Question: What is the most interesting thing you have ever done realting to science?

Gary Munnelly answered on 5 Nov 2018:

There are two kinds of answers to this question. There are things I have done which are scientific and help the science community. Then there are things that I do with science which are largely useless, but tend to make people laugh.

The most interesting thing I have done for the science community this year is demonstrate some important design features of entity linking systems when applied to cultural heritage. There were quite a few experiments behind this and we wrote several papers about our findings. There are good reasons for us to figure out these considerations as the process of digitizing cultural heritage artifacts is heavily automated these days and tools such as entity linkers can help to extract meaningful information from these rapidly growing datasets. The problem is that people don’t really know how to use them properly in this domain. I’ve been helping with this.

The silliest thing I have ever done was try to turn my cats into random number generators using a laser pointer and camera. Utterly useless. The idea is that agitated cats will produce chaotic pictures from the camera (coupled with general noise in the surrounding image). You pass the pixel data through a hash function, then a chaos function and you get a random number out the other side. How random? I don’t know yet. I haven’t tested it properly, but somewhere in the world I like to think a statistician is very angry with me.