I learnt today that my Elsevier Challenge entry didn't make the final cut. This wasn't unexpected. In the interests of "open science" (blame Paulo Nuin) here is the feedback I received from the judges: I think this is a pretty fair evaluation of my entry. I was making a case for what could be done, rather than providing a specific bit of kit that could make this happen right now.

Stata Center. MIT Originally uploaded by Roderic Page Quick post about the Elsevier Challenge, which took place yesterday in the wonderful Stata Center at MIT. It was a great experience.

I've submitted my entry for the Elsevier Grand Challenge. The paper describing the entry is available from Nature Precedings (doi:10.1038/npre.2008.2579.1). The web site demo is at http://iphylo.org/~rpage/challenge/www/. I'm now officially knackered.

Elsevier have released this video about the challenge, featuring a few of the contestants. I couldn't get my act together in time to send anything useful, and having seen the 16 gigabytes song (full version here), I'm glad I didn't -- there's just no way I could compete with Michael Greenacre and Trevor Hastie.

Chris Freeland's tweet alterted me to the Elsevier Article 2.0 Contest: Elsevier are clearly looking for ideas (they also have their Grand Challenge), and there's been some interesting commentary on the Article 2.0 contest.

Just to provide a sense of how much data I want to analyse for the Challenge, I have the XML, PDF, and images for 1687 articles from Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution to play with.

Starting to get serious about the Grand Challenge. First step is to parse the XML data Elsevier made available. Sadly this is only for Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution for 2007, I would have liked the whole journal in XML to avoid hassles with parsing PDF. However, XML is not without it's own problems.

Elsevier recently announced the 10 semi-finalists for their Grand Challenge. To my consternation, I'm one of them.