Increasingly, funding of academic research groups depends on sources other than the groups' home institutes. In the group that I lead, the Information and Language Processing Systems group, fewer than 20% of the members are funded by our home institute, the University of Amsterdam. Project acquisition is becoming an increasingly important aspect of academic life.

As part of our acquisition activities, we need to do PR and outreach activities that go beyond the traditional conference talks and contributions and journal papers. So when an editor of KLM's inflight magazine Holland Herald called me, telling me that they wanted to cover my group's research as part of a piece on innovation in the Netherlands, I said yes. The result, a 100 word text snippet, appeared in the April 2007 issue of the Holland Herald.

While I acted as group leader for ILPS, trying to promote us as a group and emphasizing the collaborative nature of much of our work, the text snippet, which mostly deals with MoodViews, may unfortunately be interpreted differently so that it fails to recognize the contributions of my UvA colleagues and students. I regret this and want to apologize to the team behind MoodViews: to Gilad Mishne (who initiated it and created the first site and buzz) and to Krisztian Balog and Breyten Ernsting (who made important further contributions); see http://www.moodviews.com/About/ for details.

I have asked the Ethische Commissie to look into this matter.

Listening to ''Super flumina Babylonis'', by Palestrina (Play Count: 4)