“Who are those guys?” *
If anybody asks you that about us, we’ve got an answer for them in 16 slides: The Eigenvector Company Profile. It’s a short profile of EVRI, including some information about our company history, software products, personnel, short courses and consulting services.
“Hey, Butch?”
“What?”
“They’re very good.”
BMW
* With apologies to Butch Cassidy.
Eigenvector offers academic discounts on our software and short courses, such as our upcoming Basic Chemometrics in Rome. Everyone, of course, likes a discount, so we get a lot of questions regarding how to qualify as an academic.
If you do a Google search on “definition academic” you’ll come up with quite a few choices. Most of them, like TheFreeDictionary.com, include something to the effect of “Of, relating to, or characteristic of a school, especially one of higher learning.” Based on this, we define academic as degree granting institution. Thus, we do not consider research institutes, such as national laboratories, to be academic, and ask that they pay industrial rates.
There are some other definitions of academic. In particular I like “Scholarly to the point of being unaware of the outside world” and “Theoretical or speculative without a practical purpose or intention.” If you are willing to admit that your institution fits this definition, then I suppose we would give you the academic rate. However, I’d have to see this on letterhead and signed by the laboratory director. I doubt that we’ll find anyone willing to put that in writing, but if we do, I’ll post it here!
BMW
I’m pleased to announce that Eigenvector’s Dr. Charles E. “Chuck” Miller has been elected chair of the 2010 International Diffuse Reflectance Conference, aka the “Chambersburg” Meeting. IDRC has been held every other year since 1982 and is one of the premier conferences on NIR spectroscopy and related fields. It is organized by the Council for Near infrared Spectroscopy, CNIRS.
The 2008 IDRC meeting ran from August 3-8 in its usual location, on the campus of Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. IRDC is organized in a Gordon Conference-like format, with longer talks, moderated discussions, morning and evening sessions, and afternoons off for further scientific exchange or recreation. Chuck will be responsible for organizing the program for the next meeting, to be held in August, 2010.
This year at IDRC Chuck presented “Chemometrics in Process Analytical Technology (PAT)-A Six Sigma Perspective.” When at Dupont, Chuck became a “Six Sigma Green Belt.” His presentation outlines his experience with Six Sigma and explores the relationship between Six Sigma, PAT and chemometrics.
Congratulations to Chuck! We’re sure the 2010 Chambersburg meeting will be a smashing success!
BMW
Details are now available for our Basic Chemometrics in Rome, Italy, short course. Rasmus Bro will be joining me for this 3 day, hands-on course October 27-29, 2008.
The course page includes additional information about Rome, the course content, registration, prices, and nearby lodging. If there is anything you can’t find, please let me know!
BMW
Originally, the Chemometrics in Analytical Chemistry (CAC) conferences were held every 4 years. That changed with CAC-2002, which was held in Seattle (USA), only two years after CAC-2000, in Antwerp (Belgium). Since then, the schedule has been conferences in Europe every four years, with conferences outside of Europe in the even years in-between. CAC-2004 was in Lisbon (Portugal), CAC-2006 in Águas de Lindóia-Guarulhos (Brazil), and the just completed CAC-2008 was in Montpellier (France).
In 2010, CAC moves back to North America, to New Orleans (USA). The host committee is headed up by Steve Brown and Karl Booksh. They invite you to come to the New Orleans, the birthplace of Jazz, in the first two weeks of June, 2010, for chemometrics plus southern hospitality, Louisiana Cajun-Creole cooking and the continuous party that is the French Quarter.
CAC-2012 will move back to Europe. Several groups have expressed an interest in hosting the meeting, so it’s possible it could be in Poland, Germany, or Hungary. The CAC series is alive and well!
BMW
If your chemometrics software package were an automobile, what would it look like?
Sorry, couldn’t resist! 
BMW
Some time ago I asked Rasmus Bro if he would be interested in teaching a short course with me in Europe this fall. He said, “Yes, and I really want to go to Rome!” Fortunately, I’d been in contact lately with Dr. Giovanni Visco of Rome University Chemistry Department regarding the CMA4CH meeting.
Dr. Visco has been kind enough to put us in touch with CASPUR, the nearby “Interuniversity Consortium for Supercomputing and Research,” which has good facilities for teaching a computer based course. We’re currently planning on teaching an introductory 3-day course October 27-29, 2008. The course will include:
Obviously, we’ll have to do a little editing of these courses to fit this 4.5 days worth of material into 3 days! If you have questions, please drop me a line (bmw@eigenvector.com).
See you in Rome this fall!
BMW
In September of 2007 I received an offer I couldn’t refuse. When Professor Dominique Bonvin of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) wrote and asked if there was a chance to have me spend some time there in 2008, it didn’t take long for me to send back a positive response.
