The BKL - The Biological Knowledge Laboratory - was founded by Professor Futrelle in 1989. It was an active research lab with many students, both undergraduates and graduate students, and produced many publications. The BKL lives on in spirit since Futrelle's retirement. He is working hard on the design and implementation of the latest generation of his natural language processing system. It focuses on deep analysis of full-length papers in the Biomedical domain.
The BKL activities are reasonably well-described in the pages about diagrams and natural language.
The lab infrastructure was substantially improved in 2007 with the addition of an Apple Xserve (Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series processors), 12GB of RAM and 1TB RAID5 drives. Four Mac Minis were attached to form a small cluster. We experimented with Apache Hadoop, HBase, and XGrid, learning how to develop cluster computing strategies.