www.tantallon.org.uk
Colin Batchelor

Currently (2006 to present)

Team leader, Informatics R&D at the Royal Society of Chemistry in Cambridge, UK. I am particularly interested in natural language processing of scientific text, including regular polysemy, named entity recognition (with Peter Corbett) and rhetorical analysis (with Simone Teufel). I am also interested in ontology development and am one of the maintainers (with Karen Eilbeck) of the Sequence Ontology.

I am a member of the IUPAC Subcommittee on the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier.

Natural language processing

• Peter Corbett, Colin Batchelor and Ann Copestake (2008). Pyridines, Pyridine and Pyridine Rings: Disambiguating Chemical Named Entities. Proceedings of Building and Evaluating Resources for Biomedical Text Mining at LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco. [pdf to follow]
• Colin R. Batchelor and Peter T. Corbett (2007). Semantic enrichment of journal articles using chemical named entity recognition. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Companion Volume Proceedings of the Demo and Poster Sessions, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 45--48. [pdf]
• Peter Corbett, Colin Batchelor and Simone Teufel (2007). Annotation of chemical named entities. BioNLP 2007: Biological, translational, and clinical language processing, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 57--64. [pdf]

Ontology work

Chemical ontology:

• Colin Batchelor (2008). An Upper-Level Ontology for Chemistry. In 5th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany, 31st October to 3rd November 2008. [pdf to follow]

I am delighted to observe that many of the proposals in the above paper will come into effect in the October 2008 release of ChEBI. Details.

Previously (2001 to 2006)

Technical editor, Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, UK.

Previously (1998 to 2002)

Theoretical spectroscopy

Molecular Rydberg Dynamics is my doctoral thesis in physical and theoretical chemistry. Until the Oxford Eprints repository allows theses and other grey literature to be deposited, here and the Bodleian Library will be the only places where it is available.

In a Rydberg molecule, one electron roams over a space much bigger than the rest of the molecule. Normal quantum chemical methods such as ab initio calculations, density functional theory and the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, no longer necessarily work for Rydberg molecules, so the work reported in this thesis uses quite different techniques. [Now read on...]

(Astonishingly, this is on Amazon, but "Currently unavailable". ASIN B001ABUXH8.)

Science writing

Recent magazine articles:

• 24th March 2009: Lab on ice, Chemical Technology, issue 5.
• 24th February 2009: Nanowire forests repel liquids, Chemical Technology, issue 4.
• 4th December 2008: Microreactor's holey coat improves syntheses, Chemical Technology, 2009, issue 4.
• 19th September 2008: The solution to solve all solution structures?, Chemical Biology, issue 11.
• 5th August 2008: When convection goes without a bang, Chemical Science, issue 10.
• 1st July 2008: Tubular cells, Chemical Technology, issue 8.

Full list.

Other material

Much of this is now rather dated.

• Notes on learning Finnish
• Pubs in the east of England
• The Carfax Catalogue. A collection of reviews dating back to 1998 of pubs in Oxfordshire.

About the author

Colin Batchelor was born in Edinburgh in 1976. He now lives in Cambridgeshire. [Photograph (1/4 MB, fuzzy, includes light switch)]