Besides the fact that EPFL is in a beautiful location, (on Lake Geneva in Switzerland), Dominique’s group there at the Automatic Control Laboratory has research interests that are well aligned with Eigenvector’s, and, of course, our users. For instance, they have worked on issues surrounding MSPC and curve resolution for investigating reacting systems.
I’ll be working with Michael Amrhein on model updating schemes for batch processes. This is rather timely as we work more and more with monitoring batch processes, including semiconductor manufacturing and bioreactors. Model updating is important because these process exhibit considerable drift with time.
I’ll be spending a little more than 2 months at EPFL, arriving in the last couple days of August and leaving in the first few days of November. My wife (and assistant!) Jill, will be along, as will daughters Clare and Mattie. It should be pretty much business as usual at EVRI, though it make take a few days on either end to set up operations to process orders, etc.
I look forward to this time to “sharpen the saw.”
BMW
Nomenclature has been a subject of some discussion within the chemometrics community, such as on the list ICS-L. I recall exchanges dealing with the definition of various terms such as “factor,” “latent variable,” and “principal component.” Its clear that we don’t all use these terms in exactly the same way. For the most part, this doesn’t bother me. Authors should be free to use terms as they wish provided that they define them unambiguously in their text.
However, it would be useful for the community to have a set of generally agreed upon definitions for commonly used terms and concepts. Enter IUPAC, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. I remember first hearing of IUPAC when I was an undergrad learning organic chemistry. Learning the IUPAC names for compounds was always straightforward as they were very systematic. This was in contrast to learning common names, which, it seemed at times, were pretty much random.
Professor D. Brynn Hibbert, of the University of New South Wales, has received funding for a small IUPAC project to develop a glossary of concepts and terms in chemometrics. He presented a brief introduction to this project at CAC-2008. His collaborators on this include Professor Pentti Minkkinen, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Dr. Klaas Faber, Chemometry Consultancy, and myself.
The initial project goal is to establish the scope of the problem, and to develop a draft glossary and a consultation process. To do this we plan to set up a “wiki” where members of the community could edit terms or add new ones. We’ve had several offers of existing glossaries which could be used to populate the wiki initially. We’ll do that and then let everybody have at it. The wiki software will keep track of all the edits submitted, so we’ll know what terms are particularly contentious. Once it has settled down, the project team will create a consensus list for eventual presentation to IUPAC.
An IUPAC glossary would make it easier for authors as they could simply state that they will adhere to IUPAC definitions, and thus not have to define terms further. But perhaps more importantly, it would make things easier for students of chemometrics, who could learn a common set of terms and then only have to worry about the exceptions as they come up. Ultimately, it should be good for the field of chemometrics.
It’s Eigenvector’s job to get the wiki set up. I’ll let you know when it becomes available.
BMW
Eigenvector was pleased to sponsor the “Best Poster” prize at CAC-2008. The top three poster presenters all received a certificate good for a copy of PLS_Toolbox or Solo (well, OK, it wasn’t exactly a certificate, it was one of my business cards with “Good for one PLS_Toolbox” written on the back!). The top poster also got $500USD, which equates to 320€.
There were 160 posters presented at CAC, so this was quite a contest! The winners, selected by the CAC scientific committee, represent some exceptional efforts selected from a very large body of good work.
The third place poster was “Drift compensation of gas sensor array data by Orthogonal Signal Correction” by M. Padilla, A. Perera, I. Montoliu, A. Chaudry, K. Persaud and S. Marco. This is a nice application of OSC. We’ve used it for spectroscopic instrument standardization and found it to work well in that application. It makes sense that it would work well for electronic noses as well.
Second place went to Pat Wiegand, Randy Pell and Enric Comas, all of Dow, for “Simultaneous Variable and Sample Selection for PLS Calibrations Using a Robust Genetic Algorithm.” This work addressed the problem where one has both samples and variables that are irrelevant for building a predictive model for a given property. Most previous work address either the variable selection or the sample selection problem, but not both. The robustness of their algorithm comes, in part, from a robust PLS algorithm from the LIBRA Toolbox, developed by Sabine Verboven and Mia Hubert. This toolbox is what provides the robust options for PCA and PLS in PLS_Toolbox, so of course we think that was a very good choice!
Emma Peré-Trepat accepted the first place prize on behalf of herself and co-workers I. Montoliu, F.P. Martin, S. Rezzi and S. Kochhar, all of Nestlé Research Center. They presented “Data fusion strategies for nutrimetabonomics.” Nutrimetabonomics, the application of metabonomics to nutritional sciences, is the study of metabolic responses to the consumption of specific foods and ingredients. Their approach used hierarchical modeling to fuse NMR and meta-data.
Congratulations again to the winners!
BMW