in Kfar-Yona, Nir was born.

In the picture you can see, from left to right, Sivan, Michal, Nir and Aviv. I am missing from the picture, as I was busy taking it... :-)

My first blog post

I wanted to start using a blog a while ago but I never got to do it... well, until now.

This blog will probably serve for a variety of things that I'm involved in, such as (but not limited to):

* Photography
* Gardening
* Perl programming, especially events related to Israel.pm
* Interesting links
* Occasional posts on my family


Let's see how it goes...